49 pages • 1 hour read

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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1970

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-14

Chapters 15-19

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Background

Historical Context: US Policy Toward Native American Nations

In the late 19th century, the US government’s policy toward Native American nations evolved from using Indian agents as liaisons to a more structured (and heavily restricted) reservation system. Most of the Native American nations that the US encountered earlier in its history did not fare even as well as the western nations consigned to reservations: Many eastern groups were simply erased from history by disease and violence. However, the reservation system was not really a step forward; it represented the extension of a cruel set of policies intent on supplanting Native American cultures with a Euro-American cultural identity.

The development of the United States’ so-called “Indian policy” in the late 19th century was beset with problems, not the least of which was the fact that the encounters Brown describes coincided with major historical events that loomed larger in the national consciousness. The Civil War and Reconstruction dominated public attention for much of the period in question, thus casting “Indian policy” as a lesser concern for the general public. (Brown includes chronological lists of other such events in national life at the beginning of each chapter, thus illustrating how many other issues vied for the American public’s attention at the time.) The overwhelming majority of the United States’ population lived east of the Mississippi River, so they only heard about events on the Great Plains or the Rocky Mountains through accounts in the press or in books, all of which were highly tilted toward white settlers’ perspectives. As such, the national understanding of the interactions between white settlers and Native American peoples was, for a long time, more a matter of national mythology than of fact-based history. This mythologized perspective, which whitewashed the crimes and abuses of US policy and framed the Native Americans as violent savages, held sway for most of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee strikes against that mythologized view of the American West by presenting history from the perspective of the Native Americans rather than of white settlers.

Cultural Context: Clashes of Values about Land Use

Cultural issues lie at the heart of much of the conflict between the US and Native American nations. The evolution of US policy in favor of the reservation system came about partially as a result of the government’s incapacity to deal with major cultural differences regarding land use. Whereas the European-derived culture of US society tended to regard land as a private asset to be divided and used under individual ownership, many Native American cultures regarded land as a public good, open to the collective use of many different people. This cultural difference brought Native American nations and white settlers into frequent conflict. White settlers saw the vast hunting territories of Native American nations as unclaimed, so they claimed them for use in agriculture, mining, and other commercial endeavors. When Native Americans resisted this appropriation of their hunting territories, tensions flared, and the US government, which was unable—or, more accurately, unwilling—to find a mediated solution to the cross-cultural dispute, opted to dispossess the Native American nations and to consign them to reservations where they would have only minimal contact with white settlers.

While generalizations about major patterns in Native American cultures (such as attitudes toward land use) can be useful in seeing the contrast with Euro-American cultural perspectives, it is also important to understand that Native American cultures were and are distinct from one another in many important respects. The particular cultures of the Navaho, Ponca, and Sioux, for example, are as diverse from one another as are many of the particular cultures of Europe. One of the great strengths of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is that it treats each Native American nation as a group with its own identity, language, and traditions, and not as an undifferentiated mass.

Literary Context: History from the Perspective of Indigenous Peoples

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a landmark work in the writing of American history. Its sympathetic portrayal of the experience of Native American nations is not without precedent, even if such precedents were rare (Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1881 book, A Century of Dishonor, is a notable example). Where Brown’s work stands out for its originality is in its upending of the narrative’s perspective. American historiography concerning the settlement of the West had a long tradition of being written from the perspective of US policymakers, army officials, settlers, miners, explorers, and hunters, rather than from the perspective of Native Americans. This uniformity was partly due to pervasive prejudice and partly due to the nature of the historical sources available—far more printed material had been written by white settlers than by Native Americans. Brown’s innovation was in researching and compiling existing records of first-person Native American accounts, which then formed the basis for his portrayal. This shift in perspective enabled the history to be told with far greater sympathy to Native Americans than in previous works.

Several structural features also make Brown’s book a notable turning point in the presentation of American history. Brown includes full-page portrait photographs of notable Indigenous leaders throughout his text, extended sections of quotes and extracts from the writings and sayings of those leaders to preface each chapter, and sheet music to Native American songs at the close of many chapters. The selection of sources for these elements—all Indigenous voices and faces—underscores Brown’s intent to portray the book as one being told entirely from the Native American perspective. They also add a measure of realism to the narrative, portraying Indigenous leaders not merely as characters in a story but as real people, representatives of their own rich cultural traditions.