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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