What would need to happen for Native Americans to reach a point where they are on par with Europe? By this I mean that this alternate Native American civilization would have to be about as technologically advanced as Europe and be capable to establish colonies. My theory is that there would have to be multiple competing nations in the New World in order to incentivize these alternate nations to advance.
I'd say that the biggest things which they lacked IOTL were genetic diversity (as a result of a relatively small founding population, and genetic isolation from the Old World); and following on from this, urban population centres, with established cross-continental trade routes linking them with one another. Native American civilizations for the most part seem to have been far more independent, tribal, self-contained and isolationist as a result, with the few exceptions to this, such as the Incans arising too late to make the difference. Given the geography of the Americas, maritime trade routes would have been the most viable option to facilitate this. And the most notable thing which Native American civilization lacked, which proved to be so all-important in disseminating wealth, resources, technological, scientific and military advancements across the Old World, was a
thalassocracy; look at the list of examples, and you'll notice that not a single Native American thalassocracy ever arose. No Native American seafaring cultures which could have plausibly formed a Thalassocracy ever managed to achieve the levels of cohesion required to qualify, with the candidate which arguably came closest IOTL, the Haida, coming no closer to achieving this than the early Vikings did, with tribal factionalism and infighting severely limiting the reach and influence of the Haida (which resulted in the Koryaks splitting away, losing their ties and links with the Haida, and in doing so, cut off the last and only established maritime trade link between the Americas and the New World, roughly 10-5,000 years ago).
So, then, how about this for a POD to help remedy both big issues; find some way to unify the proto-Haida clans on one of the major islands in the Haida Gwaii archipelago, and from there, unify the multiple Haida clans under a single Emperor (or rather, as a matriarchal civilization, an Empress), expanding the area of its rule to encompass the islands of OTL's British Columbia and the Alaskan Panhandle- essentially, developing the Haida into a matriarchal Amerindian Japan analogue. ITTL, the split between the Haida and the Koryaks of OTL's Kamchatka Krai (as well as the Nivkh people of northern Sakhalin and the Amur River estuary, who are also now believed to have been originally colonists from British Columbia) either never happens, or their territories are conquered and their tribes assimilated by the Haida, in much the same manner as the Japanese did with the Australasians across Saikaido, and at a similar juncture (1,500-1,000 ya). And in doing so, TTL's Haida Empire's thalassocracy spans both continents, with its naval territories extending across the Sea of Okhotsk, making it a neighbor and direct trade partner of the Japanese (with potential scope for the Ainu to develop their own Ryukyu Kingdom analogue themselves as a result of this, with the trade route through their archipelago enabling them to capitalize, become intermediaries and form a thalassocracy of their own).
As such, ITTL, a Trans-Aleutian inter-continental maritime trade route- essentially, the same deal as OTL's much later
Maritime Fur Trade- is firmly established between the Pacific North-East of Asia and the Pacific North-West of the Americas by the Native Americans themselves, 1,000 to 500 years earlier than it was IOTL, making it a contemporary of the European Hanseatic League (and using this analogy, also making this solution potentially viable even if the original Haida Empire has already collapsed and fragmented by this stage, so long as enough of the port market settlements and the trade connections between them still remain). Or, indeed, to the Viking settlements on Newfoundland. And in doing so, this 'Aleutian Interchange' brings them up to a similar level roughly on a par with those of the Japanese and Koreans over the course of the next few hundred years, with these technological developments (along with domesticates, crops, inter-racial merchant-native populations, Old World diseases, and earlier resistance to them) spreading southwards, along the Pacific coast, and eastwards, to Native American tribal groups further inland, through the Haida's trade links.