Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

BIBLIOGRAPHIC DETAILS:
Print: COPYRIGHT ©: 1970; ISBN: 0-03-085322-2; PUBLISHER: New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; PAGES: 487; UNABRIDGED; (Info from Wikipedia)

Digital: ©: October 23, 2012; PUBLISHER: Open Road Media; PAGES: 482; Unabridged (Info from Amazon.com)

*Audio: COPYRIGHT ©: 14 Oct 2009; PUBLISHER: Blackstone Publishing; DURATION: 14: hrs. (approx..); Unabridged; (Info from version available in Libby app)

Feature Film or tv: Yes. Produced by HBO Films. Premiered May 27, 2007. Starring Adam Beach, Anna Paquin, Chevez Ezaneh, August Schellenberg, Aidan Quinn

SERIES: No

SUMMARY/ EVALUATION:
SELECTED: I’ve been doing some reading on Native Americans, and if I didn’t already know it, the citing of this book in many of those I have read, indicated that this is a seminal work on the subject.
ABOUT: The book provides a history of indigenous Americans and the devolution of their encounters with the European colonists. This book speaks to the colonists’ initial sense of geniality towards natives as they were welcomed and ushered into the country, offered provisions, and shown the lay of the land.
As time wore on, and the new Americans battled for freedom and dominion over their newly adopted land, they accepted the assistance of the Natives as though it were their due. And as the colonists populated, developed, and expanded across the land, an intolerance developed toward what they grew to perceive as their backward, unchristian, ignorant, barbaric, uncivilized hosts; and they began scheming to remake these people into their own image. When efforts failed, the Euro-Americans sought to remove the Natives through various means—first battles, and eventually, relocation—then, more battles when each time they thought they’d found worthless land to dump the Natives on, they soon discovered it wasn’t worthless and they fervently wanted it back. The book speaks to the readers through voices of the Natives, and from military reports, and leaves the reader understanding, if they hadn’t already, the travesty that is the history of the Native Americans since the arrival of the Europeans.
OVERALL IMPRESSION: Very well organized and very well told.

AUTHOR:
Dee Brown: (From Wikipedia)
“Dorris Alexander "Dee" Brown (February 29, 1908 – December 12, 2002) was an American novelist, historian, and librarian. His most famous work, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), details the history of the United States' westward colonization of the continent between 1830 and 1890 from the point of view of Native Americans.”

NARRATOR:
Grover Gardner- From Wikipedia:
“Grover Gardner (b 1956)[1] is an American narrator of audiobooks. As of May 2018, he has narrated over 1,200 books.[2] He was the Publishers Weekly "Audiobook Narrator of the Year" (2005) and is among AudioFile magazine's "Best Voices of the Century".[2]
Biography
Gardner is a native of Pennsylvania.[1] He attended high school in Belgium.[1] He graduated from Florida's Rollins College in 1978 as a theater major.[1]
In 1981, Gardner was an actor in the Washington, D.C. region, working at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company under Howard Shalwitz.[4] He won a number of lead actor awards for plays such as Metamorphoses and The Rocky Horror Show.
Gardner heard about and auditioned for the Library of Congress' Books for the Blind Program. He worked at fellow theater actor Flo Gibson's Audio Book Contractors in the DC region to produce classic literature on cassette tape. Over time, his acting career tapered off and audiobooks took over.[1] Eventually he established his own independent studio in Maryland where he recorded books for Books on Tape.[5] In 2007, he moved to Ashland, Oregon where he became Studio Director of Blackstone Audio.[5]
Gardner has also narrated under the aliases Tom Parker and Alexander Adams.”
It would seem that a lot of great narrators started as readers for the blind. That’s so wonderful that a generous spirit lead to financial and popular success. Grover, of course, was pitch-perfect in this narration.

