We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Gregory points to a rhetorical double standard: identical acts of killing are morally coded differently depending on who commits them. Calling the cavalry’s success a “great victory” and Indigenous success a “massacre” reveals how power controls the vocabulary of legitimacy. The line also shows how narrative framing can reverse empathy—he and others “rooted” for the Indians not from romanticism, but from a sense that the scoreboard was rigged by biased storytelling. More broadly, the quote critiques how history is taught: not as neutral record, but as a language of justification that normalizes state violence and delegitimizes resistance.