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

Content Warning: The following material includes references to subjects that some readers may find troubling, including warfare, discrimination, and genocide.

In his Introduction, Dee Brown offers an overview of his historiographic methodology. His book, first published in 1970, presents a familiar history in an unfamiliar light. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee surveys the history of the American West from 1860 to 1890 but reverses the traditional perspective. Rather than narrating the history of Indigenous Americans in the western United States from the point of view of Euro-American settlers, like most previous histories did, Brown presents his history from the point of view of the Indigenous Americans themselves. He notes that in previous renderings of the history of the American West, “Only occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more often than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man” (xxiii).

Brown makes use of the extensive primary sources that feature Native American people’s statements in their own words, the greater part of which are transcripts of council proceedings and treaty negotiations: “Although the Indians who lived through this doom period of their civilization have vanished from the earth,” Brown writes, “millions of their words are preserved in official records” (xxiv).