When is a Massacre a Massacre?
This project is a visual survey of the American landscape at places of historic conflict and tragedy between the US and Native American peoples centering around the idea of “massacre,” exploring how these sites and events have subsequently been commemorated and memorialized.
From the moment of first contact over five hundred years ago, Native Americans and white Euro-American colonial-settlers found themselves caught in a tragic struggle between different cultures, different ideologies, and different civilizations. Fundamentally it was a clash over the land itself: lands that the original inhabitants called home and that the Euro-American colonial-settlers coveted and eventually took for themselves. The purpose of my project is to explore the idea of “massacre” at this history’s most violent convergence and how the meaning and interpretation of “massacre” has (or has not) changed over time as witnessed by the memorialized landscape today.
The word “massacre” has various overlapping meanings. One dictionary defines it as “an instance of killing a number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty.” Another defines it as “the unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a large number of human beings.” Other qualifications can include “the killing of people who are not engaged in hostilities and offer little to no resistance” and “to kill many people in a short period of time.” Whether or not a massacre is remembered and acknowledged oftentimes depends on who is doing the remembering. The eighteenth century Shawnee leader Chiksika is quoted as observing, “when a white army battles Indians and wins, it is called a great victory, but if they lose it is called a massacre.” This project includes sites today that are acknowledged as massacres, sites that could very well be considered massacres, and sites where that understanding has shifted over time.
