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

Themes

The Tragedy of Cultural Eradication

One of the overriding thematic elements of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is that of tragedy. Brown regularly evokes sorrow by offering Native American peoples’ reflections on their historical experiences in their own words. Presenting the history of the period from a Native American point of view makes the book elegiac, as it tells the story of peoples whose physical possessions and cultural heritage were slowly and systematically taken from them, conveying their history to readers who could never know the full scope of the rich civilizations and cultures that were destroyed. To add to the sense of grief, rather than being seen in a sympathetic light by their contemporaries for the tragedies they suffered, the Indigenous groups Brown depicts were almost universally despised as barbaric savages by bigoted white settlers and were regularly blamed for the tensions that arose from their dispossession.

Though Indigenous leaders tried tactic after tactic to find a better way of relating the threat of US encroachment—from resistance to full submission—they found themselves locked in a no-win scenario. No matter what they did, their lands were taken from them, their people killed, and their cultures and languages repressed. The sense of absolute frustration and futility can be heard in the plea of Captain Jack, a leader of the Modoc nation in northern California, to be left alone in the last desolated shred of his people’s territory: “Give me this Lava Bed for a home. […] Nobody will ever want these rocks; give me a home here” (232). But the US authorities would not allow him even that.

The tragic circumstances of the dispossession of Native American nations in the West is multifold, including the continual renegotiation of what were meant to be permanent treaties, the perpetual erosion of reservation lands promised to the Native American nations, the failure of even the most conciliatory attempts to placate the white advance, the establishment of agency systems that disempowered Native Americans through dependency, the regular failure of the US to ensure those systems could continue to provide their promised services, and the casual disregard with which landscapes and animals precious to the Native American nations were decimated for commercial gain. By the end, there was almost no element of Native American heritage that was left unassaulted by the expansion of US power and cultural influence. The utter sorrow of these repeated waves of oppression is well captured by an extended quote from the Comanche leader Ten Bears, included in the prefatory material to Chapter 11:

I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls. […] I lived like my fathers before me, and, like them, I lived happily. […] So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. […] But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die (242).

The Irony of Accusations of Barbarism

Another theme regularly invoked by Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is the hypocritical stereotyping of Indigenous peoples as savage by the white settlers taking away their lands and forbidding their cultural practices. For centuries, Euro-American settlers exhibited the prejudice of assuming that their own cultural heritage was the social apex of civilization. As a result of this self-ascribed description, they castigated essentially all non-European humans as being uncivilized. Most Euro-American settlers lacked an appreciation for Native American cultures, and so those cultures were often described as “barbarian” or “savage”—words that for millennia had been prejudicial markers against outsiders. These terms implied not only that the Native Americans lacked cultural refinement, but that they were also morally and socially underdeveloped, given to violent bloodlust and other vices. This racist stereotype of Native Americans persisted in US society through much of the 20th century, while myths about US history glorified the settlers, miners, cowboys, and cavalry officers of the American West.

In Brown’s retelling of history, accusations of barbarism are shown to be projection on the part of white encroachers. The Native American groups Brown describes were not barbarian in any social or moral sense; rather, they were clear-sighted regarding the barbarism of the injustices they themselves faced. Further, in many cases, Native American leaders showed far more temperance, restraint, and nobility of character than many of the white settlers with whom they interacted. As one Indigenous leader said, “The Cheyennes do not break their word. […] If they should do so, I would not care to live longer” (77).

The white settlers, for their part—and especially the government and military leaders who were so often valorized in other accounts of the American West—are revealed to have been far more barbaric than the people they accused of being barbarians. Brown cites examples of US officers exulting in the prospect of attacking undefended Indigenous villages and “wading in gore” (86), and of state governors encouraging the scalping of Indigenous civilians, including infants. The much-mythologized figure of Colonel George Custer is painted not as the hero of “Custer’s Last Stand,” but as the murderous leader who mowed down Black Kettle’s peaceful settlement:

In a matter of minutes Custer’s troops destroyed Black Kettle’s village […]. To kill or hang all the warriors meant separating them from the old men, women, and children. This work was too slow and dangerous for the cavalrymen; they found it much more efficient and safe to kill indiscriminately (169).

It was US officials who constantly went back on treaties, broke promises, incited hatred and violence, and gloried in the merciless destruction of their so-called enemies.

Deception and Broken Promises by US Authorities

The cultural barbarism displayed in white settlement of the region was realized mainly through the process of undermining previous agreements. In their dealings with US authorities, Native American nations were pressed to use a method of cultural interchange foreign to them: the European-based system of political treaties, with all the inherited legal history of practice that went with it. Being unacquainted with this form of diplomacy, Native American peoples were at a serious disadvantage at the negotiating table. Whereas white Americans understood treaties to be always open to further negotiation should conditions change in the future, Native Americans took literally the treaties’ language of lands being promised to them “forever,” or “in perpetuity.”

Despite promises of a permanent settlement, then, Native Americans were constantly being forced into new rounds of negotiations, in which more and more of their lands and possessions had to be signed away. The Ute nation, for example, had already traded away massive portions of their land—all the mountains east of the continental divide—when they were guaranteed the western portion of Colorado as their territory, but this treaty did not last: “Five years later, the white men of Colorado decided they had let the Utes keep too much land” (368). To the Euro-American authorities, treaties could always be renegotiated regardless of what had been promised previously, so they pressed the Ute leaders back to the table and came away with greater concessions.

The dissonance in understanding of the treaty process was not simply a case of poor cross-cultural communication. Brown portrays it as active deception. Indigenous leaders were well aware of this duplicity: “Washington has deceived me,” said Kiowa leader Lone Wolf, “Has failed to keep faith with me and my people—has broken his promises; and now there is nothing left but war” (262). The United States’ infidelity to previous agreements often took one of two forms. First, US authorities used changing conditions to claim that they needed a renegotiation of treaties. Sometimes those changing conditions were tensions between Native American and settler populations that settlers themselves had caused; at other times the change was that something had been discovered on Native American land that the US now wanted. In either case, the motivation was less than laudable. Second, the system by which US authority operated in the West made infidelity to their agreements almost a sure outcome. They rotated their placements of officials and army commanders regularly, so that politicians and officers who might be sympathetic to Native American claims would be replaced with new officials who had no such sympathies and who did not feel beholden to keep their predecessors’ agreements. In some cases, US authorities did not even bother forcing a renegotiation of an official treaty; they simply declared a new state of affairs and forced the Native American nations to comply.