Musings: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee has become a classic in American history.  I've had the book for a few years, but I own a bulky hardcover edition and just couldn't motivate myself to carry it around with me.  Luckily, it was also available via the Chicago Public Library's digital audiobook collection, and I was able to remove it from my TBR list that way.  I'm glad I did.  While so much of this book is about long-term suffering and a sense of doomed inevitability, it is also about the power of resistance and standing up for what you believe in, even if you know that you are going to lose.  In Brown's preface to the new edition of the book, he said that the history is in print in so many countries which have populations of people who have been beaten back and oppressed through time.

In a way, that made me feel better.  One of the worst things about knowing history is knowing that we are doomed to repeat it - collective human memory is too short for us to remember all of our misdeeds in the past so that we can avoid them in the future.  While it's no better to know that Native Americans are not the only people who have been driven to near extinction by conquering forces, it is easier to accept the fact if you realize that this same thing has happened the world over, time and time again.  There's a fatalism that pervades this book - you know when you begin reading it just how it will end, but that doesn't make the events any less horrifying or depressing.


Some months ago, Kari and I read Lions of the West, which tells a very biased account of westward expansion.  After that, I wanted to know more about the other point of view.  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee provides that view and makes so strikingly clear that westward expansion was not a result of manifest destiny, with a whole empty continent opened up wide before Americans.  It was fought for and squabbled over and won, with the loss of a lot of blood, the help of a huge number of broken promises, and a terrifying dose of genocide.

By its very nature, this book is cyclical and fairly repetitive.  Americans want to push Native Americans out, the Native Americans resist, a war ensues, the Native Americans are forced onto a reservation, and often they die or waste away.  There isn't a lot of variation.  And that's actually what makes this book so inspiring and fascinating.  That people can wake up every morning knowing that they are going to lose, knowing that their culture is on the brink of annihilation, and they will still fight for it.  And it was much easier to understand why some chose to go to reservations instead of fighting - when you've seen so many of your friends and family die around you, it makes your heart sick.

What is most disturbing about reading this book is less obvious.  In previous generations, Americans knew tribes of Indians, knew how to differentiate between them, knew that different cultures existed.  And Indians were present in their lives and their histories and their knowledge of America.  But now... it seems as though Indians have just faded away from our collective consciousness.  They were here, now they're gone, and it's sad, but it happened.  And now we keep claiming that disease is to blame for the deaths of so many Indians, which is true, but it's also true that Americans and the American government are to blame for a huge number of deaths, too.  And we tend to ignore that part of history because we are so ashamed of it.  I wonder why, though, we are willing to accept slavery as part of our history and try to make amends for it, but we cannot do the same for westward expansion.  African Americans have become a prominent group in our country's history and politics and culture.  But Native Americans have not.  I don't blame them, really - once you learn the history, it's completely understandable that they want absolutely nothing to do with this country.  But at the same time, I wish that they were more vocal and visible in our everyday lives.

This is a difficult book to read.  There are so many heroic last stands, so many rebellions, so many villains, so many lies.  Most of us are taught to obey the law and to trust the system - that if you have right on your side, then justice will be yours.  But time and again, Indians trusted the system, trusted that people were good at heart, trusted that promises would be kept, and every time, they lost.  The racism implicit in every decision, the arrogance of Americans as they swept across a continent, the collusion of government officials and greedy individuals - it is all sickening, all disheartening.

But does that mean we shouldn't know that it happened?  Not at all.  So many of these names have been lost to history, or they have been warped into stereotypes and ideals that have nothing to do with real people.  Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee brings them back to life, makes them dynamic.  And it gives us that horrible but very important lesson that governments are only a reflection of the people they govern, and sometimes people can be pretty horrible.

Such an important book, and such a painful read.