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The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best History & Biography (2019)LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE
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.
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.
526 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 22, 2019
About the author
David Treuer
10 books398 followersDavid Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Minneapolis. He is the author of three novels and a book of criticism. His essays and stories have appeared in Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Lucky Peach, the LA Times, and Slate.com.
Treuer published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel The Translation of Dr Apelles and a book of criticism, Native American Fiction; A User's Manual appeared in 2006. The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. REZ LIFE is his newest book and is now out in paperback with Grove Press.
Treuer published his first novel, Little, in 1995. He received his PhD in anthropology and published his second novel, The Hiawatha, in 1999. His third novel The Translation of Dr Apelles and a book of criticism, Native American Fiction; A User's Manual appeared in 2006. The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. REZ LIFE is his newest book and is now out in paperback with Grove Press.
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March 8, 2020
David Treuer: Burning Wooden Indians
Sunday, September 17, 2006
David Treuer is sick and tired of dancing with wolves, throwing tea in the bay, hiding in the cupboard or weeping a single tear at the sight of a littered highway. In conjunction with his new novel, the 35-year-old Ojibwe writer has published a provocative collection of essays that denounce the way Native Americans are imagined in this country. Ugly stereotypes that fed the genocidal campaigns of the 18th and 19th century are mostly a thing of the past. The problem nowadays, he claims, is the precious way that Indians are portrayed in even the most well-meaning books and movies.
"We function the way ghosts function in ghost stories," Treuer says from his home on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. "We sort of hover around to admonish people about what they should be doing, what they're doing wrong, how they're destroying nature. We're always there, but chained to our own deaths, not really alive and active and engaged."
-- Ron Charles ”© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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October 9, 2019
Now a Finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction 2019
"If you want to know America - if you want to see it for what it is - you need to look at Indian history and the Indian present."
In a mixture of history book, reportage, and mémoir, Ojibwe author David Treuer tells the story of Native America after the massacre at Wounded Knee, and by doing so, he is resisting the toxic narrative of the "vanishing Indian" and the tendency to view all Native history as a history of pain. This does not mean that Treuer doesn't adress the injustice, oppression, and violence Native people had to endure - he certainly does! - but he underlines the resourcefulness, strength, and persistence of Native tribes that have fought back, protested, resisted, forced new laws, made allies on all sides, claimed their rights and remained loud and visible, no matter what some representatives of the settler state came up with to prevent that.
This is a book about dignity and perception, about perspective and awareness, and it is a truly eye-opening read - so go and pick it up, because without knowing Native American history, your idea of North America will forever be distorted.
"If you want to know America - if you want to see it for what it is - you need to look at Indian history and the Indian present."
In a mixture of history book, reportage, and mémoir, Ojibwe author David Treuer tells the story of Native America after the massacre at Wounded Knee, and by doing so, he is resisting the toxic narrative of the "vanishing Indian" and the tendency to view all Native history as a history of pain. This does not mean that Treuer doesn't adress the injustice, oppression, and violence Native people had to endure - he certainly does! - but he underlines the resourcefulness, strength, and persistence of Native tribes that have fought back, protested, resisted, forced new laws, made allies on all sides, claimed their rights and remained loud and visible, no matter what some representatives of the settler state came up with to prevent that.
This is a book about dignity and perception, about perspective and awareness, and it is a truly eye-opening read - so go and pick it up, because without knowing Native American history, your idea of North America will forever be distorted.
October 12, 2021
But to be Indian and alive is no easy thing ... The "story of the Indian" has been a story about loss: loss of land, loss of culture, loss of a way of life. Yes, Indians remain...
David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is part history of Native Americans in the contiguous U.S., part reportage of contemporary Indians, and part memoir as Treuer is Ojibwe. The macro history is far from pretty as Part 1 is titled "Narrating the Apocalypse," which covered pre-history to the pivotal 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. Some noteworthy lessons for me included:
- Archaeological findings in present day Pennsylvania at Meadowcroft Rockshelter dated back 19,000 years. This corroborated the presence of indigenous peoples prior to the formation of the Bering Strait land bridge.
- Christopher Columbus acted as a mercenary and violent slave trader in his exploration of the "New World" for gold. Even his royal sponsors could not tolerate his abuses and he died in disgrace.
- Forget the Thanksgiving image of Pilgrims and Indians gathering at the banquet table. The Pilgrims killed the Pequot tribe in 1637 in what is now present day Boston.
Treuer wanted to draw attention to Native American strengths. He wanted to dispel the prevailing belief that the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre signaled the demise of the Indian and thus the opening of the American frontier. Had they existed then, the United Nations would have easily identified the genocidal policies and campaigns of the European colonizers and then the American government. In light of that, I was hard pressed to see the Indian successes in Part 1 because of the human tendency to recall negative events more readily than positive ones. But Treuer was right that 1890 marked the nadir and not the annihilation of Native Americans.
Challenges persisted throughout the 20th century. The U.S. government had already established a pattern of treaty brokering and then reneging on them. So unsurprisingly, the wide array of federal policies weren't beneficial for Indians for decades and even when well intentioned, they were detrimental. Citizenship was a hard won victory in 1924 after 17,000 Indian men served in the US military during WWI. In fact, the first "code talkers" weren't the Navajo peoples (that was WW2) but the Choctaw soldiers in WW1. Native American cultures though remained under attack. Indian boarding schools forced family separations, child labor, and the suppression of tribal languages, attire, and religious beliefs for most of the 20th century.
Broader social trends in the U.S. were impactful as well. More than one-third of Native American men served in WW2, and this far exceeded representation from all other racial groups. The shared experiences of war and boarding schools were beginning to shape an American Indian consciousness in addition to the individual tribal affiliations. The National Congress of American Indians formed in 1944 as delegates from 50 tribes banded together to oppose federal policies. They had been inspired by the creation of the NAACP by African Americans. Others, however, were more admiring of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. The Red Power and the American Indian Movement were formed in pursuit of faster progress. These two groups occupied Alcatraz Island, the abandoned federal prison located in the San Francisco Bay, in addition to other questionable activities to garner attention for the plight of Indians.
Tremendous progress came with two laws in the 1970s that restored religious freedom to Native Americans, as guaranteed to all Americans by the First Amendment, and their ability to shape Indian education. After decades of federal policies that forced cultural assimilation, how to be Indian was now a question for Indians to determine.
for my mother, being Indian wasn't a condition to be cured or a past to be escaped and even improved upon. ... But to be Indian is not to be poor or to struggle. To believe in sovereignty ... to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: it is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously.
Tribal sovereignty was only truly restored through a series of legal actions that had also begun in the 1970s. This enabled the recent economic creation of gaming venues by more than half of all tribes. Casinos however aren't the sole panacea but only one piece of the tribes' puzzle of economic development. Native Americans still face tremendous challenges as measured by income, health and crime metrics. But, as Treuer emphasized, the Indians survived. In the 500 plus federally recognized tribes, the current population of Native Americans exceeds 2 million, a more than ten-fold increase since the 1890 nadir. When Indians with multiple ancestries are included, then the Native American population swells to more than 5 million persons.
The American Indian Dream is as much about looking back and bringing the culture along with it as it is about looking ahead... We're using modernity in the best possible way: to work together and to heal what was broken.
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a really information - dense book and this review can only skate the surface. Treuer included brief bios of several Native American men with testimonies of life as early as the 1940s. Treuer incorporated women's narratives, starting with his mother, in the end of his book to describe the leaders of change. And since this book is part memoir, the Indian history is skewed toward the author's Ojibwe connection.
