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

Brown opens with a short survey of contact between Europeans and the peoples of eastern North America, showing how early diplomacy gave way to removal and broken promises. He then settles into the three decades that make up the core of the book, beginning in the 1860s, when the Civil War diverted federal attention while settlers, miners and railroad builders pressed onto Indigenous lands. The chapters that follow are largely self-contained. They cover the forced Navajo march to Bosque Redondo, the uprising led by Little Crow among the Dakota in Minnesota in 1862, and the Sand Creek massacre of 1864, in which a Colorado militia led by John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho camp that believed itself under army protection.

The middle of the book turns to the northern and southern plains. Brown follows Red Cloud's successful war over the Bozeman Trail and the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, then the argument over Black Hills gold that led to the Great Sioux War, Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn in 1876, and the harrowing aftermath for the Lakota and Cheyenne. Other chapters follow the Apache under Cochise and later Geronimo, the Modoc war in the lava beds of northern California, the Kiowa and Comanche in the Red River War, and Chief Joseph's attempt to lead the Nez Perce toward Canada in 1877. He also gives space to Standing Bear's 1879 court case, in which a federal judge ruled that an Indian was a person under the law, and to the Ute crisis in Colorado.

A pattern becomes clear as the episodes accumulate. Treaties are signed under pressure and then breached by settlers, contractors or Congress. Promised rations fail to arrive, hunger drives people off reservations, and the army is sent to bring them back. Brown treats the buffalo's destruction as a deliberate and decisive blow to plains economies and spiritual life. He also shows individual officials and reformers, such as the Seneca commissioner Ely Parker, who tried to soften the policy and met resistance from those who profited from it.

The last chapters follow the spread of the Ghost Dance religion among the Lakota, the alarm it caused among agents, the killing of Sitting Bull in December 1890 and the slaughter of Big Foot's band at Wounded Knee a few days later. Brown does not present Wounded Knee as an isolated tragedy but as the end of a long sequence of choices by the United States.

What Brown is trying to demonstrate is less a new thesis than a change of vantage point. He argues, through his selection and arrangement of evidence, that the familiar story of frontier progress looks very different when told through the words of those who lost the land. The tone is elegiac and often angry, and the book's power comes from accumulation rather than from analysis of causes or comparison across regions.

The most persistent theme is broken agreements: nearly every chapter turns on a treaty that was negotiated under duress, ignored by settlers and abandoned when the land became valuable. Closely tied to it is the gap between official language and frontier practice, between Washington's stated benevolence and the behavior of agents, militias and speculators.

A second theme is the contest over land and subsistence. Brown ties military conflict to the loss of hunting grounds, the slaughter of buffalo herds and the dependence on rations that reservations created. A third is the role of testimony. He treats speeches and recollections as historical evidence and argues that excluding them had distorted the national story.

Other threads include leadership under impossible choices, the cultural and religious pressures placed on Native communities, and the way ideas of progress and destiny were used to justify conquest. Brown also returns to the contrast between a few sympathetic officials and the larger system they worked within.

The book covers the period between the Civil War and 1890, when the United States completed its continental expansion. The Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroad, gold and silver strikes and the cattle trade all brought settlers into the plains, mountains and Southwest. Federal Indian policy shifted from treaty-making toward reservations, and in 1871 Congress ended the practice of making new treaties with tribes as sovereign nations. The 1890 census statement that a frontier line no longer existed is often paired with Wounded Knee as a symbolic end to the era.

The publication moment matters as well. In 1970 the United States was divided over the Vietnam War, and reports of atrocities there made Sand Creek and Wounded Knee feel newly relevant to many readers. The civil rights movement and the growth of Native activism, including the American Indian Movement and its 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, created an audience for histories that questioned older accounts. Until then, popular treatments of the West had been shaped by Hollywood Westerns and by memoirs written by soldiers and settlers. Brown's book belongs to the wave of revisionist work that began to alter that picture, though professional historians of Native America have since gone well beyond it.

