Customer Reviews

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

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This book is essentially a collection of short narrative about the struggles of various Native American cultures in what became the United States. The book is written from the perspective of the Native Americans, and thus has a different emphasis than many of today's high school U.S. History texts (at least not the same emphasis as mine had). I really enjoyed the reading. It was new to hear the side of the story we almost never consider. I would recommend this book to anyone.

Absolutely one of the most thought provoking books I have read. I enjoyed this book so much I did not want to put it down nor have it end.

As I read this book of unimaginable hardship for the American Indians, my very soul was pained. For it offers the most truthful history of the removal of the Indians from THEIR homeland I have ever read. My heart aches with the knowledge that my anscestors lived both sides of the war mentioned in this book. My blood is thick with Irish and Cherokee...ironic, isn't it? I, as so many others I am sure, feel torn by the horror that the first Americans had to endure at the hands of those who set up colonies here. This is the first book I have read that tells the story from the view of the Natives instead of the white man. I am proud of my Native American heritage, therefore, I feel that this book is of ultimate importance to those of us who yearn for understanding. While I am hurt and somewhat angered by the history, it is imperitive that I learn both sides of this story. Unfortunately, the only history offered in school is one-sided, thus, imperfect. Let us all long to hear the songs of the first true Americans...The Native American Indians. When you have read this book in its entirety, your understanding will be opened. If we had only listened to "those savages" our respect for the land would be great and our natural resources wouldn't be at risk today. Be prepared to feel the emotions of a multitude; raped, murdered, starved, enslaved and stripped of dignity. This book is definitely one that should hold a prestigious place in every library in America!

I am in the process of reading this book now. It is an excellent book. It is written in a way that you don't want to put the book down. Also the history content is wonderful. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in American Indian culture.

This book was very interesting, regaurding its importance and also its obscurity from public knowledge. The ignorance of society and racism are both shown in the extreme in this book, and its overall value in the modern world is its strong message that you can't forget history, because it can repeat itself, and that history is written by those who win wars. The Indians were ignorant of our culture (as European Americans) and we were of theirs. However, our ignorance developed into racism while theirs was a sense of reverence and awe. The Book reads as a betrayel of an abusive father to his ignorant son, when it is actually the annihilation of numerous indigenous cultures by a more powerful one. Chapter by chapter, the whole work is one of repetition: the destruction of each one of the great North American Indian tribes by settlers and military forces. One might compare the happenings detailed in this book to the hardships of African American Slavery in the United States. However, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is an account of perpetual heartbreak and destruction on a level unmatched by any hardship I have read of save the holocaust. Many repressed minorities have been assimilated into the modern US culture, but where are the Native Americans? The Paiutes, the Navajos, the Apaches, the Cheyennes? Most were slaughtered like cattle and left to die on barren lifeless reservations in the unsetteled areas of the United States in the 19th century. History can not be forgotten, or the same thing may reoccur.

I fully expected a book this old to be a bit less than what was described as condition. Was I wrong! Although the dust jacket had been taped (expected for an item of this age) it was still intact and the cover of the actual book is like new. I'm impressed with this seller and will surely order again if they are one that offers what I seek.

Apparently Dee Brown thought the sufferings of 19th-century American Indians weren't ghastly enough to impress hippie readers back in the Age of Aquarius, so he proceeds to fake things. Brown doesn't merely "slant" things to a degree that amounts to a hallucinatory experience, but makes things up outright. Anxious to make G.A. Custer look bad for the Washita attack, he invents casualty figures, claiming that Custer killed 103 Cheyennes, only eleven of whom were men! (As anthropologist John Greenway observed, massacres of Indians, in the neononsense of Brown and his associates, are not indiscriminate, but rigorously discriminate, consisting solely of women and children.) Brown either covers up Indian atrocities (particularly those of the Apaches) or tries to lie his way out of them by providing some bogus excuse; according to him, the Sioux's Minnesota massacre of some 400 white settlers one fine day in 1862 simply never happened.

He can't even get the small parts right, even depicting Custer's men as carrying sabers at the Little Bighorn. One can find out nothing about the American Indians of the West from reading Brown's book, perhaps because he's not really interested in them save as victims for his guilt-stricken white readership.

As for Brown's claim that his book is an "Indian history," based on Indian accounts gathered at treaty councils or immured in obscure government documents, this is but another falsehood. He could have written the thing in two weeks, ripping off standard books in print -- including Custer's memoir "My Life on the Plains"! No original research was involved.

"BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE" was assigned as my 9th grade Honors U.S. History II summer reading assignment. My class was told that it would help to lead us into this chapter in our history class. The first day of school, the teacher asked us how the book was coming along and found out firsthand just how open a class we are. We all hated it. It was terrible! Every chapter tells a different tribe's story, but it was all the same. This book was so repetitive. There is a fight, there is a treaty, the whites break the treaty, there is another fight, and the Indians endure a terrible massacre. I was saddened to read about the poor Indians, but it got a little old after the first 5 times or so. Many of the people in my class are having so much trouble getting through the book, that they are either skimming through the book and risking the bad grade, or are buying the summary of each chapter off of a website. The review on the front of the book reads, "...Impossible to put down." I found this true because after around 20 pages of reading this book, I would fall asleep with the book in my hand. If you are planning to read this book, please understand how repetitive it is and rethink your decision.