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

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, a nonfiction history by librarian and historian Dee Brown, was published in 1970 and became a widely influential bestseller. Dee Brown (full name Dorris Alexander Brown) was the author of more than 30 fiction and nonfiction books. As a librarian at the University of Illinois, he had access to the primary historical records from the late 19th century that became the main source material for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The book details the United States government’s interactions with Native American nations in the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and West Coast from 1860 to 1890. It tells the story from the perspective of the Native American nations, thus breaking a long trend in American historiography of narrating those events from the viewpoint of white, Euro-American settlers. Its sympathetic depiction of the suffering inflicted on Indigenous peoples resonated with the American public during a time when similar atrocities were at the forefront of international news (such as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam). Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was turned into a made-for-TV movie released on HBO in 2007, which won six primetime Emmy Awards.

This study guide uses the 2007 edition from Holt Paperbacks. Please note: Certain features of the spelling of Indigenous names are variable, and Brown’s usage may not always align with other popular usages (for instance, using “Navaho” instead of “Navajo”). This study guide conforms to Brown’s usage in such matters but differs in other respects. Wherever possible, reference is made to each nation’s name rather than to a generalized identity, but when a general term is required, this study guide refers to Native American nations or Indigenous groups, whereas Brown uses “Indians.” While Brown designates the plural form of most Native American national names by adding a plural ‘s’, this study guide follows the standard convention of allowing such names to act as collective nouns (except when quoting Brown’s own text).

Content Warning: Both Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and this study guide include references to subjects that some readers may find troubling, including warfare, discrimination, and genocide.

Summary

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee gives an account of the clashes that resulted from the United States’ expansionist program of settlement and commercial exploitation in western territories that traditionally belonged to various Native American nations. Unlike most previous histories, however, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee presents its narrative from the perspective of Native American peoples, not those of the settlers, miners, cowboys, or cavalrymen. It does this by making substantial use of primary sources that recorded the words of Native American leaders, typically from transcripts of treaty negotiations. After giving a brief historical introduction covering interactions between European settlers and Indigenous nations from 1492 through the mid-19th century, Brown focuses on the historical window from 1860 to 1890.

Brown’s treatment of the period is selective but intended to give a broad view of the entire region of the American West. As such, while his account does not exhaustively retell every Native American nation’s experience, it addresses those stories that deal with either the largest groups (such as the Sioux) or those with the most poignant narratives (as with the Ponca). The book is divided into chapters, each of which is devoted either to a different Native American nation or to a separate phase in the overall history. Brown focuses his attention on the Navaho, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Apache, Modoc, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Percé, Ponca, Ute, and Sioux nations. Other prominent nations—like the Crow, Shoshone, Blackfeet, and Omaha—are not dealt with directly, but appear sporadically in the narrative.

Many of the chapters offer standalone accounts of particular nations or episodes in history, as is the case with the book’s treatment of the Navaho, Modoc, Nez Percé, Ponca, and Ute nations. Other nations, like the Arapaho, Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche, appear in multiple chapters, but their stories are also limited to a strictly episodic format. The episodic nature of these chapters supports the broader cycle of the book’s narrative arc, in which each Native American nation is gradually challenged, dispossessed, deported to reservations, and sometimes massacred by the institutional agents of the US government—whether soldiers, Indian agents, or local politicians.

In addition to its episodic accounts, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee also provides an overarching narrative of the affairs of two of the largest nations of the Great Plains, the Cheyenne and the Sioux (primarily of the Lakota division), who were often allied during the period from 1860 to 1890. Brown describes the Cheyenne’s expulsion from Colorado, which had a domino effect on events in the Great Plains. First, many of the Southern Cheyenne were displaced to present-day Oklahoma under their leader Black Kettle, where rising tensions followed them and similarly afflicted the Kiowa and Comanche nations. Some of these displaced Cheyenne sought to travel back north, to hunt or to join with the Northern Cheyenne, which added still further tensions to the region. An alliance arose between Northern Cheyenne and Lakota Sioux under the prominent leader Red Cloud, aiming to defend the Powder River Country of present-day Wyoming from further encroachment by white settlers, hunters, and miners. Red Cloud’s coalition successfully pushed back an invasion by the US army and secured a treaty guaranteeing the freedom of the Powder River Country and the establishment of a vast area for a new Sioux reservation. These gains, however, evaporated within just a few years, as the value of the lands within the Sioux reservation became apparent to white settlers. In response to US efforts to break up reservation lands, a new wave of resistance emerged among the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. This resistance movement won major victories against US army forces, culminating in the destruction of Colonel George Custer’s troops at Little Bighorn. The victory was fleeting, however, and eventually the members of the Sioux-Cheyenne alliance had to either surrender or flee. The reservation lands promised to the Native American nations in the Great Plains continued to be split apart and reclaimed by the US government, until each nation was living on territory that represented only a tiny fraction of its original homeland.

Behind both the episodic accounts and the broader sweep of the Cheyenne/Sioux narrative, Brown details a recurring cycle: Indigenous nations being systematically dispossessed by force or duplicitous practices (or more often, by both). This history is marked by treaties promising much but later being renegotiated, by systematic attempts to erase Indigenous languages, cultures, and religions, and by occasional massacres of noncombatants, like those at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee presents a tragic story of the dispossession of whole peoples and the attempted eradication of their cultures.