I recommend this book to those interested in American history. In order to live up to the ideals espoused by the Constitution, one needs a complete picture of historical failures and successes to assess how well we truly measure up and what progress yet remains. I had read both the audio book and the ebook. The former was narrated by a woman, which was surprising given the first person perspective for most of the book. I did enjoy hearing the correct pronunciation of Indian words. Treuer weaved the individual narratives with the macro history and that became a bit confusing for me with the audio version. Neither version made learning the brutalities and genocides any easier to bear. The Native American history is one of ascending from the depths of hell to the surface of the earth and seeing the sky.
The Friday after Thanksgiving is Native American Heritage Day.
July 14, 2019
This book was incredibly hard for me to rate. I think it deserves a 5. Most of the time the reading experience for me was only a 3 and sometimes a 4, and only occasionally a 5, and sometimes even a 2. I can’t in good conscience give it less than a 4 and it pains for not to give it 5 full stars.
This should be a history book (and class) in every high school, preferably mandatory – so different from the false histories I was taught when in K-12. Ideally it would be supplemented with other materials and visits by Native Americans giving talks and participating in discussions and answering questions, but this would work as the main book for the classes. It is an important book and I learned so much. I do consider this a “must read” book for everyone, particularly residents of North America, but everyone.
The reason for the docking of a star was that for me it was a really slow read. I always wanted to keep reading and never lost interest but it wasn’t a page-turner for me. It took me 4 weeks to read. I read other books during that time even without them I think it would have taken me nearly as long to read. It’s really, really dense. All crucial information but slow going.
I got hold of the audio edition thinking my reading would go faster if I simultaneously read the hardcover the Overdirve audio edition but I was wrong. I hated the narration. I was shocked to hear a woman’s voice doing the narration; I was expecting a man! This is David Treuer’s story, his family’s story, his tribe/People’s story, and his account of interviews he had with others and his take on history and the present. If it can’t be in his voice it needs to at least be a man’s voice. The narrator’s inflections might be his and I like to think that they are, but it still sounds wrong. So I mostly just continued reading the hardcover book, after giving the audio edition along with the paper edition a fairly long trial period.
I enjoyed his story. I love his parents, including his Holocaust surviving Jewish father.
I wish there were even more but I appreciated all the maps, photos, drawings, pictures that were included. I always love maps in books and those here helped me better understand the narrative.
I almost immediately felt guilty for having loved the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee when I read it decades ago when it was a recently published book. The author makes a compelling case for why that book misrepresents things. More than once in the book he talks about why that book disturbs him.
This book is so packed with information. Only at 100 pages in does the reader reach the subtitle of “1890 to the Present.” The first 100 pages is more distant history. And when people now talk about the Native Americans/Indians of this area or that area, well I had no idea. There were a plethora of tribes/Nations in most areas. Not just the ones remaining in the more recent past. So many! So much change!
When I read the California section I see so many names that are now street names and place names in my city and I want them changed! They should never have been named as they have been!
My favorite parts were the section prior to 1890 and other earlier rather than more recently in history sections or the more present sections because I learned so much. Much of what was written about the mid-1960s to the present I had more awareness going in, though I still learned much and still enjoyed many people’s stories.
There are many exceedingly distressing accounts and there is also a fair amount of humor. The narrative shows the complexity of this history.
The Epilogue and the A Note on Sources were both excellent and made me appreciate the book even more!
I didn’t read all the notes pages 461-488 (I always wish this information could somehow be included in the book proper) or all the index pages 489-511.
In summary, this is a fascinating, informative history of Natives in North America, particularly in the area that is now the United States, from the distant past to the present. I highly recommend it. I wish I’d had history taught to me like this when I was in school. (This is a book written with adult readers in mind but I think it’s fine for high school and up.) I want to read even more on this subject. I can’t do this book justice in a review. It’s so full of information, history, stories. Highly recommended!
This should be a history book (and class) in every high school, preferably mandatory – so different from the false histories I was taught when in K-12. Ideally it would be supplemented with other materials and visits by Native Americans giving talks and participating in discussions and answering questions, but this would work as the main book for the classes. It is an important book and I learned so much. I do consider this a “must read” book for everyone, particularly residents of North America, but everyone.
The reason for the docking of a star was that for me it was a really slow read. I always wanted to keep reading and never lost interest but it wasn’t a page-turner for me. It took me 4 weeks to read. I read other books during that time even without them I think it would have taken me nearly as long to read. It’s really, really dense. All crucial information but slow going.
I got hold of the audio edition thinking my reading would go faster if I simultaneously read the hardcover the Overdirve audio edition but I was wrong. I hated the narration. I was shocked to hear a woman’s voice doing the narration; I was expecting a man! This is David Treuer’s story, his family’s story, his tribe/People’s story, and his account of interviews he had with others and his take on history and the present. If it can’t be in his voice it needs to at least be a man’s voice. The narrator’s inflections might be his and I like to think that they are, but it still sounds wrong. So I mostly just continued reading the hardcover book, after giving the audio edition along with the paper edition a fairly long trial period.
I enjoyed his story. I love his parents, including his Holocaust surviving Jewish father.
I wish there were even more but I appreciated all the maps, photos, drawings, pictures that were included. I always love maps in books and those here helped me better understand the narrative.
I almost immediately felt guilty for having loved the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee when I read it decades ago when it was a recently published book. The author makes a compelling case for why that book misrepresents things. More than once in the book he talks about why that book disturbs him.
This book is so packed with information. Only at 100 pages in does the reader reach the subtitle of “1890 to the Present.” The first 100 pages is more distant history. And when people now talk about the Native Americans/Indians of this area or that area, well I had no idea. There were a plethora of tribes/Nations in most areas. Not just the ones remaining in the more recent past. So many! So much change!
When I read the California section I see so many names that are now street names and place names in my city and I want them changed! They should never have been named as they have been!
My favorite parts were the section prior to 1890 and other earlier rather than more recently in history sections or the more present sections because I learned so much. Much of what was written about the mid-1960s to the present I had more awareness going in, though I still learned much and still enjoyed many people’s stories.
There are many exceedingly distressing accounts and there is also a fair amount of humor. The narrative shows the complexity of this history.
The Epilogue and the A Note on Sources were both excellent and made me appreciate the book even more!
I didn’t read all the notes pages 461-488 (I always wish this information could somehow be included in the book proper) or all the index pages 489-511.
In summary, this is a fascinating, informative history of Natives in North America, particularly in the area that is now the United States, from the distant past to the present. I highly recommend it. I wish I’d had history taught to me like this when I was in school. (This is a book written with adult readers in mind but I think it’s fine for high school and up.) I want to read even more on this subject. I can’t do this book justice in a review. It’s so full of information, history, stories. Highly recommended!
March 12, 2021
UPDATE:
HEADLINE -- February 23, 2021
First Native American picked to run Interior Dept. says: ‘It’s not about me. It’s about ‘all of us.’
******
Dee Brown wrote in the introduction to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
The book’s final chapter is an account of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, which was the final major clash fought between U.S. military forces and Native Americans, one in which it is estimated that more than 250 men, women, and children of the Lakota (Sioux) tribe were killed and that fifty-one were wounded, some of whom died later.
The book concludes with the following passage on page 445:
Published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee received positive reviews, has been translated into over a dozen languages, sold over four million copies, and has never gone out of print.
David Treurer, who grew up on the Leech Reservation in Minnesota, said that he never got around to reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee until he was in college in the 1990s, over twenty years after it was published. He was dismayed, he said, about how Brown in the introduction portrayed Indian reservations as worn-out places in which hopelessness, poverty, and squalor were the norm.
Treuer, whose mother is a member of the Objibwe (Chippewa) tribe and whose father was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, wrote The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019) as a rebuttal to Brown’s book as well as a continuation of Indian history after the 1890 massacre.
