Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Themes

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is a book about genocide, the deliberate and systematic murder of an ethnic group. The title of the book refers to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, when U.S. troops marched hundreds of followers of Sitting Bull to Wounded Knee Creek, which is located inside the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation in South Dakota. There, the troops shot and killed more than three hundred Native Americans, many of them children…

Dee Brown makes a convincing case that the U.S. government’s Native American policies in the 19th century were genocidal. But American leaders (at least for the most part) weren’t explicit about the destructive intent of their country’s policies. Sickeningly, they used propaganda to give a benign and even moralistic gloss to policies that were, in their effects, genocidal. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny was perhaps the most important form of ideology that was used to…

During the period of time covered in Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the United States government colonized much of North America using a mixture of political hypocrisy, racism disguised as patriotism, and outright violence. Native American tribes resisted this aggression in a variety of different ways. Some of them tried to use legal, political means to negotiate with government representatives, while others turned to forms of religious mysticism, such as the Ghost Dance…