Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West

“The Navahos had the fortitude to bear freezing weather, hunger, dysentery, jeers of the soldiers, and the hard three-hundred-mile journey, but they could not bear the homesickness, the loss of their land. They wept, and 197 of them died before they reached their cruel destination.”

This quote illustrates Brown’s intention to keep themes of tragedy and sorrow at the forefront of the reader’s mind. In most sections of the book, Native American first-person accounts express the pathos of their experience, but on occasion (as here), Brown adds emotionally-charged language to his own narration.

“For years he had tried to keep the treaties, to follow the advice of the white men and lead his people on their road. It seemed now that he had lost everything.”

This is a description of Little Crow’s experience as a leader of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota. Throughout the book, Indigenous leaders take different strategies of relating to US encroachment, ranging from conciliation to outright resistance; Little Crow’s response began with the former and ended with the latter. Regardless of which path was chosen, however, the outcomes were always tragically similar.

“The day of the Santee Sioux in Minnesota now came to an end. Although most of the war chiefs and warriors were dead, in prison, or far beyond the borders of the state, the uprising had given the white citizens an opportunity to seize the Santees’ remaining lands without even a pretense of payment. Previous treaties were abrogated, and the surviving Indians were informed that they would be removed to a reservation in Dakota Territory. Even those leaders who had collaborated with the white men had to go.”

Here Brown gives a summary of the state of affairs after Little Crow’s war fell apart. Brown illustrates the Tragedy of the Dispossession of the Santee Sioux and the theme of broken treaty promises. Even a single instance of resistance could be used as a pretext to abrogate an established treaty and annex the lands of a Native American nation.

“‘The Cheyennes do not break their word,’ One-Eye replied. ‘If they should do so, I would not care to live longer.’ (Wynkoop said afterward that his conversations with the two Cheyennes on this march caused him to change his long-held opinions of Indians. ‘I felt myself in the presence of superior beings.’).”

This quote illustrates the theme of the Irony of Accusations of Barbarism. Whereas Brown’s narrative regularly portrays US officials and white settlers as people who often went back on their word, Native Americans like One-Eye—who so often were castigated as barbarians in the popular imagination—are shown to be people of high moral character. (Wynkoop, mentioned above, is a US army officer.)

“I told them I had come to persuade them to make peace with the whites, […] as they were as numerous as the leaves of the trees. ‘We know it,’ was the general response of the council. ‘But what do we want to live for? The white man has taken our country, killed all of our game; was not satisfied with that, but killed all of our wives and children. Now no peace. We want to go and meet our families in the spirit land. We loved the whites until we found out they had lied to us, and robbed us of what we had. We have raised the battle ax until death.’”

This quote conveys an interaction at a council meeting of Cheyenne and Arapaho leaders in the aftermath of the Sand Creek massacre. It expresses the resolve of the remnant of those nations to ally with the broader Sioux-Cheyenne resistance, not because they wanted to, but because the depredations of white settlers pushed them to it.

“‘The Great Spirit raised both the white man and the Indian,’ Red Cloud said. ‘I think he raised the Indian first. He raised me in this land and it belongs to me. The white man was raised over the great waters, and his land is over there. Since they crossed the sea, I have given them room. There are now white people all about me. I have but a small spot of land left. The Great Spirit told me to keep it.’”

Here Red Cloud gives voice to a sentiment that is repeated by many other Indigenous leaders through the book: the sense that they are down to their very last piece of land, and that now they have no option but to try to hold it. This ties in with the book’s theme of the Tragedy of Cultural Eradication, expressing sorrow at the immense loss that Native Americans had already experienced up to that point.

“The war, he repeated, was being fought for one purpose—to save the valley of the Powder, the only hunting ground left his nation, from intrusion by white men. ‘The Great Father sent his soldiers out here to spill blood. I did not first commence the spilling of blood…. If the Great Father kept white men out of my country, peace would last forever, but if they disturb me, there will be no peace.’”

In the first part of this quote, Brown’s narration provides the context for the second half, in which Red Cloud announces his position on the war for Powder River Country. It clearly conveys the sense, repeated often in the primary sources, that Native Americans considered themselves reluctant combatants. They would have preferred peace, but white forces initiated a cycle of violence.