Treuer, who describes his book as part history, part memoir, and part reportage, says that he “came to conceive of a book that would dismantle the tale of our demise by way of a new story. This book would focus on the untold story of the past 128 years, making visible the broader and deeper currents of Indian life that have too long been obscured."
By 128 years, he meant the years from the Wounded Knee Massacre to 2018, the year he finished writing his book.
Treuer is correct in saying that most histories that have been written about the American Indian experience ended with the climactic battle at Wounded Knee. His book is a much needed continuation that brings that experience up to the present, and does so in a thoroughly researched, well-written fashion.
He admits that Dee Brown’s book was an important one because it raised awareness of the history of warfare, broken treaties, unfulfilled promises, and land grabs that had occurred at the expense of the various tribes. But, as mentioned, his complaint was how Brown made a blanket statement about the poverty, hopelessness, and squalor that Brown said were characteristic of the reservations after Wounded Knee.
In defense of Brown, Treuer, as earlier mentoned, admits that he didn’t read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee until sometime in the 1990s, which was more than two decades after it was published. And it should be noted that the conditions on reservations were much bleaker at the time that Brown published his book than they were almost fifty years later when Treuer published his.
Rather than seeing Treuer’s book as a rebuttal to Brown’s, I prefer to see it as a complement, one that completes the history that Brown began. Reading both books provides the reader with a comprehensive history of the conflicts between America’s native peoples and the Europeans and Americans who opposed them as well as the setbacks and successes that have been a part of reservation life since 1890.
HEADLINE -- February 23, 2021
First Native American picked to run Interior Dept. says: ‘It’s not about me. It’s about ‘all of us.’
******
Dee Brown wrote in the introduction to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee:
The Indians knew that life was equated with the earth and its resources, that America was a paradise, and they could not comprehend why the intruders from the East were determined to destroy all that was Indian as well as America itself.
And if the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why.
The book’s final chapter is an account of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890, which was the final major clash fought between U.S. military forces and Native Americans, one in which it is estimated that more than 250 men, women, and children of the Lakota (Sioux) tribe were killed and that fifty-one were wounded, some of whom died later.
The book concludes with the following passage on page 445:
The wagonloads of wounded Sioux (four men and forty-seven women and children) reached Pine Ridge after dark. Because all available barracks were filled with soldiers, they were left lying in the open wagons in the bitter cold while an inept Army officer searched for shelter. Finally the Episcopal mission was opened, the benches taken out, and hay scattered over the rough flooring.
It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel font above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.
Published in 1970, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee received positive reviews, has been translated into over a dozen languages, sold over four million copies, and has never gone out of print.
David Treurer, who grew up on the Leech Reservation in Minnesota, said that he never got around to reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee until he was in college in the 1990s, over twenty years after it was published. He was dismayed, he said, about how Brown in the introduction portrayed Indian reservations as worn-out places in which hopelessness, poverty, and squalor were the norm.
Treuer, whose mother is a member of the Objibwe (Chippewa) tribe and whose father was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, wrote The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (2019) as a rebuttal to Brown’s book as well as a continuation of Indian history after the 1890 massacre.
Treuer, who describes his book as part history, part memoir, and part reportage, says that he “came to conceive of a book that would dismantle the tale of our demise by way of a new story. This book would focus on the untold story of the past 128 years, making visible the broader and deeper currents of Indian life that have too long been obscured."
By 128 years, he meant the years from the Wounded Knee Massacre to 2018, the year he finished writing his book.
Treuer is correct in saying that most histories that have been written about the American Indian experience ended with the climactic battle at Wounded Knee. His book is a much needed continuation that brings that experience up to the present, and does so in a thoroughly researched, well-written fashion.
He admits that Dee Brown’s book was an important one because it raised awareness of the history of warfare, broken treaties, unfulfilled promises, and land grabs that had occurred at the expense of the various tribes. But, as mentioned, his complaint was how Brown made a blanket statement about the poverty, hopelessness, and squalor that Brown said were characteristic of the reservations after Wounded Knee.
In defense of Brown, Treuer, as earlier mentoned, admits that he didn’t read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee until sometime in the 1990s, which was more than two decades after it was published. And it should be noted that the conditions on reservations were much bleaker at the time that Brown published his book than they were almost fifty years later when Treuer published his.
Rather than seeing Treuer’s book as a rebuttal to Brown’s, I prefer to see it as a complement, one that completes the history that Brown began. Reading both books provides the reader with a comprehensive history of the conflicts between America’s native peoples and the Europeans and Americans who opposed them as well as the setbacks and successes that have been a part of reservation life since 1890.
December 31, 2019
National Book Award for Nonfiction Longlist 2019. Native American author Treuer (Ojibwe) has written an expansive exploration of the progress Native Americans have had in gaining political/cultural autonomy within the United States since the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The 1970s book by Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, declared that “the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed” during the 1800s. Indeed, in the first half of the book Treuer recounts the numerous actions by the federal government to do just that. This portion of the book is deeply depressing—genocide, ethnic cleansing, broken treaties and armed attacks. And when the federal government wasn’t killing Native Americans outright, they were doing their best to destroy their culture—separating children from their parents to send them to schools that forbade the children from even speaking their native language.
The second half of the book is more positive. It offers highlights of the resilience of the Native American communities through the stories of unique individuals, creative entrepreneurs, talented lawyers, and others who have worked for the best interests of their tribes. Treuer recounts the efforts of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) to gain greater rights through confrontational publicity and even violence. While most of their actions proved counterproductive, AIM did help to energize tribes to fight continued disenfranchisement.
The Carter-era American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 allowed tribes to exercise religious traditions. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act helped the tribes to establish casinos—a badly needed source of money. [However, of the 500 federally recognized Indian tribes, fewer than half own or run gaming operations.] The reauthorization in 2013 of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) empowered tribal courts to charge and prosecute non-Natives who raped or assaulted women on Native land.
Despite these positive steps, Native Americans still suffer from high unemployment, particularly in the northern Great Plains where the rate can be as high as 77%. Clearly, much more progress needs to be made.
Recommend.
The second half of the book is more positive. It offers highlights of the resilience of the Native American communities through the stories of unique individuals, creative entrepreneurs, talented lawyers, and others who have worked for the best interests of their tribes. Treuer recounts the efforts of the radical American Indian Movement (AIM) to gain greater rights through confrontational publicity and even violence. While most of their actions proved counterproductive, AIM did help to energize tribes to fight continued disenfranchisement.
The Carter-era American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 allowed tribes to exercise religious traditions. The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act helped the tribes to establish casinos—a badly needed source of money. [However, of the 500 federally recognized Indian tribes, fewer than half own or run gaming operations.] The reauthorization in 2013 of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) empowered tribal courts to charge and prosecute non-Natives who raped or assaulted women on Native land.
Despite these positive steps, Native Americans still suffer from high unemployment, particularly in the northern Great Plains where the rate can be as high as 77%. Clearly, much more progress needs to be made.
Recommend.
January 7, 2019
Treuer characterizes this book as 3 journeys in his introduction: a journey into history, a journey across America, and a journey into himself and his identity. He describes all three of theses journeys with great skill, although the historical journey does get a little dry here and there, and his inward journey makes the narrative a little more Minnesota-oriented than it would be coming from someone else (that's a plus for me). After his introduction, which by the end made me want to stand up and cheer, he covers Native American history from prehistoric times to 1890 (Wounded Knee) in a little over 80 pages. The story methodically moves from region to region, giving us a sense of the diversity of Native American history and identity. This history is a review, and is just as soul-crushing as I expected it to be, but it was well-written and engaging. And within it, Treuer uses that phrase of his that characterizes this book for me: "And yet." Despite the raging forest fire of white Americans through Native lives and culture, many tribes survived, held on. Then Treuer describes the fledgling new life springing up here and there through the next century, and by the end of the book he's describing a verdant landscape, full of hope. I need this book. So many need this book.