The book suits general readers who want a vivid, chronological introduction to the Indian wars and their causes, as well as students beginning US or Western history who need a human-scale narrative to anchor more technical reading. Teachers often reach for it because its self-contained chapters can be assigned separately. Readers who liked narrative history of conflict, treaties and leaders, such as accounts of single campaigns, are likely to find it absorbing.

It may be less suitable for those wanting a rigorous scholarly study, a balanced survey of every Native nation or a history that reaches into the twentieth century. Readers sensitive to detailed descriptions of massacres, starvation and the killing of children should expect distressing passages throughout. Anyone seeking current Native perspectives will want to add recent books by Indigenous historians.

The prose is clear, direct and written for a general audience, with no specialist vocabulary beyond names of peoples, places and treaties. The challenge is mostly emotional and organizational. The book has a long cast of chiefs, officers and agents, and a reader who skips between chapters may lose track of how the episodes connect. Names and spellings of Native nations and leaders follow mid-twentieth-century usage, and some are no longer standard.

The original 1970 hardcover ran to 487 pages with maps and photographs, and the exact length and extras of this Picador paperback printing are not confirmed here. Many paperback editions set the text in small type and may omit some illustrations. Pacing is steady, and the chapters can be read in short sessions.

No formal preparation is required, but a basic outline of nineteenth-century US history will help: westward expansion, the Civil War, the Homestead Act and the building of the transcontinental railroad. A rough map of the Great Plains, the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest makes the campaigns easier to follow. It also helps to know that Native nations were distinct peoples with their own languages and political systems, not a single group, and that terms such as Sioux, Lakota, Dakota and Nakota refer to related but different divisions.

A short look at the idea of Manifest Destiny and at the difference between treaties, agencies and reservations will make Brown's targets clearer. Readers may also want to look up the ways Native names were recorded by non-Native writers, since this affects how people appear in the text.

Few single volumes cover so many episodes of the Indian wars in one narrative, and fewer do so while giving prominent space to Native speakers. Its influence on how Americans discuss the West makes it a useful reference point even for readers who plan to move on to newer research. It shows how popular history can alter public memory, and reading it clarifies why later books were written in response.

The book also rewards readers who care about primary-source storytelling. Brown's skill lies in selecting a speech or a recollection that brings an abstract policy to a human scale. Anyone wanting to understand where the title comes from and why Wounded Knee became shorthand for a broader history will find that explained here.

A careful reader should come away with a firm chronological sense of the main conflicts between 1860 and 1890 and of how they connect through broken treaties, scarcity and military force. They may reconsider familiar stories such as Custer's Last Stand by seeing them as episodes within a longer struggle over the Black Hills and plains hunting grounds.

Readers may also notice how much any history depends on whose voices survive in the record, and how translation and transcription by non-Native recorders shape what is preserved. Finally, the book invites readers to look at their own local history and ask whose land they live on and how it changed hands.

Brown's greatest strength is narrative clarity: complex events are organized into manageable chapters, each with a clear arc and memorable figures. His use of council speeches, interviews and memoirs gives Native leaders agency and personality, which was unusual for a general history of its time. The book's pacing and the cumulative effect of its structure make the pattern of broken promises hard to ignore.

The work has also proved durable. It has been in print for decades, has been widely translated and remains a common starting point for readers new to the subject. Its moral seriousness, without the cynicism sometimes found in revisionist writing, gives it lasting readability.

Brown was a gifted popular historian rather than a specialist in Native studies, and the book reflects the research available in the late 1960s. Many of its sources were created by non-Native interpreters, agents or journalists, so the Native voices it presents are filtered. Later scholars have also pointed out that its structure, which presents Native peoples chiefly as victims of a relentless advance, can leave less room for their political strategies, internal disagreements, alliances and survival after 1890.