“the soldier chief who looked like an angry bear, Sheridan, was planning a winter campaign below the Arkansas. When the snows of the cold moons came, he would send Custer and his pony soldiers to destroy the villages of the ‘savage’ Indians, most of whom had kept their treaty obligations. To Sheridan, any Indian who resisted when fired upon was a ‘savage.’”

General Sheridan and Colonel Custer, two of the much-acclaimed war heroes of 19th-century American folklore, are shown here in their true light: as vengeful aggressors driven by prejudice. In response to unrest raised by a few scattered bands north of the Arkansas River, Sheridan planned a violent invasion into the villages below the Arkansas, whose Indigenous communities largely followed US government requirements. This military action culminated in the death of Cheyenne leader Black Kettle.

“In 1868 men came out and brought us papers. We could not read them, and they did not tell us truly what was in them. […] All I want is right and just. I have tried to get from the Great Father what is right and just. I have not altogether succeeded.”

This is an extract from a speech Red Cloud gave in New York after his visit to Washington, DC, to contest his people’s removal to a reservation on the Missouri River. The Sioux leader’s words touch on the theme of the Deceitful Treaty Practices to which many Indigenous peoples were exposed.

“‘Why shut me up on a reservation?’ he asked. ‘We will make peace. We will keep it faithfully. But let us go around free as Americans do. Let us go wherever we please.’”

These words from Apache leader Cochise sum up some of the common Native American complaints of his time: why the land their nations had always held was considered to fall under the sovereignty of United States, and why other people who lived in the country had rights of movement and freedom while they did not. Brown often highlights the clear-sighted morality of Indigenous leaders’ statements, which exposed the obvious injustice of their circumstances.

“I can take care of my people. I do not ask anybody to help me. We can make a living for ourselves. Let us have the same chance that other men have.”

In this quote, similar in tone and content to the previous one, Modoc leader Captain Jack is arguing for the most basic of human rights, but the authorities in his region were not willing to grant him even that, which again underscores the shocking injustices perpetrated against Indigenous nations like the Modoc people.

“They were especially angry against white hunters who were coming down from Kansas to kill thousands of buffalo; the hunters took only the skins, leaving the bloody carcasses to rot on the Plains. To the Kiowas and Comanches the white men seemed to hate everything in nature.”

One of the many cultural misunderstandings between Euro-Americans and Native Americans were their widely divergent conceptions of the function and uses of the natural world, with one side seeing it as an asset open to commercial ventures and the other side as a home and habitation to be treasured, shared, and cared for. The shortsightedness of the white settlers’ actions on the Great Plains nearly led to a complete ecological collapse.

“The great leaders were gone; the mighty power of the Kiowas and Comanches was broken; the buffalo they had tried to save had vanished. It had all happened in less than ten years.”

This is Brown’s assessment at the end of Chapter 11, which draws attention to the startling rapidity of the changes wrought in the Great Plains. Both in the political and ecological realms, the advent of white settlers quickly overturned centuries of stability. Here Brown also invokes his thematic refrain of the Tragedy of Cultural Eradication.

“When the white men in the East heard of the Long Hair’s defeat, they called it a massacre and went crazy with anger. They wanted to punish all the Indians in the West. Because they could not punish Sitting Bull and the war chiefs, the Great Council in Washington decided to punish the Indians they could find—those who remained on the reservations and had taken no part in the fighting.”

Here we see the response of the American public and the government in Washington to the news of the death of Colonel Custer (“Long Hair”) and his resounding defeat at Little Bighorn. Yet rather than pause to consider the roots of the conflict, Congress immediately sought vengeance on the Sioux nation, which necessarily fell on those who had not even been involved in the resistance. This is yet another illustration of the failure of US officials to even try to understand the Indigenous cultures they neighbored and the motivations behind their adversaries’ actions.

“Another chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. ‘I think you had better put the Indians on wheels,’ he said sardonically, ‘and you can run them about whenever you wish.’”

