Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was in the midst of reading Brown’s book, I was beginning a course in American Literature to 1865. The first pieces we read are American Indian creation stories and trickster tales. We follow these with a couple of letters Columbus wrote about his voyages. I wanted the students, when they finished reading Columbus, to consider the validity of our having a Columbus Day. Looking around Youtube, I ran across a video arguing against those who would do away with the holiday and against the idea that the American Indians were victims of genocide. The video basically builds its arguments on selected moments and actions–when Indians successfully fought back, when they did bad things to other Indians, and so on. The argument is that the American Indian wasn’t a helpless victim but just became a beaten opponent.

Certainly the American Indians were not helpless and certainly they were often skilled in brutality. Just as certainly they won many battles. But reading through Dee Brown’s 1971 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I couldn’t put aside, then couldn’t get out from under, the weight of hopelessness that metaphorically crushed the American Indians of the American West. The so-called winning of the West is a legacy of Euro-American greed for land and gold and silver, a litany of lies and broken promises and broken treaties that runs through tribe after tribe throughout the West, and a plague of racial prejudice. These are the dark and devastating elements that are the reality of Manifest Destiny.

Dee Brown’s book is indeed an American Indian history of the West. But what it implies as well is that Euro-America — white America — had already perpetrated the same crimes against the Wampanoag and others in New England, the Cherokee and others in the American South, the Ojibwe and Osage and others in the Midwest.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a brutal and beautiful book.



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1959, 1969, 1979, 1989, 1999, 2009, 2019 — I’ve now lived through six of these ’9s. Looking at the list, I can tell you that I don’t know much — not off the top of my head — about what happened in most of them. Having been born late in an ‘8 (1958), I know that I’ve been in a zero year of age from 1 January to 25 November in these years; that is, I was ten years old for most of ’69, twenty for most of ’79, and so on.

I’m sure I know almost nothing about 1959, although I feel certain that it was a big year for me personally — the world I knew was all about me. We lived in Sumter, South Carolina, that year. “We” were father Plumer Jean Cody, mother Dorothy Lee Reeves Cody, and brother — three years older — Robert Gerald “Jerry” Cody. I know this all to be true, but I I don’t know it through remembered experience. I’m sure I cooed and was cooed over. I’m sure I ate some stuff and stuffed some diapers — both coo-able actions in their own ways. I might have taken a few steps and said a few words, for which I was more loudly cooed over and perhaps even applauded. So, yeah, a big year for me, although I can’t really access any memories from it.

1969? War continued in Vietnam. Nixon was inaugurated. Apollo 11 took Armstrong and Aldrin out for a walk on the moon. Jethro Tull, Neil Diamond, The Beatles, The Band, The Rolling Stones. I was ten years old for most of the year, and we moved into the homeplace in Walnut with Mama Reeves. This is the house I will always think of with the phrase, “where I grew up.”

One of the most important events of my life took place in 1979. Like the proverbial prodigal son, I took something like an inheritance and spent the summer in Europe with 45+ other college students from around the US, mostly, with one I remember from South America (Argentina, I think) and one from Canada (Toronto, I think). For a twenty-year-old from the southern Appalachian mountains, it was a brilliant and life-changing trip. I’ll not try to go into much detail about this here. We journeyed together from the middle of June through the first week in August. Imagine: London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, West Berlin in the days of the wall, Prague and Budapest and Belgrade behind the Iron Curtain, Vienna, Athens, Rome, Florence, Venice, Salzburg, Munich, Milan, Nice, Barcelona, and Madrid. Travel together formed strong friendships among several of us — lifetime friendships. In the middle of June 2019 a group from that group, some dozen of us will spend a week together in Sicily, celebrating our 40th anniversary.

My marriage to Leesa on 2 September 1989 made me, in one moment, both husband and father. I was thirty years old for most of the year. I’m just past sixty now. My life since then — almost half my life — has been defined by those roles, and it has been good to be so defined. I can’t say enough about Leesa and Lane and (later) Raleigh and (even later) those who have come into my life through our sons, so I won’t say more.

Okay, in 1999, I was teaching at Western Carolina University and working on my dissertation for my doctorate from the University of South Carolina. It was at the end of that year that I traveled to Chicago to interview for a position at Murray State University. Forty-one years old and just applying for my first real job. Again, a good life.

And 2009? I’m sure something momentous went on then, but I can’t recall the specifics. I was Associate Professor of English at ETSU and the Director of the University and Midway Honors Scholars Programs. My colleagues and I probably ate a lot at El Charolais, and I was beginning, I think, to plan a return to playing music live in Johnson City and Marshall. Let’s just say I was busy.

And 2019? As I type these words we’re forty-four minutes in and all’s well so far. The boys are with their significant others in North Carolina and Tennessee. Leesa and I are vacationing in Charleston, South Carolina, and she is in bed asleep. I don’t know what this year will bring to me, a sixty- year-old for the bigger part of it (until 25 November). And at this point, I’ll not try to think my way into and through it. Much better to join Leesa for now.

Happy New Year to you all!