Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee
An Indian History of the American West
Author Dee Brown
1970
ISBN 009 952640 9
The story of the American West between the years 1860 - 1890.
Years of broken promises by the white men, total disillusionment, war and massacre.
Dee Brown spent the early part of his life in the lumber camps and oil fields of the American Southwest. Haunted by the tragedy of the American Indians this book is finally an attempt to put the record straight.
What can I say - I have never before read a book that has had me in tears as much as this one. As I am reading the plight of such brave people as Red Cloud, Little Crow and others and the forced marches and battles of the Cheyenne, the Apache and the Navajo. I am with them. I am living it, feeling it.
Never have I run the emotional roller coaster of our Native family as vehmently as this. I have experienced their pain, their futility, their despair and the abjectness of these people. The writing is blunt and honest.
The overriding emotions have to be anger and frustration. Anger at the years of broken treaties and promises. The frustration of a people trying desperately to hang on to a little of their homelands and their sacred places.
This book chronicles all this in a sometimes not so easy to read, but always moving and sympathetic manner. You cannot help but to feel along with these people as you read of their struggle and their plight.
I defy anyone with any feeling to read this book and not be moved by it...or indeed angered by it.
Recommended 100% if you want to read the true realities of those times.
But be prepared to shed tears.