Headscratchers / Star Trek The Next Generation S 7 E 19 Journeys End

• Since the Natives are so efficient at researching a man's history right down to a single ancestor, how's it they were unable to research the very planet that is already inhabited by other Natives that Kirk had dropped off almost a century earlier?
  • Picard is 33 generations removed from that ancestor. Since Picard would have had two parents, each of whom had two parents, and so on, Picard's problematic ancestor should be one among 2^33, or over 8 billion.
  • Either the show simply never acknowledges that episode to have have occurred, or the Native Americans on that planet have stopped living there, or the Native Americans from this episode are a different tribe than those in the previous episode. There is incredible variety in Native American cultures, and this tribe specifically wanted to preserve their culture. It wouldn't make sense for a group of Norwegians to preserve their traditional culture by assimilating with a planet full of Serbians, even though they're both European.
    • Considering that their mutual ancestors all shared a single continent on Earth, it smacks of Planetville to argue that they would incapable of co-existing on an entire planet!
    • We don't know how much of that planet is fit for human occupation. At any rate, it's pretty common in Star Trek for planets to only have a single civilization on them for whatever reason.
    • The planet Kirk encountered falls solidly under Prime Directive restrictions. Colonizing it would be legally unthinkable, even though the locals are human.
• Why are the Native Americans Federation citizens in the first place? They left "more than 200 years ago"; the Federation was founded about 209 years before this episode, so chances are, they left before the founding of the Federation. Is any human being just... Part of the Federation because they're human?
  • They could have left just after the founding, and it might have been the founding of the Federation that made it easier for them and other Earth-based cultures to go out colonising planets in the first place.