Letters from Tomis

Book Review

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.

Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970) remains a landmark work in the historiography of the United States, offering a searing and meticulously documented account of the systematic dispossession, displacement, and destruction of Native American nations during the westward expansion of the 19th century. Through vivid narrative, extensive primary sources, and a deliberate shift in historical perspective, Brown reframes American history from the standpoint of its Indigenous victims—upending triumphalist national myths and forcing readers to confront the violent foundations of American settler colonialism.

Brown structures the book chronologically from the 1860s through the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, focusing on specific tribal nations—such as the Navajo, Sioux, Cheyenne, Nez Perce, and Apache—and foregrounding their resistance to U.S. military and governmental incursions. What distinguishes the work is Brown’s refusal to romanticize Native Americans or caricature white officials. Instead, he relies heavily on speeches, letters, and testimony from Native leaders to create an emotionally and morally charged history rooted in Indigenous voices, which had long been omitted or distorted in mainstream narratives.

The strength of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee lies in its rhetorical clarity and political intent. Brown’s prose is not academic in the formal sense—he was a librarian, not a professional historian—but it is rigorously sourced and deeply moral. The book draws largely from 19th-century government documents, reports, and eye-witness accounts, which Brown uses not merely for factual scaffolding but as a moral indictment of U.S. imperialism. Through this methodology, the book accomplishes what many works of critical historiography aim to do: demystify empire, amplify silenced perspectives, and stimulate political reflection.

Yet, from an academic standpoint, the book has notable limitations. Its narrative, while powerful, often simplifies complex tribal dynamics and elides Indigenous agency beyond victimization. The framing of the Native Americans as uniformly noble and the U.S. government as monolithically villainous, while rhetorically effective, risks reducing history to a binary of oppressor and oppressed, rather than exploring the full spectrum of strategic choices, intertribal politics, and cultural transformations that shaped the Indigenous experience. Scholars have also pointed out that Brown’s work pays relatively little attention to Indigenous women or the cultural and economic dimensions of Native life outside of warfare and displacement.

Nevertheless, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee occupies an essential place in both popular and academic discourse. It was among the first widely read works to introduce mainstream audiences to the genocidal realities of U.S. expansionism and to force a reckoning with the historical trauma inflicted upon Native peoples. While later Indigenous scholars such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Ned Blackhawk have developed more nuanced, theoretically grounded frameworks for interpreting Native histories, Brown’s work remains a foundational text that catalyzed a broader decolonization of U.S. historical consciousness.

In conclusion, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is not without its scholarly limitations, but its historical impact, moral clarity, and empathetic lens make it a crucial entry point into the study of Indigenous resistance and U.S. colonial violence. It deserves a continued place on the shelf of any serious reader of American history.

A powerful and empathetic account that reshaped American historical consciousness, even as it leaves room for deeper critical engagement by future scholars.