Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee -- Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by American writer Dee Brown is a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century, and their displacement and slaughter by the United States federal government.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee expresses the American Indian perspective of the injustices and betrayals of the US government--in its dealings with the Indians, which seemed to be engaged in continued efforts to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American people.

The book begins with the statement that Christopher Columbus had named the Native Americans "Indios" and with the differing dialects and accents of the Europeans to come, the word became known as Indians. Life as known to the indigenous people of the Americas would never be the same from the point of Columbus' arrival in the Americas in 1492.

Chapter by chapter, the book describes differing tribes of Native Americans and their relations to the US federal government during the years 1860-1890. It begins with the Navajos, the Apaches, and the other tribes of the Southwest US who were displaced as California and the surrounding areas were colonized. Brown chronicles the changing and sometimes conflicting attitudes both of US authorities, such as General Custer, and Indian chiefs, particularly Geronimo, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse, and the Indian chiefs' attempts to save their peoples, by peace, war, or retreat.

The later part of the book focuses primarily on the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes of the North American Plains. They were among the last to be moved onto Indian reservations, under perhaps the most violent circumstances. It culminates with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the deaths of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, and the US slaughter of Sioux prisoners at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, an event generally considered to mark the end of the Indian Wars.