Treuer set out to prove that American Indians are not a relic of a failed history. There is a living culture of Indigenous people in our country that thrives and improves every day. At the end of the book, he describes the Standing Rock protests and what they meant, how different they were from the protests of the 1970s. He describes the small revolutions taking place on reservations and in cities across North America. This is a masterpiece of history from a proud Indian. I hope there are many more like it to come; as he states late in the book, identity politics is the beginning of privilege, and Native Americans are just getting to that level of privilege in the last decade or two.
I can't recommend this enough. I'm very thankful to the publisher, who gave me a copy to review through Edelweiss.
Treuer set out to prove that American Indians are not a relic of a failed history. There is a living culture of Indigenous people in our country that thrives and improves every day. At the end of the book, he describes the Standing Rock protests and what they meant, how different they were from the protests of the 1970s. He describes the small revolutions taking place on reservations and in cities across North America. This is a masterpiece of history from a proud Indian. I hope there are many more like it to come; as he states late in the book, identity politics is the beginning of privilege, and Native Americans are just getting to that level of privilege in the last decade or two.
I can't recommend this enough. I'm very thankful to the publisher, who gave me a copy to review through Edelweiss.
January 7, 2020
4 ★
This one belongs on a shelf titled: I have no clue how to rate or talk about this book.
It would be fair to say it reads like a very interesting textbook. Since I'm a fan of the subject I appreciated it but admit that the pages are packed and dense with information all over the place and my brain can wonder with audio books so it did not have my full, undivided attention. Hate to say I was not a fan of the narration by a female and think it should of been done by a male, if not the author himself, since it's written from his first person POV. Definitely a must read or listen for those interested in Native American history but may be a hard sell for those with none. Apparently the hard copy has extra material, such as photographs and maps, which sadly I missed out on. I recently read this was on President Obama's recommended reading for 2019. I would love to hear his thoughts.
It held my interest and I'm richer for the experience and information.
This one belongs on a shelf titled: I have no clue how to rate or talk about this book.
It would be fair to say it reads like a very interesting textbook. Since I'm a fan of the subject I appreciated it but admit that the pages are packed and dense with information all over the place and my brain can wonder with audio books so it did not have my full, undivided attention. Hate to say I was not a fan of the narration by a female and think it should of been done by a male, if not the author himself, since it's written from his first person POV. Definitely a must read or listen for those interested in Native American history but may be a hard sell for those with none. Apparently the hard copy has extra material, such as photographs and maps, which sadly I missed out on. I recently read this was on President Obama's recommended reading for 2019. I would love to hear his thoughts.
It held my interest and I'm richer for the experience and information.
February 18, 2019
Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum wrote of Native Americans, “Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect civilization, follow it up with one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.” Charming. By the 1600’s the colonial powers had shifted their focus from “exploitative colonization” to “exploitive settlement”. Thomas Jefferson writes in secret memos to William Henry Harrison in 1803, a plan to disappear the tribes of the Southeast. Jefferson writes, “They must see that we only have to shut our hand to crush them.” Then he says that “driving them across the Mississippi as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.” An example to others? These guys aren’t the Founding Fathers, but the Founding Settler-Colonialists – Washington too with all those land deals on Native Soil backed by guns (Calloway’s GW book). Parts of California were once populated by Indians in a density that rivaled Europe at that time. Evidence of seventeen thousand years of Native history exist in California. “The paradise became a wasteland” and the genocide of the Californian Native was on; “The degree of violence in the ‘Golden State’ cannot be over emphasized.”
The Cayuse War teaches the government that it is best to simply offer Treaties going forward, knowing that settlers would soon overrun all set boundaries “by force of numbers”. Think of those Black Friday Sales when the doors open and badly dressed white Americans rush in. Like that. “America ‘won’ the west by blood, brutality, and terror.” George Washington orders General Sullivan to “lay waste all the settlements around with instructions to do it that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.” Chief Joseph said, “Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars.” The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 made all people born in the U.S. American citizens EXCEPT for Native Americans. The “Civilization” the Unites States forced on Indians consisted of “poverty, disenfranchisement, and the breakdown of Indian families.” Yum. The Medal of Honor was given to “twenty of the troopers who opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee”. Is there any greater honor than in gunning down harmless unarmed people who have surrendered?
All this good stuff comes from the first 150 pages about stuff that happens ONLY before Wounded Knee. But the intention of this book is to show Native history from AFTER Wounded Knee and how we should not view Native Americans as victims. The next 250 pages are 200 pages of stories from the author’s life and travels, leaving the reader 50 pages of what Native Americans have really accomplished or had to overcome since Wounded Knee. In those 50 pages, we learn Indians couldn’t practice certain religions until 1978. We learn Cannabis is tribal (right on). We hear the words “Digital Indian” and “To be an Indian today seems to be more a matter of action.” “I worry that if the story we tell of the past as a tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future.” Fair enough David, but why not share the thoughts of these Indians of action?
David wants Indian “action” yet his book totally ignores the deep cultural written contributions of Vine DeLoria, Ward Churchill, Waziyatawin, Winona LaDuke, or even John Trudell (Vine and John are quickly mentioned but not their ideas or quotes). No mention of Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings? And he portrays Dave Archambault II as an authority while ignoring the legitimate concerns and views of his many detractors. I looked forward to reading this; I was excited to learn all the amazing things Native Americans have done since Wounded Knee and instead – Yawn! You would think he’d mention the great Native scientists, inventors, musicians, and artists since then, but no, David won’t mention a single one. He won’t talk about Native American Fred Begay, Nuclear Physicist, Wallace Hampton Tucker, Astrophysicist, or Mary Golda Ross who was an aerospace pioneer and a math genius at Lockheed’s secret Skunk Works project (Lockheed’s first female engineer). Fair enough. But then he won’t mention Native American musicians: Robbie Robertson, Link Wray, John Trudell, Jesse Ed Davis (imagine Taj Mahal w/o Jesse!), Rita Coolidge or jazz legend Oscar Pettiford (Choctaw-Cherokee). Even Jim Pepper’s amazing circular jazz standard “Witchi-Tai-To” or Redbone’s foot stomping platinum selling “Come and Get Your Love” aren’t seen as proud Native achievements. Go figure. The subtitle is “Native America from 1890 to the Present” – from that I believed I was going to get a real history lesson of Native American obstacles and achievements SINCE Wounded Knee. Instead all I got was some good Pre-Wounded Knee info morphing into hundreds of pages of first hand musings coming from the authors travels. So many of my favorite Native activist/writers are not in this book (mentioned above) who should be in it with their hard-core activist thoughts and credentials. Why shy away from the rich library of recent Native American thought? Why not introduce us to their ideas and writings? This book pretends to be something it is not; it is no reference book on recent Native American History. The author is no Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
The Cayuse War teaches the government that it is best to simply offer Treaties going forward, knowing that settlers would soon overrun all set boundaries “by force of numbers”. Think of those Black Friday Sales when the doors open and badly dressed white Americans rush in. Like that. “America ‘won’ the west by blood, brutality, and terror.” George Washington orders General Sullivan to “lay waste all the settlements around with instructions to do it that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.” Chief Joseph said, “Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we will have no more wars.” The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 made all people born in the U.S. American citizens EXCEPT for Native Americans. The “Civilization” the Unites States forced on Indians consisted of “poverty, disenfranchisement, and the breakdown of Indian families.” Yum. The Medal of Honor was given to “twenty of the troopers who opened fire on unarmed Lakota at Wounded Knee”. Is there any greater honor than in gunning down harmless unarmed people who have surrendered?
