A sweeping
history--and counter-narrative--of Native American life from the
Wounded Knee massacre to the present.
The received idea of
Native American history--as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's
mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee--has been that
American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at
Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands
of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Native civilization did as
well.
Growing up Ojibwe on
a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and
researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and
novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because
they did not disappear--and not despite but rather because of their
intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their
families, and their very existence--the story of American Indians
since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of
unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.
In The Heartbeat of
Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing
the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how
the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The
devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated
legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that
Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of
their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a
unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the
pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern
times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned
a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the
essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative
era.