GENRE:
Nonfiction; U. S. History

TIME FRAME:
1492 - 1890

SUBJECTS: (Not comprehensive)
Native Americans; European Settlers; Spanish; Battle of Little Bighorn; Battle of Wounded Knee; Indian Removal; Europeanization; Manifest Destiny; Wampanoags; Narragansetts, Iroquois, Cherokee; Navajo Nation; Santee Dakota; Hunkpapa Lakota; Oglala Lakota; Cheyenne; Apache; Arapaho; Modoc; Kiowa; Comanche’ Nez Perce; Ponca; Ute; Miniconjou Lakota

DEDICATION:
“For Nicolas Brave Wolf”.

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter One “Their Manners Are Decorous and Praiseworthy”
“Where today are the Pequot? Where are the Narragansett, the Mohican, the Pokanoket, and many other once powerful tribes of our people? They have vanished before the avarice and the oppression of the White Man, as snow before a summer sun.
Will we let ourselves be destroyed in our turn without a struggle, give up our homes, our country bequeathed to us by the Great Spirit, the graves of our dead and everything that is dear and sacred to us? I know you will cry with me, “Never! Never!”
—TECUMSEH OF THE SHAWNEES
IT BEGAN WITH CHRISTOPHER Columbus, who gave the people the name Indios. Those Europeans, the white men, spoke in different dialects, and some pronounced the word Indien, or Indianer, or Indian. Peaux-rouges, or redskins, came later. As was the custom of the people when receiving strangers, the Tainos on the island of San Salvador generously presented Columbus and his men with gifts and treated them with honor.
“So tractable, so peaceable, are these people,” Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain, “that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, and their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.”
All this, of course, was taken as a sign of weakness, if not heathenism, and Columbus being a righteous European was convinced the people should be “made to work, sow and do all that is necessary and to adopt our ways.” Over the next four centuries (1492–1890) several million Europeans and their descendants undertook to enforce their ways upon the people of the New World.
Columbus kidnapped ten of his friendly Taino hosts and carried them off to Spain, where they could be introduced to the white man’s ways. One of them died soon after arriving there, but not before he was baptized a Christian. The Spaniards were so pleased that they had made it possible for the first Indian to enter heaven that they hastened to spread the good news throughout the West Indies.
The Tainos and other Arawak people did not resist conversion to the Europeans’ religion, but they did resist strongly when hordes of these bearded strangers began scouring their islands in search of gold and precious stones. The Spaniards looted and burned villages; they kidnapped hundreds of men, women, and children and shipped them to Europe to be sold as slaves. Arawak resistance brought on the use of guns and sabers, and whole tribes were destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people in less than a decade after Columbus set foot on the beach of San Salvador, October 12, 1492.
Communications between the tribes of the New World were slow, and news of the Europeans’ barbarities rarely overtook the rapid spread of new conquests and settlements. Long before the English-speaking white men arrived in Virginia in 1607, however, the Powhatans had heard rumors about the civilizing techniques of the Spaniards. The Englishmen used subtler methods. To ensure peace long enough to establish a settlement at Jamestown, they put a golden crown upon the head of Wahunsonacook, dubbed him King Powhatan, and convinced him that he should put his people to work supplying the white settlers with food. Wahunsonacook vacillated between loyalty to his rebellious subjects and to the English, but after John Rolfe married his daughter, Pocahontas, he apparently decided that he was more English than Indian After Wahunsonacook died, the Powhatans rose up in revenge to drive the Englishmen back into the sea from which they had come, but the Indians underestimated the power of English weapons. In a short time the eight thousand Powhatans were reduced to less than a thousand.
In Massachusetts the story began somewhat differently but ended virtually the same as in Virginia. After the Englishmen landed at Plymouth in 1620, most of them probably would have starved to death but for aid received from friendly natives of the New World. A Pemaquid named Samoset and three Wampanoags named Massasoit, Squanto, and Hobomah became self-appointed missionaries to the Pilgrims. All spoke some English, learned from explorers who had touched ashore in previous years. Squanto had been kidnapped by an English seaman who sold him into slavery in Spain, but he escaped through the aid of another Englishman and finally managed to return home. He and the other Indians regarded the Plymouth colonists as helpless children; they shared corn with them from the tribal stores, showed them where and how to catch fish, and got them through the first winter. When spring came they gave the white men some seed corn and showed them how to plant and cultivate it.
