Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee Analysis

Matthew Dwyer
April 28, 2014
US History
Book Selection: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Published: Original – 1970,
Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York, NY

A Review of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

Dee Brown is the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970. Brown is an American author from Arkansas, who developed close ties with the Native American population as he began to befriend locals of Native American descent. Brown has focused most of his writings and research on the American West and Native American history, and made a career as a professor of library science at University of Illinois from 1962 to 1975. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Brown’s most famous work, and was truly a groundbreaking writing on the topic of Native American history.
The underlying theme of Brown’s writing is the overall inappropriate and poor treatment of Native Americans during the late 1800’s, as the US government began to attempt to take over all of the land that the Native Americans were living on. The events of the book are a good representation of the historical background of the time in which the book is written. Dee Brown essentially is writing a chronology depicting the existence of Native Americans in early America. The book opens with a discussion of the early years of Native American inhabitance, and their relationship with settlers up through the mid-1800s. Early on, the relationship was peaceful, and Brown discusses the time period when the Pilgrims began to arrive, and how the Native Americans helped those Pilgrims survive on the new land and especially how to survive the winter. However, as the late 1600’s and early 1700’s came, settlers – mostly white from Europe, began to encroa...

... middle of paper ...

..., for the first time a majority of US Citizens opposed what America was doing in Vietnam. It is extremely important that writings and coverage like this continues into the future for similar events, so that people really understand the full spectrum of what is going on in events like this.
Overall I thought the book was a great piece of writing, depicting extremely important events in our history, in a different way than I am used to. Having a clear and defined perspective in the book made it much more enjoyable and relevant, and thus it had much more of an impact than simply reading about these events in a textbook, which I believe was Dee Brown’s goal in writing it. The history of the Native Americans is crucial to the history of America, and it is important that people understand the entirety of these events, because they shaped who and what we are today.