List of Indian massacres

In the history of the European colonization of North America, an atrocity termed "Indian massacre" is a specific incident wherein a group of people (military, mob or other) deliberately kill a significant number of relatively defenseless or innocent people—usually civilian noncombatants or to the summary execution of prisoners-of-war. The term refers to the killings of Euro-Americans by Native Americans (Indians) as well as to killings of Native Americans by Euro-Americans and/or by other Native Americans.

"Indian massacre" is a phrase whose use and definition has evolved and expanded over time. The phrase was initially used by European colonists to describe attacks by indigenous Americans which resulted in mass casualties. While similar attacks by colonists on Indian villages were called "raids" or "battles", successful Indian attacks on white settlements or military posts were routinely termed "massacres". Knowing very little about the native inhabitants of the American frontier, the colonists were deeply fearful, and as time passed, "far more white Americans eagerly consumed Indian atrocity stories around the family table and in popular literature and newspapers than ever interacted with Indians or witnessed an Indian raid." Emphasis was placed on the depredations of "murderous savages" in their information about Indians, and as the migrants headed further west, fear was the prevailing emotion behind their thoughts and actions concerning Indians. In some instances motivated by politics, in Colorado for example, "stories in the News continued to stir those fears: wild rumors of Indian conspiracies were heralded as fact; any violence at all between whites and Indians was reported as an Indian 'massacre'".

The phrase eventually became commonly used to also describe mass killings of American Indians. Killings described as "massacres" often had an element of indiscriminate targeting, barbarism or genocidal intent. As noted by one historian, "Any discussion of genocide must, of course, eventually consider the so-called Indian Wars, the term commonly used for U.S. Army campaigns to subjugate Indian nations of the American West beginning in the 1860s. In an older historiography, key events in this history were narrated as battles. It is now more common for scholars to refer to these events as massacres. This is especially so of a Colorado territorial militia's slaughter of Cheyennes at Sand Creek (1864) and the army's slaughter of Shoshones at Bear River (1863), Blackfeet on the Marias River (1870), and Lakotas at Wounded Knee (1890). Some scholars have begun referring to these events as "genocidal massacres," defined as the annihilation of a portion of a larger group, sometimes to provide a lesson to the larger group.

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