Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

This was the hardest book I have ever read due to it being SO heartbreaking. The idea of people believing God gives them divine right to dominate and exterminate another race leaves me with a huge hole in my gut. It seems completely incredulous to think that anyone could so cold heartedly shoot, kill, brutalize, and mutilate another human being not just for being different but because you covet their territory? It is just so atrocious made even more so by claiming it’s being done in the name of a God who loves all. A story of the lust for power, broken promises, and a superiority complex that leads to treating others worse than filth.
Whole tribes... a whole nation, wiped out by greed and envy... it’s no wonder the collective show more unconscious fears aliens will come to earth and do to them what they did to the Native Americans... show less

This "Indian History of the American West" changed my thinking. I always thought Native American reservations were places (albeit never the most desirable land) set aside for various tribes to continue their lives as sovereign nations. This book depicts them rather as prison camps, where the US government concentrated various tribes, taking away their horses and weapons, and thus their livelihoods. They were not free to leave.

Brown describes the negotiations between US agents and Indians following these lines repeatedly: you may as well sell us the land, because if you don't, you know we'll just take it anyway. The US broke treaty after treaty within a few years of their being made, when pioneers, ranchers, and miners exerted pressure. show more The US government initiated conflict on countless occasions, firing on women and children, attacking sleeping camps of Indians. Indian warriors responded by fighting valiantly to give their women and children time to escape. It breaks my heart to read of the US Army behaving this way.

I finally read this, having intended to for a couple of decades. Somehow I majored in history without reading, or even hearing much about, this book. It focuses on the time from 1860 to 1890, west from the Missouri River into the Rocky Mountains. To frame it with my historical markers, that's the Civil War to the "Closing of the American Frontier," according to Frederick Jackson Turner. I borrowed the copy my brother read in college. Here's a little context: Brown, the author, was white, not Indian. He worked for three decades as a librarian. The book reads like the work of a researcher. The title comes from a poem by a white American poet, quoted at the outset of the book. Crazy Horse's parents buried his bones and heart at an undocumented location near Wounded Knee Creek (p313). The book's title reveals that it's not trying to be comprehensive. Its perspective is invaluable.

You'll want a map of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain longitudes to stay oriented. It was not an easy read, but it's one of the more influential things I've ever read. show less

This is probably the most depressing and tragic book I've ever read. It just goes on and on, injustice after injustice, murder after murder. If it were fiction, you'd have to ding the author for giving no relief. But it's not. Getting through this description of genocide, which happened right here through our own government, is traumatic. So why would I rate it so highly? I loved the respect the author gives to the native Americans, especially with the careful use of quotes directly from them, and I love the way each chapter is begun with a list of the more familiar history of what was happening at that time. It makes the events of the battles with the Indians connect with me -- they aren't so very long ago. It's a worthwhile book, and show more I'm glad I read it, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it to anyone. show less

It is hard to know what to say about this book, when so much has already been said, and it was a difficult read. History of European expansion across the West in the 1700’s, from the Native American perspective. Well, it was written by a white man, but the account relates what the Native leaders recorded of events, battles and outcomes. Over and over the same story was told: local tribes welcomed the explorers and settlers they met, gave them food, land, sometimes taught them how to fish or hunt local game. Gave them permission to build roads, travel through their horse pastures and hunting grounds, mine for gold. Watched in dismay as wildlife was driven away and became scarce, protested when they were told they had to move, or stay show more in one place instead of following the game in their nomadic lifestyle. Made agreements to keep the peace in treaties they couldn’t read, and that weren’t kept anyways. Faced continually broken promises, were pushed into corners where the land was inhospitable, they met unfamiliar diseases, there was nothing to eat, provisions were inadequate. Saw their families starve, their women and children ruthlessly killed. Yes some of them retaliated but for the most part it sounds like overwhelmingly the white soldiers and settlers acted without mercy, treated them as less than human, and systematically tried to eradicate them from the earth. With many tribes they succeeded. The Native peoples didn’t have comparable weapons, and they were vastly outnumbered.

The book details many incidents I was somewhat familiar with: the battle of Little Big Horn, the massacre at Wounded Knee- but there are so many I’d never heard of. The chapters are set in more or less chronological order, each tells the story of a different tribe or Native leader. There is quite a bit of overlap as the stories are interconnected and the different tribes that had long fought over territory among themselves, came together to face their overwhelming enemy: us. Key groups mentioned include the Cheyennes, Sioux, Apache, Nez Percé, Utes, Navahos, Comanches and Kiowas.