This quote includes a bit of dry wit from a Sioux leader, but its keen observation also cuts deeply. The theme of Broken Promises and Deceptive Treaties stands out clearly here, as the Sioux leader recounted five separate instances of the US government breaking its promise to them.

“Tuekakas, a chief known as Old Joseph by the white men, told Governor Stevens that no man owned any part of the earth, and a man could not sell what he did not own. The governor could not comprehend such an attitude.”

Old Joseph of the Nez Percé nation expressed a common theme in Indigenous conceptions of land use. Land was viewed as a common good that could not be claimed, owned, or exchanged—a view that was diametrically opposed to the Euro-American cultural ideas of property rights. The failure of a US official to grasp Indigenous cultural perspectives is underscored here yet again.

“I have asked some of the great white chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me. Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.”

Young Joseph made this plea at the end of the Nez Percé people’s long and grueling journey to find freedom, asking for the same basic rights accorded to other residents within US territory. The note of desperation and disappointment in his speech gives evidence that his plea went unanswered.

“In the days when the Cheyennes numbered in the thousands, they had more horses than any of the Plains tribes. They were called the Beautiful People, but fate had turned against them both in the south and in the north. After twenty years of decimation they were closer to obliteration than the buffalo.”

Here Brown highlights the devastation wreaked on the Cheyenne nation, evoking once again his theme of the Tragedy of the Eradication of Their Culture. The Cheyenne play one of the most prominent roles in the book, with many of their leaders attempting various strategies for survival, from resistance to full submission—none successful. In the quote, Brown points to fate as the cause of their downfall, but the narrative makes it abundantly clear that the real cause was the policy and actions of US officials and citizens.

“‘I thought God intended us to live,’ Standing Bear told Crook, ‘but I was mistaken. God intends to give the country to the white people, and we are to die.’”

This quote, which expresses so poignantly the sorrow of the Native American experience on the Great Plains, is heartbreaking both in its resignation and in its nobility of spirit. Standing Bear, a Ponca leader, refuses to lash out at white settlers and instead submits to the tragic circumstances as an act of divine providence.

“Their needs are so few that they do not wish to adopt civilized habits. […] What we call conveniences and comforts are not sufficiently valued by them to cause them to undertake them by their own efforts….the great majority look upon the white man’s ways with indifference and contempt.”

Nathan Meeker, the Indian agent sent as a liaison to the Ute nation, makes this observation, which aligns with the common prejudices of his time—that Native American people were uncivilized and barbaric. Rather than viewing the Utes’ contented simplicity and self-sufficiency as virtues, Meeker interpreted them as character flaws, particularly because they clashed with the decidedly capitalist ideals of the US.

“In 1888 the United States government was not quite ready to abrogate a treaty […]. What the politicians preferred was to force the Indians into selling a large portion of their reservation out of fear that it would be taken away from them if they refused to sell. Should this scheme work, the government would not have to break the treaty.”

This is Brown’s assessment of the government’s policy regarding the Sioux reservation in the late 1880s. Even though politicians were not inclined to dismiss the established treaty altogether (though they had done so in previous years, often at the slightest pretext), their deceitful methods are still on full display here. Rather than approaching the Sioux leaders in good faith negotiations, they opted for forceful coercion to strongarm the Sioux into giving them what they wanted.

“It was all over. The Great Sioux Reservation was broken into small islands around which would rise the flood of white immigration. Before Sitting Bull could get away from the grounds, a newspaperman asked him how the Indians felt about giving up their lands. ‘Indians!’ Sitting Bull shouted. ‘There are no Indians left but me!’”

Sitting Bull’s response illustrates the despair felt by many Indigenous leaders at the time. The Eradication of Their Cultural Heritage was nearly complete, and everything precious to them had been systematically stripped away despite all their efforts to stop that from happening. 

“‘We tried to run,’ Louise Weasel Bear said, ‘but they shot us like we were a buffalo.’”

This simple but heartbreaking recollection is a witness statement from the massacre at Wounded Knee. Because the common prejudice of the age meant that Native American people were immediately assumed to be hostile, even a peaceful camp largely composed of women and children was subject to an outbreak of unthinkable violence. Once again, Brown illuminates an episode of history that makes the US officials the barbarians of the story.