Judged from today's 'enlightened' worldview, this is truly sad and injust. But judged from the values of a different time, then this seemed to be rather the norm than the exception.
I have a hard time grasping the idea of genicide.
Being that there were no men of fighting age (or very few)in this camp and they attacked at dawn and shot old men, women and children it was more of a extermination campaign against the indians. They even mutilated the bodies which later the indians copied with Custor and were called barbaric
sounds like your talking about sand creek, not wounded knee
the sandcreek massacre occured before "custer's last stand" which in turn occured before the wounded knee massacre
atrocity highlights from sand-creek:
- black kettle had his nuts chopped off and turned into a tobacco pouch (he was a venerable and friendly indian chief who'd been given an american flag to fly over his tent to show his "civilian status", he'd brought his people to a local army fort for protection when other tribes had started hostilities - that fort then turned on him)
- soldiers placed bets on the gender of fetuses inside slaughtered women and then performed dissections to settle the bet
-some soldiers removed the ovaries of dead indians and laid them out on their saddles for souvenirs
"bury my heart at wounded knee" is an excellent read on the subject - an early attempt at "revisionist" history