All this good stuff comes from the first 150 pages about stuff that happens ONLY before Wounded Knee. But the intention of this book is to show Native history from AFTER Wounded Knee and how we should not view Native Americans as victims. The next 250 pages are 200 pages of stories from the author’s life and travels, leaving the reader 50 pages of what Native Americans have really accomplished or had to overcome since Wounded Knee. In those 50 pages, we learn Indians couldn’t practice certain religions until 1978. We learn Cannabis is tribal (right on). We hear the words “Digital Indian” and “To be an Indian today seems to be more a matter of action.” “I worry that if the story we tell of the past as a tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future.” Fair enough David, but why not share the thoughts of these Indians of action?
David wants Indian “action” yet his book totally ignores the deep cultural written contributions of Vine DeLoria, Ward Churchill, Waziyatawin, Winona LaDuke, or even John Trudell (Vine and John are quickly mentioned but not their ideas or quotes). No mention of Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings? And he portrays Dave Archambault II as an authority while ignoring the legitimate concerns and views of his many detractors. I looked forward to reading this; I was excited to learn all the amazing things Native Americans have done since Wounded Knee and instead – Yawn! You would think he’d mention the great Native scientists, inventors, musicians, and artists since then, but no, David won’t mention a single one. He won’t talk about Native American Fred Begay, Nuclear Physicist, Wallace Hampton Tucker, Astrophysicist, or Mary Golda Ross who was an aerospace pioneer and a math genius at Lockheed’s secret Skunk Works project (Lockheed’s first female engineer). Fair enough. But then he won’t mention Native American musicians: Robbie Robertson, Link Wray, John Trudell, Jesse Ed Davis (imagine Taj Mahal w/o Jesse!), Rita Coolidge or jazz legend Oscar Pettiford (Choctaw-Cherokee). Even Jim Pepper’s amazing circular jazz standard “Witchi-Tai-To” or Redbone’s foot stomping platinum selling “Come and Get Your Love” aren’t seen as proud Native achievements. Go figure. The subtitle is “Native America from 1890 to the Present” – from that I believed I was going to get a real history lesson of Native American obstacles and achievements SINCE Wounded Knee. Instead all I got was some good Pre-Wounded Knee info morphing into hundreds of pages of first hand musings coming from the authors travels. So many of my favorite Native activist/writers are not in this book (mentioned above) who should be in it with their hard-core activist thoughts and credentials. Why shy away from the rich library of recent Native American thought? Why not introduce us to their ideas and writings? This book pretends to be something it is not; it is no reference book on recent Native American History. The author is no Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.
December 3, 2019
This book doesn't deserve to be mentioned with Dee Brown's "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee." I had high hopes for this book. The first half of the book kept those hopes high with tales of indigenous tribes in the South West that outlived the rule of the Spanish and the Catholic Church. But that hope soon began to vanish when Treuer turns his attention to the American Indian Movement (AIM) and its leaders. In contrast to the leadership of AIM and those actually fighting for Native American rights Treuer presents us with one Bobby Matthews.
Bobby Matthews is the counter narrative to AIM Leader Dennis Banks. In fact Treuer spends an inordinate amount of time telling us about the amazing Bobby Matthews who, according to the author, is the greatest outdoorsman in the world. After droning on and on about the outdoorsman's prowess in finding leaches and pine cones Treuer writes, "Although Bobby was around the same age as the activists who came up in the 1960s and 1970s, he didn't have much to do with them or their movements." In fact Matthews tells Treuer that he didn't know Dennis Banks and had never met him.
So at a time of incredible violence against native peoples when the per capita murder rate was around 20 times the national average the author's hero has zero involvement in the struggles to curtail that violence. Apparently Bobby Matthews was too busy learning how to exploit the natural world around him to be bothered with activism. At one point in the book the author gives us this incredible insight into the mind of Bobby Matthews,
"You know, Dave, the Creator or God or whatever you call it made the universe and all the beings in it and put this tree here and that bush there and he made the beavers and the deer and the plants that are good to eat and the ones that are good for medicine. He made all of it and it is beautiful! Also-fucking-lutely beautiful. And I look out over that creation and sometimes I don't see it like other people do. I look out at all of it and what I see is money. And by God I am going to find a way to liberate it out of there."
This is the modern native hero presented to us by David Treuer. A man who looks at this beautiful natural world--a world we are quickly destroying--and he sees money. Contrast that with an actual native hero of the Poncas tribe. Back in 1879 Standing Bear had this to say,
"I have not wished to give even a part of it[the land] to the Great Father, Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land..."
That's a long way to go in just over a century; from knowing that no amount of money could equal the value of a living planet versus our modern native hero who looks at nature and sees nothing but money. This eager acceptance of the values of Capitalism and the destructive ways of our dominant culture of death are further explored on the topic of casinos. The author takes a moment in the book to answer questions he often hears regarding casinos. One such question is, have casinos destroyed Indian Culture?
Treuer's response is telling: "That's a stupid question. Has commerce generally destroyed American, Chinese, German or French Culture?" To begin with the author conflates commerce with gambling. There's a marked difference between manufacturing goods that people want and preying on the systemic poverty in our society with games of chance. The fact that he doesn't even attempt to answer the question tells us a lot about David Treuer if the previous quote from his friend Bobby Matthews didn't already tell us enough. The author seems content with a version of indigenous life that embraces capitalism even while it's destroying the natural world and causing the world's sixth extinction event.
That leads me directly to the author's fetishizing of sovereignty. There are countless references to sovereignty and yet it's never really defined by the author. It's just accepted as a general good thing that all good people should want. As Treuer writes, "To believe in sovereignty, to let it inform and define not only ones political and legal existence but also one's community, to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: it is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously."
But what is sovereignty? According to anthropologist David Graeber in his recent work on Kings, "...the most elegant definition is that recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, 'in its minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise violence with impunity." Hidden underneath much of what Treuer writes is really this desire for violence with impunity. It's that same basic belief that allows Bobby Matthews to kill nature in the pursuit of money or allows a small clique of leaders within a particular tribe to exploit the growing inequality and poverty in this country with games of chance. They are either killing nature or killing hope, but it's violence just the same. The author is very clear about this. Later on he tells us about a family, "in 2008 who had fractional interest in a 56 acre parcel of land." They wanted to "develop" that land. As Treuer puts it, "They were doing exactly what one hopes people do with their property: securing and developing it for future generations, to make the land work for them."
Does any of that sound very indigenous? Remember this is supposed to be the stories that give us hope about the current state of native Americans. And yet isn't this exactly the mindset of the very first Europeans who showed up here 500 years ago ready to "develop" this land? And in that 500 years of development can anyone realistically say it's better now?
Lastly I took great issue with the ways in which Treuer treats Indian activists from those in AIM to the more recent Water Protectors who stood up at Standing Rock to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Honestly Treuer's treatment of these subjects is so bad I don't even know where to start. We can begin with the fact that Treuer provides the version of events squarely from the point of view of the FBI. The reader is never given the fact that FBI agents Coler and Williams never identified themselves or that there was a history of violence on the reservation and that Peltier and other members of AIM were brought in specifically to fight against that violence which went unmolested by FBI agents.
This is really illustrated by Treuer's description of how authorities managed to extradite Peltier from Canada. According to the author, "...the federal government supplied the Canadians with some very sketchy evidence." In reality, according to Amnesty International the key testimony used to extradite Peltier from Canada was perjured. In fact the woman they forced to perjure herself didn't even know Leonard Peltier. That is agents of the Federal Government forced a woman to lie in order to kidnap a man seeking asylum from political attack. Sketchy doesn't begin to encapsulate the deceitful and violent tactics of the FBI during this time. But it gets worse.