For several years these Englishmen and their Indian neighbors lived in peace, but many more shiploads of white people continued coming ashore. The ring of axes and the crash of falling trees echoed up and down the coasts of the land which the white men now called New England. Settlements began crowding in upon each other. In 1625 some of the colonists asked Samoset to give them 12,000 additional acres of Pemaquid land. Samoset knew that land came from the Great Spirit, was as endless as the sky, and belonged to no man. To humor these strangers in their strange ways, however, he went through a ceremony of transferring the land and made his mark on a paper for them. It was the first deed of Indian land to English colonists.
Most of the other settlers, coming in by thousands now, did not bother to go through such a ceremony. By the time Massasoit, great chief of the Wampanoags, died in 1662 his people were being pushed back into the wilderness. His son Metacom foresaw doom for all Indians unless they united to resist the invaders. Although the New Englanders flattered Metacom by crowning him King Philip of Pokanoket, he devoted most of his time to forming alliances with the Narragansetts and other tribes in the region.
In 1675, after a series of arrogant actions by the colonists, King Philip led his Indian confederacy into a war meant to save the tribes from extinction. The Indians attacked fifty-two settlements, completely destroying twelve of them, but after months of fighting, the firepower of the colonists virtually exterminated the Wampanoags and Narragansetts. King Philip was killed and his head publicly exhibited at Plymouth for twenty years. Along with other captured Indian women and children, his wife and young son were sold into slavery in the West Indies.
When the Dutch came to Manhattan Island, Peter Minuit purchased it for sixty guilders in fishhooks and glass beads, but encouraged the Indians to remain and continue exchanging their valuable peltries for such trinkets. In 1641, Willem Kieft levied tribute upon the Mahicans and sent soldiers to Staten Island to punish the Raritans for offenses which had been committed not by them but by white settlers. The Raritans resisted arrest, and the soldiers killed four of them. When the Indians retaliated by killing four Dutchmen, Kieft ordered the massacre of two entire villages while the inhabitants slept. The Dutch soldiers ran their bayonets through men, women, and children, hacked their bodies to pieces, and then leveled the villages with fire.
For two more centuries these events were repeated again and again as the European colonists moved inland through the passes of the Alleghenies and down the westward-flowing rivers to the Great Waters (the Mississippi) and then up the Great Muddy (the Missouri).
The Five Nations of the Iroquois, mightiest and most advanced of all the eastern tribes, strove in vain for peace. After years of bloodshed to save their political independence, they finally went down to defeat. Some escaped to Canada, some fled westward, some lived out their lives in reservation confinement.
During the 1760’s Pontiac of the Ottawas united tribes in the Great Lakes country in hopes of driving the British back across the Alleghenies, but he failed. His major error was an alliance with French-speaking white men who withdrew aid from the peaux-rouges during the crucial siege of Detroit.
A generation later, Tecumseh of the Shawnees formed a great confederacy of midwestern and southern tribes to protect their lands from invasion. The dream ended with Tecumseh’s death in battle during the War of 1812.
Between 1795 and 1840 the Miamis fought battle after battle, and signed treaty after treaty, ceding their rich Ohio Valley lands until there was none left to cede.
When white settlers began streaming into the Illinois country after the War of 1812, the Sauks and Foxes fled across the Mississippi. A subordinate chief, Black Hawk, refused to retreat. He created an alliance with the Winnebagos, Pottawotamies, and Kickapoos, and declared war against the new settlements. A band of Winnebagos, who accepted a white soldier chief’s bribe of twenty horses and a hundred dollars, betrayed Black Hawk, and he was captured in 1832. He was taken East for imprisonment and display to the curious. After he died in 1838, the governor of the recently created Iowa Territory obtained Black Hawk’s skeleton and kept it on view in his office.
In 1829, Andrew Jackson, who was called Sharp Knife by the Indians, took office as President of the United States. During his frontier career, Sharp Knife and his soldiers had slain thousands of Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, but these southern Indians were still numerous and clung stubbornly to their tribal lands, which had been assigned them forever by white men’s treaties. In Sharp Knife’s first message to his Congress, he recommended that all these Indians be removed westward beyond the Mississippi. “I suggest the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi … to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, as long as they shall occupy it.””

