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Native American Massacres

According to President Abraham Lincoln, the difference between a “massacre” and a “battle” is that there is wanton killing of noncombatants in a massacre. The concept of an Indian massacre might conjure the notion of the slaughter of White settlers or Indian ambushes of military personnel of the U.S. government. Indeed, there were atrocities and massacres committed by Indians against White settlers. Some of these massacres were used to justify atrocities and violence against the Indians—it was claimed that such actions showed that the Indians were “savages” who deserved harsh treatment. However, it was the Indians who suffered the greatest atrocities and massacres at the hands of White people and the U.S. government.

With the coming of the Europeans to the Americas, vast Indian civilizations fell as the land and way of life of Indians was stripped through treaties, the breech of treaties, and ultimately the forced placement on reservations. Violent and brutal force against those Indians who resisted, bolstered by racist and ethnocentric ideology, produced massacres with impunity at various sites, including Blue River (1854), Bear River (1863), Sand Creek (1864), 104 Washita River (1868), Sappa Creek (1875), Camp Robinson (1878), Wounded Knee (1890), and others. This entry describes the massacres at Jamestown and Sand Creek, as well as Indian resistance at the Batde at Little Bighorn. Last, it reviews the evolution of the Ghost Dance and the efforts by the U.S. government to extinguish it, culminating in the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890. These massacres were a part of government actions that took the lives of Indian men, women, and children and destroyed Indian culture in what many Indians view as genocide.

The Arrival of the Europeans

When Europeans came to the Americas, they found whole nations of indigenous people with centralized governments and subsistent economies. Estimates of the indigenous population prior to the arrival of the Europeans, in what later became the United States, range from 5 million to 94 million people. By 1880, after the impact of White-borne and previously unknown diseases, slavery, starvation, and ethnic cleansing on a genocidal level, that population had been reduced to 300,000, and their landholdings were reduced to inconsequential reservations.

When the White settlers came to the Americas, they wanted the land and riches it provided, but they faced the problem of what to do about the present owners of this land. Ideologically, forced removal and violence could be supported by assertions of racial or cultural superiority, economic determinism, or God's manifest will. However, in the beginning the strength of the tribes deterred attempts at military conquest and subjugation. Early White settlers secured footholds with negotiation and purchase. Treaties of peace and concession became the means to obtain land until White settlements were large and strong enough to impose unilateral decision making and to remove indigenous people from their lands as forged treaties were abandoned.

Jamestown Massacre

However, from the very beginning, Indians sometimes fought back. Jamestown was the first successful English settlement in North America. Conflict over land ensued between the settlers and the Powhatans. The colonists were growing tobacco and needed new soil in a few years because the soil nutrients had been depleted. They sought to gain more land for agriculture, while the Powhatans wanted the land for hunting and to remain separated from the colonists. When the Powhatans became aggressive and made small-scale attacks, settlement troops responded by raiding Indian villages. This marked the beginning of the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609. The Powhatans were militarily superior and nearly succeeded in forcing the English off the land after they laid siege to the fort in Jamestown. In 1614, the war was ended by a peace agreement, along with the marriage of a chief's daughter to a colonist. This peace lasted until the settlers again began breeching agreements on land. On March 22, 1622, in what is called the Jamestown Massacre, the Powhatans initiated a sneak attack on English settlements surrounding Jamestown and murdered significant numbers of the settlers. The Powhatans did not press the fight after the one-day attack, but it led to 10 years of open warfare between the colonists and the Indians. The English called the attack a “massacre” and used it to justify a war against the “savages.” While the Powhatan were initially militarily superior, their number dwindled from warfare and disease, and they were eventually decimated.

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