Treuer goes on to tell us,"The prosecution proved that Peltier had motive to kill the agents, considering his previous warrants and charges. And they proved Peltier was the only one who carried and used an AR-15 assault rifle during the firefight; a casing from the gun had been found in the trunk of the agents' car, and ballistics also showed that the men had been executed with that kind of rifle." In other words Treuer goes all out to convince his readers that Leonard Peltier was definitely guilty. The problem is that nearly everything in the above paragraph is false. Motive? By the loose interpretation given by our author I would imagine you could prove that any and all natives have motive to kill federal agents. But the rest is patently false. There were other AR-15's recovered from the sight. The witnesses against Peltier recanted and testified that they were coerced into testifying against Peltier. The ballistics tests were shown to have been shoddy and inconclusive at best. And in subsequent motions the government has admitted that it does not know who shot the fatal bullets into the two FBI agents.
Just to review. The FBI lied and coerced multiple witnesses. They lied about what prompted the two agents to enter the ranch. They withheld hundreds of thousands of pages from the defense as a matter of "national security." The omitted key exculpatory evidence throughout the proceedings. And yet our author wants us to believe their story hook line and sinker. Whether you believe that Leonard Peltier was a noble man fighting for the dignity of his people or not, the facts are that he never received a fair trial and that very salient fact is completely omitted by David Treuer.
But Treuer wasn't done shitting on AIM and it's leadership. His very next chapter deals with the death of Anna Mae Aquash. Leading up to her death it had been rumored that she was an FBI informant. The author continues his false facade of objectivity when he very carefully mentions that this was, "Not without cause: COINTELPRO (the counterintelligence program run by the FBI meant to disrupt and discredit domestic political organizations) had indeed infiltrated AIM and the Black Panthers and other political dissident and protest groups. However, there was no evidence (then or later) that Aqash was anything other than what she appeared to be: a dreamy, fierce, committed Indian woman."
Let's begin with Treuer's depiction of COINTELPRO. He limits the program to disrupt and discredit. Doesn't sound so bad, right? He fails to mention the outright political assassinations used against members of the Black Panther Party. He also doesn't mention the outright extortion used, for instance, when the FBI attempted to force Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide. Just a little disruption and discrediting, according to Treuer; nothing too bad! And he goes to bat for the FBI when he doubles down on the belief that "there is no evidence that Aquash was anything other than what she appeared to be..." That may very well be true.
In fact there has been no definitive proof that Aqash was an informant. But there's more to the story. First of all Aquash was an outsider. She appears almost out of nowhere and knows almost no one in the movement. There are also a number of instances where she gets out of jail much faster than her co-conspirators. And then there is the very real tool of inducing paranoia within political groups that the FBI utilized. I'm not saying Aquash was or was not an informant. That's really irrelevant here. The fact is given the context of this era, the dirty tricks played by the FBI, it would have been evident to people at the time that her death at the hands of AIM would be a likely outcome. What I'm really trying to say here is that Treuer completely ignores the very causal connection between the dirty tricks played by the FBI through its COINTEL program and the violence that often resulted.
David Treuer sums it all up:
"To me, the shootout at the Jumping Bull compound and Anna Mae Aqash's murder can't be justified as an expression of AIM's (often violent) direct action, their street theater, their agitprop. It was just violence, the result of violent men who didn't want to go to jail."
Let's just recall that this man's highest principal is the right to exercise violence with impunity. Instead of analyzing the violence of the state--a long and bloody history of violence against natives--he blames the victims. He also seems to get stuck on the idea of "men who don't want to go to jail" as if there are groups of people out there who do want to go to jail.
The author goes on to shit on the rest of native activism. He either has nothing good to say or he doesn't even mention it. He does, however, devote a chapter in his awful book to the brave water protectors at Standing Rock who attempted to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). An author who seems to at least have some grasp on native history on this continent is seemingly perplexed by the lack of cooperation on the part of tribal leaders. In short Tribal Chairman David Archambault and tribal historic preservation officer Waste Win Young dragged their feet through the entire process. This really stumps our author who goes on to write,
"I don't know why Young and tribal chairman David Archambault II didn't meet or consult with DAPL when the window to consult was open." It's hard to believe a supposedly earnest and educated native wrote that sentence of centuries of having native lands and minerals stolen from them. But he really wrote that! Centuries of duplicity, broken treaties and violence shouldn't be a deterrent from negotiating once again on your sacred land!
"Things got violent fast," he writes. Things got violent. What things? He explicitly points out that,"The protestors were determinedly anti-violence and pro-peaceful direct action; the private security teams, not so much. Not so much? He goes on to list the violence these security teams unleashed on the peaceful water protectors: "They loosed attack dogs on protestors. The activists were pepper-sprayed, arrested, hosed down with water cannons, and who with rubber bullets." So did things get violent? Or did the private property owners get violent?
Never fear our intrepid author will help us put this all in perspective:
"The most important part of this whole sordid process to note and notice is not what the government is willing to do to Indians, or what the government is willing to allow to happen to the land and the water. It is that we created a government that is doing this to us. It is the government we empowered that created a Supreme Court that ruled in favor of Citizens United; that privileges private ownership over the common good; that fast-tracks enormous projects at great environmental cost in order to assure us of cheap energy to fuel our out-of-control consumption."
Here David Treuer unveils that he truly delusional and completely out of touch with reality. We created a government that sicks attack dogs on us? We created a government that fires water cannons at us in freezing temperatures? When exactly does David Treuer believe this happened? Last I checked the Constitutional Convention for this country was held in secret by a group of slave-owning white men who were bent on genocide of the Indian people. In fact, at that very Constitutional Convention the principal framer James Madison espoused that the "primary purpose of this government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority." Madison can rest at ease knowing that even all these centuries later the minority of the opulent are still afforded ample protection.
In summary this is an awful book!
Bobby Matthews is the counter narrative to AIM Leader Dennis Banks. In fact Treuer spends an inordinate amount of time telling us about the amazing Bobby Matthews who, according to the author, is the greatest outdoorsman in the world. After droning on and on about the outdoorsman's prowess in finding leaches and pine cones Treuer writes, "Although Bobby was around the same age as the activists who came up in the 1960s and 1970s, he didn't have much to do with them or their movements." In fact Matthews tells Treuer that he didn't know Dennis Banks and had never met him.
So at a time of incredible violence against native peoples when the per capita murder rate was around 20 times the national average the author's hero has zero involvement in the struggles to curtail that violence. Apparently Bobby Matthews was too busy learning how to exploit the natural world around him to be bothered with activism. At one point in the book the author gives us this incredible insight into the mind of Bobby Matthews,
"You know, Dave, the Creator or God or whatever you call it made the universe and all the beings in it and put this tree here and that bush there and he made the beavers and the deer and the plants that are good to eat and the ones that are good for medicine. He made all of it and it is beautiful! Also-fucking-lutely beautiful. And I look out over that creation and sometimes I don't see it like other people do. I look out at all of it and what I see is money. And by God I am going to find a way to liberate it out of there."
This is the modern native hero presented to us by David Treuer. A man who looks at this beautiful natural world--a world we are quickly destroying--and he sees money. Contrast that with an actual native hero of the Poncas tribe. Back in 1879 Standing Bear had this to say,
"I have not wished to give even a part of it[the land] to the Great Father, Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land..."
That's a long way to go in just over a century; from knowing that no amount of money could equal the value of a living planet versus our modern native hero who looks at nature and sees nothing but money. This eager acceptance of the values of Capitalism and the destructive ways of our dominant culture of death are further explored on the topic of casinos. The author takes a moment in the book to answer questions he often hears regarding casinos. One such question is, have casinos destroyed Indian Culture?