The book's scope is limited to the West of the second half of the nineteenth century. It gives little attention to the Southeast and Northeast, to Alaska and Hawaii, or to Native life in the twentieth century. Some details, including figures, motives and the conduct of specific episodes, have been revised or contested by later research, and spelling conventions are dated. Readers should treat it as a powerful introduction instead of a final account.

Wounded Knee: the site on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where, in December 1890, US soldiers killed many Lakota men, women and children from Big Foot's band; the book's title and closing event.

Manifest Destiny: the nineteenth-century belief that the United States was meant to spread across the continent, which Brown shows being used to excuse seizure of Native lands.

Sand Creek massacre (1864): the attack by Colorado militia on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp, treated as an early example of broken trust.

Little Crow: the Dakota leader whose reluctant war in Minnesota in 1862 opens the book's account of armed resistance.

Red Cloud: the Oglala Lakota leader whose campaign closed the Bozeman Trail and led to the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868.

Sitting Bull: the Hunkpapa Lakota leader whose killing in 1890 preceded Wounded Knee.

Chief Joseph: the Nez Perce leader whose 1877 attempt to reach Canada is among the book's best-known narratives.

Geronimo and Cochise: Apache leaders through whom Brown follows resistance in the Southwest.

Ghost Dance: a religious movement that spread among plains peoples in 1889 and 1890 and alarmed officials.

Black Hills: the Lakota sacred land seized after gold was found, central to the Great Sioux War.

Indian Bureau: the federal agency that administered reservations and treaty obligations, portrayed here as often corrupt and underfunded.

Ely Parker (Donehogawa): the Seneca commissioner of Indian affairs who tried to reform policy.

How did the United States justify taking land it had promised to protect, and who benefited? What happens to a story of national progress when the people on the losing side are allowed to describe it? To what extent were the wars the result of deliberate policy rather than local misunderstandings?

The book also asks how Native leaders chose between fighting, negotiating and flight when each option carried grave costs, and what role hunger, disease and the loss of the buffalo played in shaping those decisions. Finally, it raises the question of what responsibility later generations have to remember events like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.

Because the chapters are largely self-contained, groups can divide the book into three or four sections and meet after each one: the early western crises through Sand Creek, the northern plains wars, the Southwest and the Pacific Northwest, and the closing chapters on the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee. Assigning one leader or episode to each member helps the group trace the larger pattern.

A useful exercise is to bring a map and mark each event as it is read. Groups may also want to pair a chapter with a recent article or book by an Indigenous historian to compare perspectives. Because the material includes accounts of massacre and starvation, it is helpful to agree beforehand on how to pause or step away. These book discussion questions in the next section are designed to work whether or not members have read other histories of the period.

1. Which episode in the book changed your understanding of the American West most, and why?

2. How does Brown's decision to rely on speeches and recollections shape the emotional effect of the book? What might be gained or lost by this choice?

3. Treaties appear again and again in the narrative. What do their repeated failures suggest about how the United States understood its obligations?

4. Brown devotes chapters to different nations. Does this structure help you see differences among them, or does it risk flattening them?

5. How do the Native leaders in the book weigh resistance against negotiation, and how might their choices look from their own perspectives?

6. Why do you think Wounded Knee has come to stand for the whole period?

7. What would a history of the same decades look like if written entirely by those who held the Indian Bureau offices? How would this book differ?

8. How might the context of 1970 have shaped the way readers received this book, and how does it read in a different time?

9. What responsibilities do readers today have toward the history described here?

Bibliographic details were checked against bookseller and bibliographic listings that match the supplied ISBN, along with a library-style catalogue record and reference entries on the book and its author. Information on the original 1970 publication comes from reference works and catalogue data. Descriptions of the book's content and context draw on encyclopedia entries, reference summaries and my own reading of the book's well-known subject matter, written in original language.

There are limits. Listings for this Picador paperback give only a year or retailer-level date and page count, which do not agree with the length of the original hardcover, so publication date and page count for this edition are not stated. Publisher attribution follows the Macmillan listing, while the series name indicates the Pan and Picador paperback line.