massacre

when a battle was won by Indians, it was called a massacre; when a battle was won by those moving onto Indian lands, it was called a victory. Writers and historians have conveyed the idea that Euroamericans who protected their homelands were patriots while Indians who did so were murderers and savages. Jessamyn West's The Massacre at Fall Creek and Elliott Arnold's The Camp Grant Massacre both use "massacre" to describe white killings of Indians that took place in 1824 and 1871. At least one library catalog system (Hennepin County Library, Minneapolis) has changed "Battle of Wounded Knee, 1890," to "Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890." We do not usually label the 1945 atomic bombardment of Hiroshima or the 1940 aerial bombardment of Rotterdam, for example, "massacres," yet outside our ethnocentric view, they would qualify.