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Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee by Roger L. Nichols
Tash Smith
Massacring Indians: From Horseshoe Bend to Wounded Knee. By Roger L. Nichols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2021. ix + 184 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper.
Central to Roger Nichols’s Massacring Indians is the definition of the word “massacre,” a term that he believes has been used too often as propaganda against Indians to justify settler colonialism on the American frontier. By analyzing ten military-Indian conflicts in and out of the Great Plains—conflicts that range from the well known (e.g., Wounded Knee, Sand Creek) to the lesser known (e.g., Bad Axe, Ash Hollow)—Nichols argues that the actions of the United States Army and local militias clearly led to “massacres” against Native populations. In each case, Americans murdered noncombatants like women and children, killed unarmed Indians attempting to flee or surrender, and wantonly destroyed villages and property.
Moving chronologically and succinctly through these ten examples, Nichols provides the national and local context surrounding each conflict. In his telling, trouble emerges at both levels. The federal government suffered from what Nichols describes as a “national schizophrenia” (4) as it encouraged white settlement of the frontier without a clear policy of dealing with the Indian populations that whites encountered. This lack of direction at a national level contributed to local problems, where whites, growing less tolerant for Natives with every passing day, demanded more land for themselves. Treaty making, military control, and eventually, civilian oversight through the Office of Indian Affairs all failed to soothe the demands of an encroaching white population. As such, each small dispute or misunderstanding risked creating larger and deadlier problems regardless of who was responsible. Through his ten examples, Nichols identifies how these conflicts led to calls from local whites to exterminate Native populations, especially as the concepts of total war and winter campaigning took hold in the years after the Civil War, ultimately resulting in military actions that fit the definition of a “massacre.”
Taken individually, the chapters provide concise historical context for each event, easily accessible for historians and scholars of all fields, while being sure to document both white and Indian actions that led to the conflict. To be sure, no side emerges blameless in Nichols’s view. What he succeeds at, however, remains important for the literature: establishing a pattern of behavior by the federal government and local white populations based on anger, greed, and misunderstandings that too often resulted in massacres and other atrocities against Native populations.
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In 1981, noted historian Frederick C. Luebke edited the first issue of Great Plains Quarterly. In his editorial introduction, he wrote The Center for Great Plains Studies has several purposes in publishing the Great Plains Quarterly. Its general purpose is to use this means to promote appreciation of the history and culture of the people of the Great Plains and to explore their contemporary social, economic, and political problems. The Center seeks further to stimulate research in the Great Plains region by providing a publishing outlet for scholars interested in the past, present, and future of the region."
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