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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

Dee Brown

Start date: November 1, 2024

Finish date: November 30, 2024

Discussion: Non-Fiction Classics

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Shelves: american, non-fiction, history, borrowed-from-library

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee reveals a sordid little truth about human beings: they have a great capacity to be cruel, to be prejudiced against someone not like themselves, and to justify any kind of horrid behavior with a logic that defies belief. Having just read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it would have been easy to say, “How could the Japanese be so cruel and inhuman?” And, how often have we asked that same question about the Germans toward the Jews, or Southerners against their blac Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee reveals a sordid little truth about human beings: they have a great capacity to be cruel, to be prejudiced against someone not like themselves, and to justify any kind of horrid behavior with a logic that defies belief. Having just read The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it would have been easy to say, “How could the Japanese be so cruel and inhuman?” And, how often have we asked that same question about the Germans toward the Jews, or Southerners against their black slaves, Hutus murdering Tutsis, or the British who watched the Irish die in the potato famines and refused to send aid? The treatment of Native Americans at the hands of Europeans and subsequent generations of Americans is no less despicable, no less harrowing, and no less shameful. In some ways other atrocities pale before it. It was genocide.

Unlike many, I am perfectly capable of placing historic events in the context of their times. I do not suffer from an inability to conceive that many modern ideas were foreign to our ancestors, that we have made progress (and, I should hope so), or that the masses were fed a steady diet of fear and propaganda that made extreme measures seem nothing less than reasonable to them. Still, I cannot imagine that any man who termed himself a Christian could have committed such acts of villainy and slept well at night or thought he would not have something beyond measure to answer for when he came before his maker. How few men protested or even attempted to intervene, and how calmly and coolly the tribes were promised a peace that was never intended, is the part of this story that most appalls me. That men such as Kit Carson, who had lived with these people, fathered children with Indian women, and spoke so highly of them as a race, could have been persuaded to join in the mass slaughter of them is incomprehensible.

I could go on, because the outrage feels very personal. The flag that Black Kettle stood under with his women and children huddled around him as the wholesale slaughter of his people began, a flag that he was promised would be his protection if he did not take arms against American troops, was my flag. It was red, white and blue. It was desecrated at that moment, and it is not too late for me to shed tears for that offence. What haunts me the most is that I think that seed of evil is still alive in mankind. It rears its ugly head all over the world today. We need to all be on guard against it. The lie that can be fashioned into truth is still a lie.
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