My copy has a spread of photographs in the center with portraits of famous leaders: Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Victorio and dozens more. (There is no picture of Crazy Horse). I knew these names but not their stories, before. Their words are eloquent, the predicament they faced an outrage, injustice, a history we should be ashamed of. They were human just like us- some of them acted brashly, or in anger, or retaliated against settlers who had personally done them no wrong. Quite a few displayed a sense of irony or humor towards the soldiers and politicians that pushed them around. But for the most part, I got an immense sense of sorrow and anger from this book. A very good book- but it makes the heart heavy.

from the Dogear Diary show less

I grew up in the 1950s, when cowboys and Indians, or cavalry and Indians, or settlers and Indians were all staple media fare. Now and then there was a nod in the direction that perhaps the Indians weren’t all that bad; the Lone Ranger had Tonto, after all.

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee clears away any lingering hangovers from that era. One tribe after anther (and Brown only considers the Native Americans west of the Mississippi) gets lied to, cheated, and massacred: the Navajo, the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Nez Perce, the Poncas, the Utes, and the Apache all find out what Manifest Destiny meant in practice.

In narrating one tragedy after another, Brown adopts a native voice. Whites are described by their native titles and show more names. Thus, a colonel is an “Eagle Chief” and a general is a “Star Chief”; Nelson Miles is “Bear Coat”, William Sherman is “Great Warrior”, and Oliver Howard is “Old Man of the Thunder”; the President is The Great Father, and Congress is The Great Council. Similarly, time gets native terms – “Corn Planting Time”, “Moon When Leaves Fall Off”, “Geese Going Moon”. This might seem an affectation, but it worked for me – made me think in a different way.

And Brown acknowledges that now and then a white was honest – Star Chief Gray Wolf Crook gets some praise in his dealings with the Chiricahua. And now and then a native is acknowledged as a savage – Victorio is described as a “ruthless killer” who tortured and killed. And it’s also acknowledged that Native Americans and whites often tended to behave the same way; if a Cheyenne (for example) wanted revenge, it was often taken on the first white encountered – and similarly innocent Cheyenne were massacred for actions they didn’t commit.

Rather depressing reading; I knew some of these stories from general study of American history but having them all collected and hammered home one after another is almost overwhelming. Recommended. show less

I listened to the audio version of “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” narrated by Grover Gardner. Dee Brown’s 1971 classic has been required reading in many colleges for decades and for good reason. However, a quick Google search of the title confirmed what I suspected: it is banned in many high schools (notably, but not surprisingly, in Florida) presumably because it might “make kids feel bad about themselves.” And the book should make every person who reads it feel bad, not about themselves but about their ancestors. The treatment of the American Indian is beyond shocking. It’s immoral, and in a country that considers itself a “Christian country,” it’s anything but Christian. “Bury My Heart in Wounded Knee” should show more be required reading at some point in every social studies department of every high school in the U.S. show less

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee reveals a sordid little truth about human beings: they have a great capacity to be cruel, to be prejudiced against someone not like themselves, and to justify any kind of horrid behavior with a logic that defies belief. Having just read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it would have been easy to say, “How could the Japanese be so cruel and inhuman?” And, how often have we asked that same question about the Germans toward the Jews, or Southerners against their black slaves, Hutus murdering Tutsis, or the British who watched the Irish die in the potato famines and refused to send aid? The treatment of Native Americans at the hands of Europeans and subsequent generations of Americans is no less show more despicable, no less harrowing, and no less shameful. In some ways other atrocities pale before it. It was genocide.

Unlike many, I am perfectly capable of placing historic events in the context of their times. I do not suffer from an inability to conceive that many modern ideas were foreign to our ancestors, that we have made progress (and, I should hope so), or that the masses were fed a steady diet of fear and propaganda that made extreme measures seem nothing less than reasonable to them. Still, I cannot imagine that any man who termed himself a Christian could have committed such acts of villainy and slept well at night or thought he would not have something beyond measure to answer for when he came before his maker. How few men protested or even attempted to intervene, and how calmly and coolly the tribes were promised a peace that was never intended, is the part of this story that most appalls me. That men such as Kit Carson, who had lived with these people, fathered children with Indian women, and spoke so highly of them as a race, could have been persuaded to join in the mass slaughter of them is incomprehensible.

I could go on, because the outrage feels very personal. The flag that Black Kettle stood under with his women and children huddled around him as the wholesale slaughter of his people began, a flag that he was promised would be his protection if he did not take arms against American troops, was my flag. It was red, white and blue. It was desecrated at that moment, and it is not too late for me to shed tears for that offence. What haunts me the most is that I think that seed of evil is still alive in mankind. It rears its ugly head all over the world today. We need to all be on guard against it. The lie that can be fashioned into truth is still a lie. show less