Review: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Dee Brown
Synopsis: An in depth look at several Native Americans tribes and their destruction by the US Government.
Rating: PG-13 – The majority of this book is about battles between the Native Americans and the US Troops. While it’s not overly graphic (Factual, not embellished), some parts might be a little intense for younger kids.
WOW. The things they didn’t teach us in school! I feel like those two sentences alone could be the entire review. Just WOW. I can’t even count the number of times I have read books, or scene movies, or heard stories about how “vicious and savage the Native Americans were!”, but not a whole lot about what happened TO them. That second part is lightly glossed over. To say that I learned a lot listening to this book would be a gross understatement.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a dense read, and covers roughly 50 years of accounts. At times the stories are so similar it almost felt slightly repetitive. The book mainly covers the struggle of the Native Americans being moved off their land by the US Government. I was hoping to learn more about their lives on the reservations (though is it talked about, I would have been interested in more detail.), and about the boarding schools the US Government sent Native American children to. But the information that’s there is factual, and not overly embellished. It was refreshing to hear the other side of the story.
There was one detail I found particularly helpful. Each chapter starts off with a brief timeline of what else was going on during the year they are discussing. It gave me a kind of reference point, a map if you will, to where in US History we were. A more history savvy person may not need that, but as a person who is relatively new to reading history books, it was appreciated.
If you are interested in history, and/or the history of the Indigenous Peoples in the US, I strongly recommend this one. You will learn a LOT!