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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1970

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-14

Chapters 15-19

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Introduction-Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary

Content Warning: The following material includes references to subjects that some readers may find troubling, including warfare, discrimination, and genocide.

In his Introduction, Dee Brown offers an overview of his historiographic methodology. His book, first published in 1970, presents a familiar history in an unfamiliar light. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee surveys the history of the American West from 1860 to 1890 but reverses the traditional perspective. Rather than narrating the history of Indigenous Americans in the western United States from the point of view of Euro-American settlers, like most previous histories did, Brown presents his history from the point of view of the Indigenous Americans themselves. He notes that in previous renderings of the history of the American West, “Only occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more often than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man” (xxiii).

Brown makes use of the extensive primary sources that feature Native American people’s statements in their own words, the greater part of which are transcripts of council proceedings and treaty negotiations: “Although the Indians who lived through this doom period of their civilization have vanished from the earth,” Brown writes, “millions of their words are preserved in official records” (xxiv). By making use of these archival sources, Brown crafts his history to match the experience and perspective of the Indigenous nations that experienced waves of encroachment by US soldiers and settlers in the late 19th century.

Chapter 1 Summary: “Their Manners Are Decorous and Praiseworthy”

This chapter serves as a historical introduction to the rest of the narrative. It begins with Christopher Columbus and the Indigenous people he encountered in 1492: the Taino and other Arawak groups. The chapter’s title comes from Columbus’s assessment of the Taino, but the Spanish colonizers he left behind did not treat them in a manner commensurate with Columbus’s high-sounding words, and in less than a decade the Arawak were devastated.

Brown then shifts his focus to the interactions between Indigenous nations and European colonizers in the area that would later become the United States. Each encounter runs similarly, transitioning from initial overtures of peace to a gradual realization by Native American groups that the colonizers’ values would dispossess them of their homes, if not destroy them. When Indigenous leaders attempted to resist the colonizers, in every instance they met an escalating of use of force from the other side. In this manner, the Powhatan nation that met the Jamestown settlers and the Wampanoag nation that met the Plymouth settlers were pushed back and erased from their homelands. The same pattern played out across the entire East Coast, Appalachians, and Midwest, despite courageous attempts at resistance from Indigenous leaders like Metacom, Pontiac, and Tecumseh.

By the mid-1800s, the territorial expansion of the United States pushed Indigenous populations back behind a promised “permanent Indian frontier” (9), first at the Mississippi River and then further west. Eventually, when the United States’ gains in the Mexican War and the discovery of gold in California made it inconvenient for the nation to keep its promises to the Indigenous nations, the permanence of that line was revoked. Brown assesses the situation as it stood in 1860: “There were probably 300,000 Indians in the US and Territories, most of them living west of the Mississippi. […] their numbers had been reduced by one-half to two-thirds since the arrival of the first settlers in Virginia and New England” (9). He closes the chapter with a brief introduction to the nations whose stories will shape the narratives that follow: the Sioux, Cheyenne, Apache, Comanche, Navaho, Ute, and others.

Chapter 2 Summary: “The Long Walk of the Navahos”

Relations between the United States and the Navaho nation began in earnest with the American annexation of the former Mexican territories in which the Navaho people lived. The Navaho, under their leaders Manuelito and Barboncito, found frequent tensions arising with the newly-arrived soldiers in Fort Defiance. During the early 1860s, the Navaho interacted with several high-ranking army officers, including General James Carleton (“Star Chief”) and Kit Carson (“Rope Thrower”). Carleton’s first major campaign reduced the sprawling Apache range to a single reservation of inferior land called Bosque Redondo. When he tried to force the Navaho to go there as well, Barboncito responded, “I will never leave my country, not even if it means that I will be killed” (22).

At Carleton’s insistence, Carson led a scorched-earth campaign against the Navaho over the fall and winter of 1863-64. The Navaho who were rounded up then were forced to undertake a 300-mile march from Fort Canby to Bosque Redondo, during which many hundreds died. Several defiant bands, including one led by Maneulito, continued to hide out in the mountains and resist until finally giving up in 1866. Just then, however, Carleton’s command of the area ceased; his replacement officers were more sympathetic to the Navaho. Finding the deplorable conditions at Bosque Redondo untenable, they sent the Navaho back to a reduced portion of their own homeland in 1868 where: “Life would not be easy. They would have to struggle to endure. Bad as it was, the Navahos would come to know that they were the least unfortunate of all the western Indians” (36).

Introduction-Chapter 2 Analysis

The first three chapters of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee serve as an extended preparation for the book’s main chronological narrative. The Introduction presents Brown’s historiographic method, while Chapter 1 offers a chronological prologue for the book. Chapter 2, the first installment of Brown’s portrayal of the period from 1860 to 1890, sets the pattern for the chapters that follow, but stands apart for its relatively positive conclusion.

The Introduction is particularly important because it sets out Brown’s methodology, which differs considerably from previous historiographic conventions. While there were previous works about the American West that showed sympathy to the condition of Native American nations, Brown’s innovation was to write his history from Native American peoples’ viewpoint as much as possible. This upending of the traditional perspective imbues Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee with much of its power, because it forces the reader to consider the story through the eyes of the victims rather than the victors, a change which naturally engenders empathy.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Brown introduces readers to the structural apparatus of his work. In each chapter, other elements intersperse and bookend the main text: prefatory quotes from leaders of Native American nations, introductory chronologies of contemporaneous events that dominated the news cycles of the United States, full-page portrait photographs of Indigenous leaders, and sheet music for Native American songs at the end of the chapter. These elements buttress the argument of each chapter’s main text in several important ways. The quotes keep the book focused exclusively on the experience and reflections of Native Americans rather than on white settlers. The photographs and musical settings add a measure of personal and cultural depth to the narrative. All three show that the leading figures in these chapters are not to be read simply as mythical characters, but as complex real people with a rich cultural heritage.

Chapters 1 and 2 also offer the reader an initial exposure to two of the major themes of the book. First, they portray The Tragedy of Cultural Eradication. Chapter 1 is particularly powerful in this regard, underscoring the repetitive pattern of cultural death and lives lost that marked the first 400 years of Indigenous/European interactions. There are no examples of successful cohabitation and no happy endings for the many Native American nations of the eastern United States; all were subsumed under the rolling tide of white settlement. This sets an expectation for the reader that the stories of Indigenous/US interactions in the West will follow a similar pattern. Chapter 2 offers the only slight glimmer of hope in the whole book: The Navaho return to a reservation that represents a significant (though reduced) part of their original homeland, but Brown quickly lets the reader know that the experience of the Navaho is atypical; every other Native American nation in the West would fare worse.

Second, Chapters 1 and 2 address the theme of Deception and Broken Promises by US Authorities. A pattern is established early on in which the destiny of Native American groups is subject to a series of negotiations with white settlers, but the results of those negotiations suffer regular abrogation. The US is always making new unilateral plans for what to do with Native American populations, regardless of whatever previous promises have been made to Indigenous peoples. In the case of the Navaho, the cycle of changing plans is partly a result of turnover in US officials, some of whom are more sympathetic to the Navaho and others who are less so.