Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

No book captures more clearly and compellingly the horrific, inspiring, and vital histories and stories of Native Americans than Brown’s.

I love the ways that Brown offers a profoundly new perspective on the American West, on the foundational myths that too often limit the way we see ourselves and the realities with which we must grapple instead, and on Indigenous communities as an essential part of the American story at every stage.

Revisionist Westerns are one of my very favorite genres, and this is the best one I know.  

In 1971, I accepted a job as a Legal Aid lawyer on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota, and I wanted to prepare myself for reservation life. One way to do that was to read this book.

This book chronicles the lies, the massacres, the broken treaties, and the deplorable conditions to which our government subjected the Indigenous peoples. This book opened my eyes and helped prepare me for the suspicion I faced during the nearly four years I lived and worked on the Reservation. 

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a broad, well-researched tale of the indigenous people of the American West, chronicling the destruction of their way of life and their relocation to reservations amid the gradual encroachment of western civilization across the continental United States in the 19th Century. Describing the tribes and their leaders, Dee Brown captures the hardships and persecution of Native Americans, evoking an appreciation for their legacy and compassion for their plight. This book ignited my passion for painting the visual diversity and unique differences of various native nations.

Although it’s non-fiction, if you want to get a sense of what the Native American population endured during the settlement of the Old West, this is the book to read. Heartbreaking, yes, but this shameful era in America’s history deserves to be told. Brown does so with finesse, focusing on specific tribes including the Navajo Nation, the Sioux, the Utes, the Apache, and the Kiowas, among others. Definitely a must-read if you’re interested in the history of the Old West.

I hate to recommend Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown because it is an excruciating look back at the atrocities inflicted by my people upon the original Natives of North America. Unfortunately, not reading about those horrific acts does not erase them from the historical record, which is why this book should be mandatory reading for every single American. The endless litany of murder and treachery recounted in this book spans nearly 500 years, and, yet, the average American knows almost nothing about the tragic events that made our lives possible. America stands for freedom, right? Dee… show more.

There is no way to understand the impact of the western migration before the Civil War without considering it from the receiving end — from the perspective, that is, of the Native Americans whose lives and traditions were upended in a matter of years by white trespassers. When it was published in 1970, Brown’s book was a needed corrective to Hollywood depictions of cowboys (good) and Indians (bad).  In retrospect, Brown’s reversal of the old equation may have oversimplified matters a little (Peter Cozzens' The Earth is Weeping is more balanced in this regard). But Bury My Heart remains a… show more.