The Truth Hurts!
|
This book makes you ashamed to be a white man, it angers you to hear how the native american indians were treated.
I knew before reading the book that the white man had treated the indians so badly, but I was not ready to read exactly how badly.
As an indian says in the book " They broke all there promises, except one. they promised to take all our land".
My heart goes out to all the native Ameican people.
|
|
|
A Classic
|
|
This book is a classic and a big inspiration for my own work on the Lakota Sioux and Wounded Knee: They Never Surrendered: The Lakota Sioux Band That Stayed in Canada.
|
|
Bury my heart at Wonded Knee - Dee Brown
|
|
An amazing book - amazing for the stories of misery and deprivation heaped on the Native Americans by the civilised white immigrants. It's not a book to sit back with a coffee and enjoy; in fact it made me so sad that I had trouble reading it. As for how well the book 'works' as a read: I found it mainly a collection of stories about specific tribes and families. It's not a connected narrative - it's basically a chronology split into chapters by the individual tribes. Chapters chronologically over-lap. In literary terms I don't think you can sit back and read through easily. This is not a criticism but I found it more of a reference type work and one where you can easily dip in to. No disputing that it's facts are awful but it's essential we read the history of white colonisation of the USA, Australia and other places and I hope we learn from the many mistakes.
|
|
|
Truth and historical fact, painful and compelling
|
I'm quite an emotional person, but this book angered me and hurt me in equal measure throughout, so much so, that its probably the most emotional account of historical significance I have ever read. I have cried throughout.
I first came across the book in 1982, when a science teacher of mine brought it into class after an American holiday. He smuggled it out of the States, he claimed, and its story touched me then. I didn't read much then, but now I have my own copy, it touches me more deeply than I could ever have imagined. Its a difficult and upsetting read.
Genocide, or attempted genocide is something civilised people simply do not do. But what Dee Brown captures in all too few words is genocide on a brutally wide scale, by a supposedly civilised nation. Its possibly more shocking than the treatment of black people in pioneer America.
The stories are heart rending and made me feel ashamed to be descended from the kinds of people that make this book so shocking.
I once saw a series on the televison called How The West Was Lost, and this book explains in graphic detail what that series shied away from. Here are the well known names from American Indian history, but also names not so well known. Long forgotten by outsiders, they crop again and again to remind the reader that the so-called Indian Wars were not simply personalities matched against each other, but horrificly planned exterminations.
It is said that history is written by those who hang heroes, Dee Brown has written a history of the hanged.
|
|
|
I admit the United States was morally at fault.
|
But were we much worse than the indians themselves? Was the average Indian Brave really more noble, more morals than the average cavalryman, that also exhibited bravery?
The indians did want peace over being able to keep all their lands. The Whites preferred greed over peace and Territory over indian freedom.
The book details the fact Indians wanted peace with the whites, and would generally fight only to protect their lands from the whites. It also says whites want more lands instead of being content with smaller amounts like the indians and living poorly, and would violently take lands belonging to other people. They weren't protecting their own. But America was their new home and their was too many whites coming ashore.
You realize once the whites came they couldn't very well have lived side by side with the indians. They worked by farming, while the indians needed large hunting spaces unhindered by man made dwellings and fields. So unless the white man took a little bit of land for himself and made it "whitish", or he became to live like an indian which is a lot to ask, just like it was a lot to ask of the indiant to turn white, he should never have settled in America.
Like I said above, the Indians were peaceful to the whites as long as possible. But many never behaved that way among themselves. Many indian tribes were violent before the whites came, not like the Tainos. Many indian tribes or cultures didn't learn massacring villaes from the whites like the book can make you believe. They were not just "imitating" the fashions of white warefare. They had it inherited in them. The differance was that they never poured it out on white people like they did on themselves. The indians only did it when there was alternative to survive the white intrusion.
The indians were doing savage warfare to each other long before the whites came. The book passingly mentions, and without condemnation, how the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho drove out the Kiowas from the plains territory. That was no differant than the whites driving out the indians really. An indian war like that occured all over America for centuries. So while the Indians practised the Golden Rule towards the Whites, they did not follow it towards enemy tribes. They would steal from each other and fight each other like marauding wolves, stealing horses and burning villages. They were no more civilized than the whites in that regard, except that the whites had a "civilized" society.
Many an indian Chief would lead an unprovoked attack for gain on a indian neighbor, just like the whites. One can argue of course, that the indainss needed the gain more than the rich whites did.
So while the indians waged a noble war agains't the whites, while we waged an unoble one, the indains quarrels and wars were among some of the blood thristy and merciless the world has ever known of older days.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada