Genocide Theme Analysis

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. While the government of the United States claimed that the massacre was an “accident,” supposedly set off because a single Native American man was waving his rifle, it’s almost impossible to imagine that such an incident could have caused three hundred accidental deaths. As Brown makes clear, the troops who marched the Native Americans to Wounded Knee despised Native Americans, and many of them relished a chance to hurt their enemies.

In the early chapters of his book, Brown discusses the United States’ motives for genocide. The U.S. had acquired a large amount of territory in the Mexican American War, and powerful elites wanted to use the land to build railroads, mine for gold, etc. The problem, of course, is that the land was already occupied by Native American tribes, many of which had been based in the same place for many centuries. Elites, then, had an economic incentive to support policies that would remove Native Americans from their land, either by relegating them to small, barren reservations where the quality of life was miserable, or by killing them.

Brown is careful to distinguish between different forms of genocide—in particular, between attempts to literally kill Native Americans, and attempts to systematically eradicate Native American culture and identity. In the former category, Brown lists several instances during which generals in the U.S. army were given instructions to murder Native Americans even if they hadn’t committed any crimes—for example, in Sand Creek in 1864. But Brown also discusses instances in which the United States practiced genocide by slower means. The military and the federal government supported white settlers’ efforts to slaughter buffalo, often with the explicit goal of depriving Native Americans of food. Furthermore, the military marched tens of thousands of Native Americans off of their homeland and onto a distant reservation; during these long marches, significant numbers of Native Americans died of exhaustion or hunger, largely because U.S. soldiers wouldn’t give them help of any kind. For those who made it to Native American reservations, life was difficult—the soil was dry, and there was almost never enough food. Without a doubt, the results of the Native American relocation process were genocidal. And in a great many cases, Brown shows, the process’s intent was genocidal, too. One American military commander said of the Santee tribe, which was starving on its tiny, barren reservation, “If they are hungry let them eat grass or their own dung.” One of Brown’s key insights, then, is that the relocation process was not an alternative to extermination—it was just a slower, arguably crueler form of extermination.

Finally, Brown comments on the U.S. government’s acts of cultural genocide—in other words, its systematic attempts to wipe out Native American culture. To name one particularly horrifying example, Nathan C. Meeker, government agent in charge of the Ute tribe, made it his mission to wipe out the Ute language, Ute artistry, and Ute religion. He forced Ute children to attend English-language schools that trained them in agricultural work—a kind of labor alien to Ute society. More generally, one could even argue that the relocation of the Native Americans onto reservations was itself an act of cultural genocide, because many Native American societies attached enormous cultural importance to their land: to force the Native Americans to live on a reservation was, in a great many cases, to force them to live without a culture.

While Brown is highly critical of the United States during the 19th century, he’s emphatically not saying that all white Americans were genocidal during this era. Indeed, there are many instances in Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee of white settlers and soldiers developing great respect and trust for Native Americans, and transcending the racism of the era. On a similar note, Brown never suggests that the U.S. government only supported genocidal policies. At times, it tried other means of dealing with Native Americans, such as negotiation, bribery, and intimidation. Nevertheless, Brown makes a convincing case that the fundamental, unalterable goal of the United States’ leadership during the second half of the 19th century was genocidal: to eliminate the Native American population either through murder or by relocating Native Americans to miserable reservations where the population would inevitably decrease. According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Toland, Adolf Hitler was a great admirer of the U.S. government’s Native American policies in the 19th century, and used them as a model for his own genocidal policies. After reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, it’s not hard to understand why.