RATING:.
5

STARTED READING – FINISHED READING
5/2/2024- 5/29/2024 ( )

A grim and hard to read factual account of the genocide of the Native American. The author never let's his emotions get the better of himself but lets his anger show in the baldly stated facts of history.
This book should be read alongside the stories of the destruction of the Aztecs and Incas by the Spainish. There is a similar disregard for (foreign/non Christian) humanity. A willingness to do anything for gold or land, and an inability to maintain the rule of law in the face of a short term gain.
This story is still being repeated somewhere in the world, like the Amazon basin where indigenous tribes are being pressure to move off their land make way for development.
It will continue to happen while there are people who don't read or write books like this one. ( )

An absolutely essential read. History that will move you to tears time and time again. ( )

This book is a dense history of Native American history. I remember reading this as a Reader's Digest Condense book when I was much younger and I imagine a lot of people at the time read this book in that format. However, it was worthwhile to actually read the entire book. It provides an interesting comparison to the way that Native American history was taught in school. I actually do recommend reading this book if you have an interest in Native American history.

Since it's a history I am not sure that spoiler applies but the source of the title was quite interesting to me. It refers to the fact that the parents of Crazy Horse buried his heart and other remains in a secret spot near Wounded Knee. ( )

Heartbreaking, mindset-shattering, eviscerating.

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. Each chapter chronicles a particular battle, people, or plight, in rough chronological order. 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.

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.

Admittedly, the book would've held more sway when first released, for a generation raised on WWII and '50s-era patriotism. 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. Yet, it's easy to forget how marginalised this culture remains - in social understanding, in cultural portrayals, etc. 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. The development of the telephone. The publication of all the great works of Romantic literature and art. The freaking Emancipation Proclamation! Yet here, in the very same country, an entire race - nay, many dozens of races - were being wiped out. It seems gauche to qualify levels of genocide, but this remains a particularly insidious one. Unlike the oligarchic genocide of the Nazis (where one feels as if removal of a few key figures would destabilise the structure), or the hereditary problems that plague, say, Israel and Palestine, this crime seems one of brutal, individual hatred. The most chilling massacres that Brown describes often occur simply because a few individuals decided - in a moment - they didn't care to be civil with these fellow human beings.

Bury My Heart is perhaps the pinnacle of pop history. In telling his tale exclusively from the other side, Brown weaves a manipulative, overly literary tale. Most of his characters are pure heroes, they speak entirely in riddles, and he pours on emotion like it was a John Williams soundtrack. At times, the academic and the writer in me cry out for some editing, perhaps some levity between the darkest moments, definitely the occasional examination of social and historical contexts that doesn't rely entirely on pandering to our heartstrings. Even when he does describe those white men who were sympathetic, or - as is always the case - seemed to find greater strength in "crossing over" to the Native side completely, Brown could give us more. It's fascinating to read of these men who married into tribes and basically lived with them, or of the young Native Americans who went to university and obtained degrees in the white man's world. But they only enter the narrative at the point when they become part of the bloodshed. What were their daily social patterns like? How did their friends and family respond to the change, and how did it affect the way they interacted in their respective new worlds? This would have been eminently more fascinating, but perhaps it's just outside the scope of Brown's aims.

Yet, this seems a cheap allegation to hurl at such a noble work. After all, where were the moments of levity during what was effectively a decades-long trench war? Where were the moments of tolerance? With each passing chapter, and each passing massacre, the book beats down any resistance you may have to the idea that there is goodness in the minds of men. It's not happy news, but if there's one area of history where that worldview needs to be accepted, it may just be here. ( )