Review By Alyce Reese

You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who was born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases . . . I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me. Let me be a free man - free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself - and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.

- Chief Joseph, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Illustrated Edition: An Indian History of the American West (Sterling Innovation/ 2009) by Dee Brown
Page 385

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee should be required reading for every high school and college student in the country. Filled with horrific and heartbreaking stories from the history of the interactions between Native Americans and white men, it is brutally honest about both sides of the story. Dee Brown managed to take the documents and history of Native Americans, and recount them from the Native American point of view.

When I started reading this book I thought I had a pretty good handle on what had happened to the American Indians. Sure, they had gotten a raw deal and lost their land to the white people, and what happened was horrible--I was prepared for that. What I wasn't prepared for was the accounts of intentional slaughter of whole tribes, including women and children, at the order of U.S. officials.

This history book is beautiful to look at, yet sorrowful to read. The illustrations and photographs are excellent, and are printed on high quality paper. It has the look and feel of a coffee table book, while having the content of a comprehensive history text.

Each section starts with a timeline of what was going on in the world to give a backdrop to the events that are going to be discussed. What it contains is a history of interactions between the white people and the Native Americans, but it is not a comprehensive history of the Native American people (which I think would be impossible to fit into one volume anyway, never mind the lack of sources because of how many tribes have died away).

Major conflicts are addressed in each chapter. For example, there are chapters about: the Navajo, Cheyenne, Apache, and Nez Perce and their struggles as tribes. There are also chapters dealing with individual Native American leaders such as Little Crow, Red Cloud, Captain Jack, and Standing Bear. Many other Native American leaders and tribes are discussed within the chapters of this book as well.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee documents many, many tragedies, but does a good job of providing the information in chronological order so that you can see the progression of events; the cause and effect. The stories of massacres are not limited to those inflicted on the Native Americans, but also tell of those for which the Native Americans were responsible. Also, the efforts of honest and kind white Americans were recognized throughout the stories (even if their efforts did prove futile in many cases).

In almost every account, even if the Native Americans were at fault for something, whether it was the theft of an animal or the killing of white people, the response from the government was disproportionate, and many times targeted at the wrong people. For example, a tribe from a different location would steal some farm animals, and then the local peaceful tribe of Native Americans would be blamed and attacked. Then the peaceful Native Americans would defend themselves, and once they were at war with the white people there was no going back. Their people and land were either destroyed, or they were sent to reservations where they could be kept penned up and watched.

What astonished me even more was the systematic mistreatment of the Native Americans on reservations. They were denied the right to hunt (because the whites didn't want them to have guns and ammunition) yet they weren't given enough food to eat. Add onto that the fact that many were taken from their homelands and made to live in an environment that they were not suited to (whether it was heat or humidity). Many Native Americans died from lack of food, while others died of sickness caused or made worse by their new environment.

The tragedies in this book are too numerous and complicated to list in this review. They are so surprising and so far from what I learned in my high school history class that I am compelled to recommend this book to all Americans. It may not be the most pleasant thing to read about, but we should all know more about this chapter of our history.


This fortieth anniversary edition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is a beautiful book, and would make a perfect gift for anyone who is interested in Native American history, or anyone who is interested in photographs of Native Americans. There was a nice selection of photographs from diverse sources, including more than twenty by Edward S. Curtis.

Rating: 5/5

About the Author:

A librarian for many years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dee Brown was the author of more than 25 books on the American West and the Civil War. His Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, considered a classic in its field, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year and has been translated into many languages. Dee Brown died in 2002.

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