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 | | Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, Hampton Sides (Foreword) ISBN-10: 9780805086843 ISBN-10: 0-8050-8684-6 ISBN-13: 9780805086843 ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8684-3 Paperback 2007-05-15 Holt Paperbacks Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived. Now repackaged with a new introduction from bestselling author Hampton Sides to coincide with a major HBO dramatic film of the book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. A national bestseller in hardcover for more than a year after its initial publication, it has sold over four million copies in multiple editions and has been translated into seventeen languages. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated. A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won, and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten, and so must be retold from time to time. | ||
Reviews | ||
During the Moon of the Must-Read There's already been much ink shed reviewing this seminal work by Dee Brown on the "loser's" of the 'Indian Wars' that consumed much of American history in the latter half of the 19th Century. If you don't feel great rage at the unceasing, genocidal campaign by European Americans upon the lands, animals and people of Native America, then you would have felt right at home among the ranks of Long-Hair Custer's men. Were I born a native American, there would always be burning deep inside me this rage, but then again to fight is in our blood, to take from other people is wired into our genetic code. There are many elements of this book that recommend a reader new to the subject matter. First, that there are actually records of the comments and feelings of the native Americans who suffered through the Indian Wars, in the archives of the U.S. Department of the Interior - what a boon to be able to go back and see the other side's perspective. Raised on a black and white narrative of good guys - the cowboys, or we brave white settlers - against the bad guys - the savage, heathen, idle Indians, most Americans are cheated out of a knowledge of how much despicable savagery was done unto our neighbors in order to take what they had, and strip away their lifestyle and impose our own upon them. Our history leaves us inside a glass house when we begin to throw rocks at others who commit genocide. It's not that two wrongs make a right or that we have no right to point out other's atrocities. But we should all be conscious of the sins and tragedies our forebears visited upon the first nations to occupy the land we love. Perhaps this knowledge is what inspires us to speak out so readily when we are faced with modern genocide. Not that we always back up our outrage with action, of course. Second, I was shocked that some of the truly admirable military leaders of the American Civil War - Grant, Sherman, Sheridan - were the very leaders of the campaign to exterminate the native Americans. Precisely those skills, ability and tenacity that made them such effective military campaigners in the War between the States were used to devastating effect against the native population in the decades that followed the conclusion of the brotherly conflict. War criminals, though, they would be, were they have to undertaken this effort today. Phil Sheridan stands out in particularly stark relief - to him is lightly attributed the horrifically bestial remark that 'the only good indian he ever saw was a dead one.' If the God that these mean manifestly believed blessed their just causes does exist, then they must be roasting on an eternally rotating spit in the dungeons of hell for the crimes they unleashed on a people who refused to live the life we wanted them to. Third, knowing as many friends as I do in the contemporary native American community, one can only admire the general lack of enmity absent in their hearts. Life goes on. For those who survived, there are the every day concerns that all Americans, regardless of skin tone, pursue. But no one who considers the American people to be a peace-loving, kind, generous and charitable folk should live their lives without knowing the full breath and depth of the depravity that we have been and remain capable of. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee makes you weep and wish you could go back in time and fight on the side of a people who truly lived the grand American mythic ethic of living lightly on and in harmony with the land, relying on the kind of rugged individualism that we claim as an inherent American trait. This book should be required reading for all American schoolchildren. | ||
BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE I read the book a long time ago and was really happy when I found it at amazon.It is a very good story about how the west was really won and the crimes and the shames of how it was done. | ||
I need maps! I became very frustrated reading this book because of the lack of maps. It is nevertheless, a very moving telling of the biggest land grab in our nation's history. | ||