Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: The Illustrated Edition by Dee Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
All books are a product of their times, and some age better than others. The question is, despite its immense popularity, is this book still relevant? I hope to answer that question in this review.
Despite the books incredibly high marks from the vast majority of readers, there are those who strongly dislike this book, and I’m sure that’s amazing to most of the people who read this book because so many of them liked it so much. But it’s true, there are those other people.
Criticisms I’ve seen of this book include -
- Too boring
- Too repetitive
- Too one-sided
It’s not really my purpose to go through and rebut each of these criticisms, but the reason I’m starting my review in this fashion is because I think each of these criticisms addresses both what people like and dislike about this book. Let me take each point in turn.
It’s too boring!
I can understand this point, although I don’t agree. Most histories involve a lot of details. Lots of place names the reader doesn’t know, which means they can’t relate to it. Lots of people names the reader doesn’t know, and more being added every few pages. And instead of building into a grand narrative, this book is just the same story over and over again. But the thing is, for each individual story, this book is a good history. Dee Brown really did his research. That’s why the book is bursting with details. I suppose that to some people, the more detail there is the harder it gets to read, whereas for others it adds flavor and depth to the history he’s telling. Personally, I’m in the latter camp, although I do get bored with histories sometimes. Of course some histories can be engaging, even humorous, at times. The style of the writers definitely varies from a “just the facts” voice to one that will paint a picture in the mind’s eye using descriptive vocabulary to give a more prosaic reading. Dee Brown, at least in this book, tends to be on the dry side, as far as prose. I believe the point is to allow the light to shine on the actors and events themselves, as well as providing a stark contrast between the author’s plain writing and the often much more lyrical voices of the actors in these events. I have not read any of his other books, so I really can’t offer an analysis of how he wrote. I will not say that I think everyone should enjoy his writing, but I do think people who complain of this book being boring because of the author’s writing need to find more patience. As for those who merely find the subject uninteresting, I guess it’s not for everyone.
It’s the same thing over and over again!
Well, yeah. I mean, that’s kind of the history of the American continent. White settlers wanted the Indians’ land and they took it by hook or by crook. The fact that this happened over and over and over again is no exaggeration, it’s just history. All well and good, you might say, but why go to great lengths to describe it over and over again? It’s all about the context. Back when this was written, books by White historians were still being written that described Indians as “savages”. And the American Indian civil rights movement really didn’t begin until the ‘70s, so when this book was written, the savagery, greed, and destructiveness of the White invaders had never been focused on before. It was important to demonstrate that what the colonizers had done was not atypical, that it had not happened just once or twice, and that it wasn’t the action of a few bad people. The point is, to the American Indian, history is the story of the Americans’ greed, racism, and genocide. Most Americans then did not (and most Americans now do not) learn much about American Indians other than that they had once been here. The only exposure most Americans got to American Indians at that time was through a bunch of racist, historically inaccurate movies. In light of the hundreds of years of racism suffered by the Indians and the decades of movies where they were the bad guys, the lesson that the real history was different would be a message that takes some repeating. This book is especially good for those who know nothing about the real history of the American Indian.
It’s biased against Whites!
Some people (pretty much White people) argue that this is a biased view of history, that it’s prejudiced against Whites, and more importantly makes them feel bad about themselves (no, they don’t say that last one out loud). In a sense these are valid criticisms. Not for the reasons White folk imagine them to be, though. As far as bias, it is. It is biased (in the sense of being weighted) towards seeing Native/Colonist interactions from the Native point of view. It’s not like there aren’t dozens of books written by White historians that either treat Indians like the “noble savage” or more likely, just “savage”. This book was explicitly meant as a counter to that bias, which is why its full title is “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West”. One might argue that this approach is not the proper or most effective way of countering such a prevalent bias in histories of the American Indian, but this book is meant as a shock to the system, and is aimed squarely at lay-people who didn’t graduate with a BA in History (or anything else, for that matter). If they were only going to pick up one book about the history of White relations with Indians, let it be this one.
Should you read this book?
