“Bury my heart at Wounded Knee” by Dee Brown

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

About author

Historian and novelist, Dee Alexander Brown also served as librarian and professor of library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to nonfiction, he authored adult and juvenile novels. Throughout his career, he examined the history of the settling of the West, its hardships and triumphs and the injustices suffered by American Indians. He was honored by the American Library Association in 1971 with the Clarence Day Award for The Year of the Century, by New York Westerners in 1971 with the Buffalo Award for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and by the Western Writers of America in 1981 with the Best Western for Young People Award for Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow. Dee Brown died at his home in Little Rock, AK, on December 12, 2002 (Brown, 1970).

The Narrative in Focus

The Contents

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee illustrates how various western tribes such as the Apache, Navajo, Nez Percé, Cheyenne, Ute, Commanche, Kiowa and Sioux resisted the American government's effort to place them on reservations and release their traditional lands for white settlement. The book is organized both chronologically and geographically. Brown opens with an overview of the early history of western Indian peoples and white explorers and settlers, and briefly outlines some of the tribes detailed later in the book. Chapter 2 describes the plight of the Navajos, who were among the first people to be subdued by harsh U.S. policies. Each chapter opens with several important and well-known political events, followed by a quotation from one or more of the leaders of the tribe about to be discussed. Throughout the book, Brown describes the broken treaties and poignant battles from the perspective of the American Indians themselves, using excerpts from speeches and conversations made by tribal leaders to reinforce this perspective (Confederation of American Indians, 1986).

Central to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is the story of the resistance and eventual subordination of the Cheyenne and Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. Although the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie clearly stated that these tribes owned the surrounding area, by the late 1850s miners entered the area and soldiers attacked the tribes. Such conflicts culminated in the Sand Creek Massacre of November 28, 1864, in which Major Scott Anthony, Colonel Chivington, and approximately six hundred soldiers attacked a band of peaceful, sleeping Cheyennes. One unwilling observer, George Bent, remembered later:

There seemed to be indiscriminate slaughter of men, women, and children. There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection. They sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed.... I saw quite a number of infants in arms killed with their mothers.

Although the Cheyenne ceded yet more land after this tragedy, both the Cheyenne and the Sioux were determined to keep the Powder River country, their last great hunting ground. When the tribes discovered that whites were intruding ...