BOOKS: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, The Navajo Nation

In 1864 the Navajo Indians escorted by the US Army walked from their ancestral lands in Arizona to a 40 mile square internment camp in New Mexico. Two hundred died along the 300-mile journey. The management of the reservation was inept and in 1868 declared a failure. The Treaty of Bosque was then signed and the Navajo were relocated back to their original lands in Arizona. Again they made the 300-mile journey back. Such stories were not given much thought in America until a University of Illinois librarian, Dee Brown, wrote the 1970 book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West.” A nerve was touched; 5 million copies were sold. “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” broke onto the national conscience. Accustomed to stereotypes of American Indians, white Americans were shocked by the suffering that many Indian tribes endured. Thirty years later the book still has not lost its impact. Reading it is still an emotional experience. The period covered by the book is from 1860 to 1890 with a brief introduction on the early European contact with Native Americans. The thing about “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” is that it gives so much more information about American Indian history than is in a standard American textbook. This is a well-written meticulously researched narrative of a series of brutal events. It’s a raw tale that can disturb. Characters that appear in the book are familiar to most Americans: Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. The difference is that this book is written from their perspective, the perspective of the American Indian. That was a shocking reversal at the time of publication. Less shocking today__in the 40-year interval since its publication, other books have appeared, such as “Trail of Tears,” and an HBO movie adaptation of “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee” in 2007. After 40 years, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” is still worth reading, not only because it is written well, but also because it will remind another generation of a shared past. Is “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” a fair retelling of the Native American story? It seems so. Cheyenne Chief Black, said "There are bad white men and bad Indians…the bad men on both sides brought about this trouble."