Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

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

I remember the day 20 years ago, when I was standing in front of the Crazy Horse memorial - still unfinished and wondering who this man might be - for whom such a huge monument is being built in the Black Hills. I bought a book and read a little about the Sioux Indians. And the visit to the Hopi and Navajo reservations and talking to a Shaman there. While I was interested in the life and culture of these people, I was not aware of all the history of the subjugation of these people.

The book documents the period from about the late 1850s and ends with the massacre at the Wounded Knee in 1890. By the time, the book's story starts, the entire Indian population in the Eastern seaboard is wiped out or already retreated into reservations. That story probably will never be told as we've only the white man's version to go with it (probably!).

This book traces the Priarie Indians as they come under the pressure of the migration from the East towards the mineral and resource rich lands of the Mid-west. The story of the land grab organized by the government and pushing the Indians into reservations is told through the eyes of the Indians.

The story is very much a repeated cases of the government coming to the Indians to get them to agree to build a road or a fort in their land, get some treaties signed by people who does not have any concept of land ownership and then start killing them indiscriminately through war, massacres and just starving them out by putting them in reservations without provisions.

The US government goes from one massacre to another, killing women, children and animals in every instance and call it battles. The utter cowardice of what they did to these people - knowingly and methodically probably is a precursor to the later day genocides of the world. The description is extensive on every massacres and some of the big heroes of these days in American history - Lincoln, Grant, Sheridan, Sherman - come through as complicit in these acts of treachery and malice through their direct involvement or the tactical silence on doing anything to change course.

'Manifest destiny' is the name given to justify the killing of 100s of women and children and taking land by effectively killing off the men who live on it. As much as I am willing to look at the events of history by placing them in the centuries they occurred, what was done to these people - in any century - be classified as a genocide and given that it was made possible under the disguise of progress and civilization just makes it more bitter to understand.

The book probably needs a lot of time to read as each chapter documents the betrayal of these people in different places by people again and again ending up with indiscriminate killing again and again.

Since the book refer to a lot of places with the Indian names, a map for reference would've helped a lot. However that is just a small inconvenience to be able to read the beautiful names the Indians had for the full moon - like the Moon of the hoer refers to the month of June. I was just sad that we chose to use June instead of that beautiful name.

It is difficult not to feel sad when reading through the story of the brave and proud people. It is also important to understand and learn the lessons from the history and be able to check and make sure that it is never repeated.