If I was making a Fallout game I’d set in Montana/Wyoming.
With the setting being that while there’s new towns and functioning small communities (some who are First Nations a group notably absent from Fallout), there is also a gold rush situation because radiation levels are finally dropping enough for prospectors to crack pre-war missile silos and bunkers, which would have been nuked more heavily. They would be the dungeons and sources of pre-war loot. There would not be raiders instead prospectors who turned bandit.
Other factions would have moved on. The Khans would have left with the Followers and now are a new nomadic people breeding herds some sort of post FEV/radiation horse. The Chicago Brotherhood of Steel would have abandoned that name for something else and are diverse faction (tribal, ghoul, mutant, deathclaw) with a small presence trying to establish a trading foothold and no functioning power armor left.
Yes and no. They’re meant to be descendants of survivors from salt lake city that were mostly pre-war European tourists and some First Nations locals. They’re the villains of honest Hearts and not the best representation.
also honest hearts leans far more into the great white saviour trope than savages with its native depiction
it also deconstructs it a bit because Joshua Graham is clearly unbalanced and just likes killing and has picked this cause because it squares that with his conscience.
Meaningfully Graham is the only character of honest hearts. All the plot points are only really there for the narrative purpose of developing Graham's character and representing aspects of him. Daniel representing his conscience, and the white legs representing his past misdeads
it's a story that works far better read symbolically and as metaphor than as literal