Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 book by American writer Dee Brown that covers the history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century. The book expresses details of the history of American expansionism from a point of view that is critical of its effects on the Native Americans. Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government. The government's dealings are portrayed as a continuing effort to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American peoples. Helen Hunt Jackson's A Century of Dishonor is often considered a nineteenth-century precursor to Dee Brown's writing.
Before the publication of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown had become well versed in the history of the American frontier. Having grown up in Arkansas, he developed a keen interest in the American West, and during his graduate education at George Washington University and his career as a librarian for both the US Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he wrote numerous books on the subject. Brown's works maintained a focus on the American West, but ranged anywhere from western fiction to histories to even children's books. Many of Brown's books revolved around similar Native American topics, including his Showdown at Little Bighorn (1964) and The Fetterman Massacre (1974).
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book has never gone out of print and has been translated into 17 languages. The title is taken from the final phrase of a twentieth-century poem titled "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benet. The full quotation, "I shall not be there/I shall rise and pass/Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," appears at the beginning of Brown's book. Although Benet's poem is not about the plight of Native Americans, Wounded Knee was the location of the last major confrontation between the US Army and Native Americans. It is also the vicinity of where Crazy Horse's parents buried his heart and some of his bones after his death in 1877.
In the first chapter, Brown presents a brief history of the discovery and settlement of America, from 1492 to the Indian turmoil that began in 1860. He stresses the initially gentle and peaceable behavior of Indians toward Europeans, especially given their apparent lack of resistance to early colonial efforts at Europeanization. It was not until the further influx of European settlers, gradual encroachment, and eventual seizure of American lands by the "white man" that the Native people were shown to exhibit forms of major resistance.
Brown completes his initial overview by briefly describing incidents up to 1860 that involve American encroachment and Indian removal, beginning with the defeat of the Wampanoags and Narragansetts, Iroquois, and Cherokee Nations, as well as the establishment of the West as the "permanent Indian frontier" and the ultimate breaches of the frontier as a means to achieve Manifest Destiny.
In each of the following chapters, Brown provides an in-depth description of a significant post-1860 event in American Western expansion or Native American eradication, focusing in turn on the specific tribe or tribes involved in the event. In his narrative, Brown primarily discusses such tribes as the Navajo Nation, Santee Dakota, Hunkpapa Lakota, Oglala Lakota, Cheyenne, and Apache people. He touches more lightly upon the subjects of the Arapaho, Modoc, Kiowa, Comanche, Nez Perce, Ponca, Ute, and Minneconjou Lakota tribes.*
*www.wikipedia.com
*www.wikipedia.com
CIMI
Kin 226: White Overtone World-Bridger
I empower in order to equalize
Commanding opportunity
I seal the store of death
With the overtone tone of radiance
I am guided by the power of timelessness.
The Fifth force animates the entire Cosmos with incredible brilliance and power, like an interval-exploding supernova the radiates eternally.*
*Star Traveler's 13 Moon Almanac of Synchronicity, Galactic Research Institute, Law of Time Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2016-2017.
The Sacred Tzolk'in
Sahasrara Chakra (Dali Plasma)
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