Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970). 1991 paperback edition published by Vintage. 487 pages

"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" is also the title of a song by Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, first published in 1970, is a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century, and their displacement and slaughter by the United States.

"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" is the final phrase of a 19th-century poem titled "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benet. (The poem was not actually about the Indian wars.) The full quotation, "I shall not be here/I shall rise and pass/Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," appears at the beginning of Brown's book.

Chapter by chapter, this book moves from tribe to tribe of Native Americans, and outlines the relations of the tribes to the United States federal government during the years 1860-1890. It begins with the Navajos, the Apaches, and the other tribes of the Southwest who were displaced as California and the surrounding states were settled. Brown chronicles the changing and sometimes conflicting attitudes both of American authorities such as General Custer and Indian chiefs, particularly Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, and their different attempts to save their peoples, by peace, war, or retreat. The later part of the book focuses primarily on the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes of the plains, who were among the last to be moved onto reservations, under perhaps the most violent circumstances. It culminates with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the murders of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and the slaughter of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee, South Dakota that is generally considered the end of the Indian Wars.

1 Impact of the Book
2 Chapters
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Impact of the Book

It is difficult to overstate the impact of the book. Prior to its publication in 1970, the dominant images of the period were of noble settlers threatened by savage Indians and defended by the 7th Cavalry. The book brought to the public's attention the other side of the story: that the original owners of the land were systematically massacred, betrayed and forced onto only those scraps of land that the more numerous and technologically superior conquerors disdained.

One strength of the book is its strong documentation to original sources. Its message may not have been a welcome one, but it came loaded with facts. The other strength is that each chapter forms a story, compelling as any fiction and far more interesting than academic treatises.