DOUBLE REVIEW: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and the Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

 

Hello my lovely readers! I read these two books back to back and it was honestly a coincidence that I happened to read them during Native American Heritage month. I've had these two books for month and finally got around it them! Let's get into it!

SYNOPSIS
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's eloquent, fully 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 almost four million copies and has been translated into seventeen languages. For this elegant thirtieth-anniversary edition—published in both hardcover and paperback—Brown has contributed an incisive new preface.

Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows the great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them demoralized and defeated. 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 really won.


In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

MY THOUGHTS
Both of these books were tough to get through due to the constant violence and tragedy they contained. Native Americans just could not catch a break once the colonizers arrived. I felt more emotionally connected to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee because it was such a depressing read! Chapter after chapter it was the same thing....despair, heartache, wars and death. I know history isn't pretty, but goodness.

I did enjoy that The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, picks up where Bury My Heart left off and gave us a look at Indian American life since then. Again, it was pretty bleak, but there are some bright spots. 

I'm glad I read both of these books back to back and that I know more about America's true history, dating back to the original Americans. Everyone should read these books.