Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

History is written by the victors, which makes you wonder how many more of the things we learn about have a completely different narrative from the other side. Like Manifest Destiny, for example. From what I recall from my K-12 history classes, this was a largely positive event, stretching the US from sea to shining sea. There's some token acknowledgment that it meant “resettling” the Native Americans, but it's not dwelled upon. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, though, tells the story of the settling of the American continent from the people who were there first.

Since he focuses on the era of Manifest Destiny (there's some information about how European arrival in the Americas played out, but it's a small portion of the book), Brown confines his focus to the West. It's heartwrenching to read about from the perspective of now, because you know that each chief that tries to negotiate in good faith with the white people will eventually be cheated and that each warrior who tries to fight back against the people who were eroding their way of life will eventually lose. Brown uses as many Native American sources as possible to show how the westward march of white settlers progressed from the point of view of the people who were pushed away from the land and lifestyle they'd always known in order to make room. With each passing year, restrictions on their territory become tighter and tighter, but their inability to safeguard even the small promises that they were able to extract is just relentlessly sad to read about.

I think it's important to wrestle with all parts of American history, and remember that many of what we think of as gains come from losses by someone else. As such, I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who's interested in how this country has treated its original residents.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is the Native American story of the American West. In many ways the many stories told are all the same story: Native Americans are living happy lives in the West, and non-natives arrive and see the beauty of the land and make treaties with the native peoples and then immediately begin to break the treaties and scheme and lie and fight and kill in order to take their land. And it happens over and over and over again.

‘“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.”' This, of course, makes the stories even more tragic.

The Navahos...the Cheyennes...the Apaches...the Nez Perces...the non-natives meet them, sign treaties with them, and then amend or ignore the treaties, and soon we see the native peoples shuttled off to land that can't support life or killed in horrendous massacres.

I am left with a feeling of deep sadness for the Native Americans. This is a terrible story, but it is a story that all Americans should know.