Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Brown

Native American/American Indian history is really interesting to me and one of my personal goals is to learn about what really happened and what is happening with these peoples. As part of a general push in my personal life to make some of my daydreams into reality, I've put a bunch of books about this topic into my reading list. This is the first for me to get to. It was published in 1970 and seems to have been widely acclaimed at the time.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee gives a history of the tribes of the “Indian Wars” of the American West from the American Indians' point of view. Personally, since my little previous reading had been about Eastern tribes,very little of this was previously known to me besides some of the famous names. (I have no idea how I knew the names of Sitting Bull, Geronimo, etc without knowing anything about the Indian Wars except that they occurred.) The bias is obvious, but the author made his intent clear – he wanted to give a side of the story that had not been told, not necessarily a fair and balanced account.

To read this book as an American, it's heartbreaking to see a dark side of my country – blatantly lying and breaking treaties to get at land, denying that the American Indians were people until forced by law, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”, etc. Even more heartbreaking is the fact that from my modern point of view with greater acceptance of high population density, there was no reason to take most of that land – even today it's still pretty sparsely populated. Before reading this book, I had some idea that the worst of the atrocities happened in the very early days of America and earlier. But to be confronted with dates nearing 1900 and Civil War heroes (which were the heroes of Foote's massive Civil War history which I listened to last summer) acting like savages made me reassess some things I had in mind about my country.

To read this book as someone with significant American Indian blood yet no personal interaction with that part of my heritage, I felt both awed and frustrated by the picture of their cultures given in this book. On the one hand, in general the chiefs had more honor and nobility than any white character that comes into play. What the Americans at the time saw as butchery was fair and just within the internal logic of their culture, and was clearly provoked. On the other hand, they showed little ability to be flexible and play the new political game that the white men brought with them. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism, because in our modern time people have to deal with major changes at rates unprecedented in human history. And racism at the time was stronger than I can truly believe. But still I feel that the American Indians could have preserved much more of themselves if they had gone about things differently.

Another thing that surprised me, especially after the aforementioned education on the civil war, was the small numbers involved. Where thousands were dying in single days of battle in the South, out west the casualties rarely numbered more than 50 on either side. Yet these relatively small battles had such a huge major effect on our society.

Overall I am very glad I listened to this book. It gave me a great foundation to continue my study of this topic. I would say, if you have an interest in learning about American history then this one should make it to your bookshelf/mp3 player sometime.