I have to say that anyone who’s even remotely interested in American Indian history, the state of American Indians today, or American Indian politics should read this book. Somebody who is going to try to be an expert on any or all of these issues should read this book because it is a good history of the areas that it covers, and because so many other people have also read it. Someone who isn’t an expert and isn’t trying to be should read it because this is an excellent counterpoint to the standard studies of American Indian history (what little there is of it) given in public schools. Indians didn’t just go away, they were systematically destroyed. Of course, some of us did survive and are still surviving today. But that’s a different book.
Final thoughts
The history of the American Indians is complex. It’s never as simple as it may seem at first, and authors can, unfortunately, give the wrong impression just by writing the facts a different way. I’m not going to call myself an expert, but I am a Cherokee who has an interest in the history of his own people, and having read many books on the subject, I know more than most people about it. In order to demonstrate how the same story can be told in order to give different impressions, I’m going to write two accounts of the Cherokee Removal.
Story 1) In the face of increasing pressure from the Georgians, Major Ridge and many other prominent chiefs decided that the only way to survive was to move west to Indian Territory. The US government was prepared to offer the Cherokee Nation some 3 million dollars in trade for the lands they would be losing, as well as to pay the costs of transportation and some goods for the displaced Cherokees to begin their new lives in Indian Territory. The chiefs signed The Treaty of New Echota in 1835, clearing the way for removal. Despite ratification by the US Senate, Principal Chief John Ross adamantly opposed it and falsely informed his people that they would never be forced to move. After years of stalling, the Cherokees were forced to move and because of the lack of preparation, an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died on the way to their new homes.
Story 2) After the discovery of gold fields within the Cherokee Nation, Georgian trespassers demanded the removal of the Cherokees. The Georgians were generally jealous of Cherokee prosperity, as well as their high standard of living (upwards of 90% of Cherokees were literate, whereas something like 15% of Georgians were). They pressured the US government to take the Cherokee land. Upon signing an agreement with a small number of men who were neither representatives of the Cherokee Nation nor representatives of a majority of Cherokee people, the US government claimed the right to forcibly remove the Cherokees from their lands, and did so in 1838 resulting in what is now called The Trail of Tears, which resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Cherokee, mainly the elderly and young.
The truth is more complex than either of these accounts, but neither of them is untrue. The fact is that the vast majority of Cherokees were innocent victims of an absolutely brutal government. The other fact is that Cherokees were complicit in allowing the removal to happen. Maybe it would have happened otherwise, or maybe they could have survived Jackson’s tenure as President and gotten one more sympathetic to their plight. The Ridges didn’t believe that would happen, and they took such actions as they believed necessary to save what they could of the Cherokee Nation. The Georgians thought that land was wasted on “savage Indians”, which they were still calling us despite the fact that we hadn’t fought in a war since the Creek War, read newspapers, and generally did things our White neighbors did. The Georgians might have just formed a militia and starting slaughtering Cherokees anyway. Either way, we were the ones who made a choice. We weren’t simply passive victims.
Now you may ask, what’s all that got to do with this book? Well, I told you that I was going to try to answer whether this book is still relevant. I’ve read this book a couple of times now, and my opinion is still that it’s a great book. It just so thoroughly smashes the established idea of the West that no one who reads this can ever after accept stereotypical Hollywood Indians who sweep in to kill White men and take White women. It destroys the idea that the Indians came from nowhere to enact violence and went nowhere after the Whites came. It rips away the idea of the Indian as a wild creature who fought because he liked it and replaces it with the Indian as a soldier who fought for his land and his people.
The greatest disservice that Hollywood movies that portray Indians as villains and books that portray Indians as victims is that they don’t make non-Indians understand that Indians are real people too, who cover the entire range of the human spectrum. We had great and noble men like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and John Ross. We had men who did horrible things like Geronimo and Doublehead. But they were all real men, with real men’s wants, desires, and feelings (not to mention all the women who are just left out). That’s why Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a beginning to the discovery of the American Indian as a real person. It should be read by everyone whose knowledge of American Indians comes from Hollywood or misinformed school teachers.
PS: Specific to the illustrated edition, the additional essays and pictures really add a lot to the experience. For anyone who’s only read the original version, or anyone who hasn’t read it yet, get this one.
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