Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“In 1860 there were probably 300,000 Indians in the United States and Territories, most of them living west of the Mississippi. According to varying estimates, their numbers had been reduced by one-half to two-thirds since the arrival of the first settlers in Virginia and New England.”

Brown sets the stage for his historical narrative by providing these statistics of the damage already done to Indigenous populations by the arrival of European settlers. This frames the reader’s expectation that the story of the book will follow a similar pattern of suffering, dispossession, and depopulation.

“The Navahos had the fortitude to bear freezing weather, hunger, dysentery, jeers of the soldiers, and the hard three-hundred-mile journey, but they could not bear the homesickness, the loss of their land. They wept, and 197 of them died before they reached their cruel destination.”

This quote illustrates Brown’s intention to keep themes of tragedy and sorrow at the forefront of the reader’s mind. In most sections of the book, Native American first-person accounts express the pathos of their experience, but on occasion (as here), Brown adds emotionally-charged language to his own narration.

“For years he had tried to keep the treaties, to follow the advice of the white men and lead his people on their road. It seemed now that he had lost everything.”

This is a description of Little Crow’s experience as a leader of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota. Throughout the book, Indigenous leaders take different strategies of relating to US encroachment, ranging from conciliation to outright resistance; Little Crow’s response began with the former and ended with the latter. Regardless of which path was chosen, however, the outcomes were always tragically similar.