Treuer's response is telling: "That's a stupid question. Has commerce generally destroyed American, Chinese, German or French Culture?" To begin with the author conflates commerce with gambling. There's a marked difference between manufacturing goods that people want and preying on the systemic poverty in our society with games of chance. The fact that he doesn't even attempt to answer the question tells us a lot about David Treuer if the previous quote from his friend Bobby Matthews didn't already tell us enough. The author seems content with a version of indigenous life that embraces capitalism even while it's destroying the natural world and causing the world's sixth extinction event.
That leads me directly to the author's fetishizing of sovereignty. There are countless references to sovereignty and yet it's never really defined by the author. It's just accepted as a general good thing that all good people should want. As Treuer writes, "To believe in sovereignty, to let it inform and define not only ones political and legal existence but also one's community, to move through the world imbued with the dignity of that reality, is to resolve one of the major contradictions of modern Indian life: it is to find a way to be Indian and modern simultaneously."
But what is sovereignty? According to anthropologist David Graeber in his recent work on Kings, "...the most elegant definition is that recently proposed by Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat, 'in its minimal sense, sovereignty is simply the recognition of the right to exercise violence with impunity." Hidden underneath much of what Treuer writes is really this desire for violence with impunity. It's that same basic belief that allows Bobby Matthews to kill nature in the pursuit of money or allows a small clique of leaders within a particular tribe to exploit the growing inequality and poverty in this country with games of chance. They are either killing nature or killing hope, but it's violence just the same. The author is very clear about this. Later on he tells us about a family, "in 2008 who had fractional interest in a 56 acre parcel of land." They wanted to "develop" that land. As Treuer puts it, "They were doing exactly what one hopes people do with their property: securing and developing it for future generations, to make the land work for them."
Does any of that sound very indigenous? Remember this is supposed to be the stories that give us hope about the current state of native Americans. And yet isn't this exactly the mindset of the very first Europeans who showed up here 500 years ago ready to "develop" this land? And in that 500 years of development can anyone realistically say it's better now?
Lastly I took great issue with the ways in which Treuer treats Indian activists from those in AIM to the more recent Water Protectors who stood up at Standing Rock to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Honestly Treuer's treatment of these subjects is so bad I don't even know where to start. We can begin with the fact that Treuer provides the version of events squarely from the point of view of the FBI. The reader is never given the fact that FBI agents Coler and Williams never identified themselves or that there was a history of violence on the reservation and that Peltier and other members of AIM were brought in specifically to fight against that violence which went unmolested by FBI agents.
This is really illustrated by Treuer's description of how authorities managed to extradite Peltier from Canada. According to the author, "...the federal government supplied the Canadians with some very sketchy evidence." In reality, according to Amnesty International the key testimony used to extradite Peltier from Canada was perjured. In fact the woman they forced to perjure herself didn't even know Leonard Peltier. That is agents of the Federal Government forced a woman to lie in order to kidnap a man seeking asylum from political attack. Sketchy doesn't begin to encapsulate the deceitful and violent tactics of the FBI during this time. But it gets worse.
Treuer goes on to tell us,"The prosecution proved that Peltier had motive to kill the agents, considering his previous warrants and charges. And they proved Peltier was the only one who carried and used an AR-15 assault rifle during the firefight; a casing from the gun had been found in the trunk of the agents' car, and ballistics also showed that the men had been executed with that kind of rifle." In other words Treuer goes all out to convince his readers that Leonard Peltier was definitely guilty. The problem is that nearly everything in the above paragraph is false. Motive? By the loose interpretation given by our author I would imagine you could prove that any and all natives have motive to kill federal agents. But the rest is patently false. There were other AR-15's recovered from the sight. The witnesses against Peltier recanted and testified that they were coerced into testifying against Peltier. The ballistics tests were shown to have been shoddy and inconclusive at best. And in subsequent motions the government has admitted that it does not know who shot the fatal bullets into the two FBI agents.
Just to review. The FBI lied and coerced multiple witnesses. They lied about what prompted the two agents to enter the ranch. They withheld hundreds of thousands of pages from the defense as a matter of "national security." The omitted key exculpatory evidence throughout the proceedings. And yet our author wants us to believe their story hook line and sinker. Whether you believe that Leonard Peltier was a noble man fighting for the dignity of his people or not, the facts are that he never received a fair trial and that very salient fact is completely omitted by David Treuer.
But Treuer wasn't done shitting on AIM and it's leadership. His very next chapter deals with the death of Anna Mae Aquash. Leading up to her death it had been rumored that she was an FBI informant. The author continues his false facade of objectivity when he very carefully mentions that this was, "Not without cause: COINTELPRO (the counterintelligence program run by the FBI meant to disrupt and discredit domestic political organizations) had indeed infiltrated AIM and the Black Panthers and other political dissident and protest groups. However, there was no evidence (then or later) that Aqash was anything other than what she appeared to be: a dreamy, fierce, committed Indian woman."
Let's begin with Treuer's depiction of COINTELPRO. He limits the program to disrupt and discredit. Doesn't sound so bad, right? He fails to mention the outright political assassinations used against members of the Black Panther Party. He also doesn't mention the outright extortion used, for instance, when the FBI attempted to force Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to commit suicide. Just a little disruption and discrediting, according to Treuer; nothing too bad! And he goes to bat for the FBI when he doubles down on the belief that "there is no evidence that Aquash was anything other than what she appeared to be..." That may very well be true.
In fact there has been no definitive proof that Aqash was an informant. But there's more to the story. First of all Aquash was an outsider. She appears almost out of nowhere and knows almost no one in the movement. There are also a number of instances where she gets out of jail much faster than her co-conspirators. And then there is the very real tool of inducing paranoia within political groups that the FBI utilized. I'm not saying Aquash was or was not an informant. That's really irrelevant here. The fact is given the context of this era, the dirty tricks played by the FBI, it would have been evident to people at the time that her death at the hands of AIM would be a likely outcome. What I'm really trying to say here is that Treuer completely ignores the very causal connection between the dirty tricks played by the FBI through its COINTEL program and the violence that often resulted.
David Treuer sums it all up:
"To me, the shootout at the Jumping Bull compound and Anna Mae Aqash's murder can't be justified as an expression of AIM's (often violent) direct action, their street theater, their agitprop. It was just violence, the result of violent men who didn't want to go to jail."
Let's just recall that this man's highest principal is the right to exercise violence with impunity. Instead of analyzing the violence of the state--a long and bloody history of violence against natives--he blames the victims. He also seems to get stuck on the idea of "men who don't want to go to jail" as if there are groups of people out there who do want to go to jail.
The author goes on to shit on the rest of native activism. He either has nothing good to say or he doesn't even mention it. He does, however, devote a chapter in his awful book to the brave water protectors at Standing Rock who attempted to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). An author who seems to at least have some grasp on native history on this continent is seemingly perplexed by the lack of cooperation on the part of tribal leaders. In short Tribal Chairman David Archambault and tribal historic preservation officer Waste Win Young dragged their feet through the entire process. This really stumps our author who goes on to write,
"I don't know why Young and tribal chairman David Archambault II didn't meet or consult with DAPL when the window to consult was open." It's hard to believe a supposedly earnest and educated native wrote that sentence of centuries of having native lands and minerals stolen from them. But he really wrote that! Centuries of duplicity, broken treaties and violence shouldn't be a deterrent from negotiating once again on your sacred land!
"Things got violent fast," he writes. Things got violent. What things? He explicitly points out that,"The protestors were determinedly anti-violence and pro-peaceful direct action; the private security teams, not so much. Not so much? He goes on to list the violence these security teams unleashed on the peaceful water protectors: "They loosed attack dogs on protestors. The activists were pepper-sprayed, arrested, hosed down with water cannons, and who with rubber bullets." So did things get violent? Or did the private property owners get violent?
