“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West” by Dee Brown
This is a meticulously researched book, that puts the faces and names behind the statistics of the Native American genocide in the 19th century American West.
It is the stories of the many Native American tribes such as the Cheyenne, Sioux, Dakota, Apache, Ute, and many others, including their famous chiefs and heroes such as the wonderfully named Little Crow, Big Eagle, Mankato, Tall Bull, Lone Wolf, Black Kettle, White Horse, Dull Knife, Kicking Bird, Two Moon, White Bear, Little Wolf, Crazy Horse, Bald Head Tatum, Big Tree, Little Robe, Spotted Tail, Red Cloud, Wabasha, and Black Bear.
The book shows how the Native Americans were living, the organization of tribes, the names, the heroes, the folklores. And how the White Settlers gradually grab power, created unequal laws (such as Manifest Destiny), displaced the Natives from their lands, and ended up conducting a mass-scale genocide towards them when they resisted.
It is the tail end of an already brutal history since Christopher Columbus arrived in the continent in the 15th century, which have seen approximately 56 million Natives slaughtered in North America alone. It is told through tales such as the Little Crow’s war, the war with the Cheyenne, the Powder River invasion, Red Cloud’s war, the rise and fall of Donehogawa, the story of Cochise and the Apache guerrillas, the war to save the buffalo, the war for the Black Hills, the flight of the Nez Perces, and the Cheyenne exodus, among others. All of which are really tough to read, so very heart breaking, and have no happy ending.
“During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed,” the author Dee Brown remarks, “and out of that time came virtually all the great myths of the American West—tales of fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms, and homesteaders. 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.”
This book, however, is different. First published in 1970, it revealed history from the Native Americans’ point of view, how their ancestors’ land that have been handed down from many generations were not shared but systematically robbed, which clearly shows that the story of the Thanksgiving is actually a blatant lie.
But of course the reality is much more complicated than just a bloodlust massacre. The book shows how some friendships between the Natives and White Settlers were genuinely formed, how several trades were established, and occasional friendly games were also held. But nevertheless, the good bonds were all broken at one point or another, and they largely became a tale of broken promises, backstabbing, cheating, framing, raids, famine, diseases, and segregation of villages, with the mass killing conducted gradually through complicated truces, bogus new regulations and abuse of power.
Dee Brown then continues, “The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890—the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.”
And the cherry on top? The United States of America has never officially admitted that they conducted a genocide. And almost nobody is demanding for any accountability.
4 million copies of this book have been sold since it was first published, and the book has been translated into 17 languages, as well as made into a movie with the same title. The book is so good of illustrating the genocide that it gives me a bitter aftertaste where I felt hopeless and powerless, towards a series of events that happened more than a century ago, over people that I did not even know existed.
THE CHAOS THEORY 