It seems gauche to qualify levels of genocide, but this remains a particularly insidious one.

The freaking Emancipation Proclamation! Yet here, in the very same country, an entire race - nay, many dozens of races - were being wiped out. The publication of all the great works of Romantic literature and art.

With a pointedness approaching black humour, Brown opens each chapter with a detail of the more commonly-known 'great' events that occurred around the world concurrently with that particular act of one-sided warfare. Yet, it's easy to forget how marginalised this culture remains - in social understanding, in cultural portrayals, etc. Nowadays, we're more aware of the graphic nature of the treatment of the Native Americans, and so the book's heavy-handedness is particularly evident. Using transcripts, interviews and evidence from the time, Brown creates a moving portrait that shatters many myths which still resonate, and reminds us of the sins of such ground-level intolerance.Īdmittedly, the book would've held more sway when first released, for a generation raised on WWII and '50s-era patriotism. Without resorting to extensive flashbacks or appendices, Brown manages to create a sense of the West's treatment of Native Americans from colonisation to the particularly brutal 1800s, when genocide was effectively carried out. Each chapter chronicles a particular battle, people, or plight, in rough chronological order. To get the positives out of the way first: Dee Brown's immense wealth of knowledge and research contributes to make Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee a detailed-yet-well-paced experience. It tells a story that should not be forgotten and so must be retold from time to time.Heartbreaking, mindset-shattering, eviscerating. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated.Ī unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won-and lost. Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived.īury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century.

I lost my heart at wounded knee