Never fear our intrepid author will help us put this all in perspective:
"The most important part of this whole sordid process to note and notice is not what the government is willing to do to Indians, or what the government is willing to allow to happen to the land and the water. It is that we created a government that is doing this to us. It is the government we empowered that created a Supreme Court that ruled in favor of Citizens United; that privileges private ownership over the common good; that fast-tracks enormous projects at great environmental cost in order to assure us of cheap energy to fuel our out-of-control consumption."
Here David Treuer unveils that he truly delusional and completely out of touch with reality. We created a government that sicks attack dogs on us? We created a government that fires water cannons at us in freezing temperatures? When exactly does David Treuer believe this happened? Last I checked the Constitutional Convention for this country was held in secret by a group of slave-owning white men who were bent on genocide of the Indian people. In fact, at that very Constitutional Convention the principal framer James Madison espoused that the "primary purpose of this government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority." Madison can rest at ease knowing that even all these centuries later the minority of the opulent are still afforded ample protection.
In summary this is an awful book!
May 21, 2019
How can I not know the things written here? As Anglo-Americans, we've been taught such lies and shaded stories. This book gives a different side, another heart-breaking view of all the evil done by Europeans when they arrived in America. I was fascinated to learn so much and horrified that I didn't know it.
While I would like to hand this book to everyone and say, "read this," it isn't an easy read. More like a history book than a personal narrative (of which I would have liked more), its long and detailed and takes some work to make it through. I could see Treuer's training in this book (anthropology PhD).
In the end, though, the readers who put in the time and effort will be rewarded with a fuller understanding of history, the present, and the future. Treuer waxes hopeful and forward looking, which is a great counterpoint to the horrors of history.
While I would like to hand this book to everyone and say, "read this," it isn't an easy read. More like a history book than a personal narrative (of which I would have liked more), its long and detailed and takes some work to make it through. I could see Treuer's training in this book (anthropology PhD).
In the end, though, the readers who put in the time and effort will be rewarded with a fuller understanding of history, the present, and the future. Treuer waxes hopeful and forward looking, which is a great counterpoint to the horrors of history.
April 23, 2021
While aware of the mistreatment and decimation of indigenous people in our country perpetrated by those coming from other countries, I'd never read a nonfiction book about that history until now. This book was both informative and interesting, during 18 hours of listening.
The book offers decades of history, from the early days when Native Americans interacted with settlers--often to their own detriment--and progresses to recent years. It reports on how individuals, companies, the government and the military took land, broke contracts, wiped out tribes and food sources, forced children into boarding schools, brought disease, and generally whittled away at the culture and livelihood of an entire people. It elaborates on what relocation to reservations caused and how the indigenous people suffered at the hands of the dominant culture. It provides a global view of historical events as well as up close views of individuals, a nice mix of academic with more personal.
But it also shines a glowing light on how those who lived endured, adapted, and looked for ways to exist, and even thrive; finding cracks in the walls erected by those who failed to value their existence and humanity. As a culture, some have landed on their feet, and are helping others do the same.
This audiobook was even more appreciated as I listened while traveling through some of the country where the battles occurred, where the reservations were created; the arid and inhospitable land they were pushed onto, away from life-sustaining water and pliable soil. That they survived at all with that mistreatment is a testament to their resilience.
I did get extremely appalled at the actions of our government, repeatedly, in their dealings with this population of people. I wish I could say we've evolved, but sadly, I don't think we have.
The book offers decades of history, from the early days when Native Americans interacted with settlers--often to their own detriment--and progresses to recent years. It reports on how individuals, companies, the government and the military took land, broke contracts, wiped out tribes and food sources, forced children into boarding schools, brought disease, and generally whittled away at the culture and livelihood of an entire people. It elaborates on what relocation to reservations caused and how the indigenous people suffered at the hands of the dominant culture. It provides a global view of historical events as well as up close views of individuals, a nice mix of academic with more personal.
But it also shines a glowing light on how those who lived endured, adapted, and looked for ways to exist, and even thrive; finding cracks in the walls erected by those who failed to value their existence and humanity. As a culture, some have landed on their feet, and are helping others do the same.
This audiobook was even more appreciated as I listened while traveling through some of the country where the battles occurred, where the reservations were created; the arid and inhospitable land they were pushed onto, away from life-sustaining water and pliable soil. That they survived at all with that mistreatment is a testament to their resilience.
I did get extremely appalled at the actions of our government, repeatedly, in their dealings with this population of people. I wish I could say we've evolved, but sadly, I don't think we have.
May 20, 2020
This seemed like two books combined into one. The first book is a historical overview of the Native American experience from colonization to Standing Rock. The second book is a an account of time that he has spent with other Native Americans--not ones of note, but just regular people struggling to make their lives better. The problem is that these accounts are woven together with the historical overview, and the personal accounts often have little or no bearing on what's happening in the historical overview. When the book switches perspectives, it quite jarring. Treuer is a good writer, but I would have preferred to read this as two books rather than as one.
November 15, 2023
THIS is the book to read on Native American history.
A book written in response to Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a phenomenal account of Native American history that address misconceptions and highlights an altogether different narrative of Native American lives. Treuer himself is Ojibwe and to read his insights is mesmerising. He is a brilliant writer and I could not stop reading this marvellous book - he tackles stereotypes and makes connections with such a unique voice and I was truly engrossed.
A book written in response to Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a phenomenal account of Native American history that address misconceptions and highlights an altogether different narrative of Native American lives. Treuer himself is Ojibwe and to read his insights is mesmerising. He is a brilliant writer and I could not stop reading this marvellous book - he tackles stereotypes and makes connections with such a unique voice and I was truly engrossed.
February 1, 2020
This excellent book picks up where "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" left off. It begins after the Wounded Knee massacre and its point is to document the fact that Native American history did not end at the end of the 19th Century, that it continued, amidst more bad decisions and cultural genocide by the government. Treuer documents how Native Americans have faired over the last century. His book is a statement about not alone have all the real Indians have not died off but are alive and well and making their way in the world. Although most still are struggling, many are making their way in the world and finding a way to be an Indian and an American. Many tribes have done well with casinos and other ventures. Native Americans have begun to reclaim their history and their culture and find ways to find their own American dream. This is a very well written and researched book and something that all Americans should read.
November 30, 2021
Read through page 268, but with nearly 200 pages still to go I couldn’t do it with this book and was relieved to stop forcing myself through it.
This book purports to be a different kind of history of Native America, one focused on Native Americans’ real lives and agency and existence in the modern world, but for the most part it’s just more of the same.
First, despite purportedly being a history from 1890 to the present, the entire first 100 pages (out of 455 in the main text) explicitly summarize pre-1890 history, as do most of the following 75, which are labeled as covering the years 1891-1934.
Second, despite the author’s claim at the beginning that he wants “to see Indian life as more than a legacy of loss and pain”—and the fact that he’s Ojibwe himself—the book still represents Native American life as the stereotypical “peaceful and uneventful before the white man showed up, full of death and oppression afterwards.” If it focuses less on massacres and more on unjust government policies, it is nevertheless a chronicle of oppression, loss and pain, in which Native Americans are rarely shown with agency unless they are perpetrating violence. And those 100 pages explicitly devoted to pre-1890 history, bizarrely, mostly just describe pre-contact tribes’ diets and migration patterns. Beside a really exceptional history of the Americas like Charles Mann’s 1491—in which the author made a point of writing the same type of history we write about Europe and Asia, you know, with discussion of technology and government and society—this book compares poorly. Writing a “history” of pre-1890 Native America that’s based almost entirely on archaeology (plus the occasional massacre) gives the impression of people who don’t have a history, or who aren’t even people (seriously, diet and habitat? Every species has those), regardless of vague generalizations to the contrary.
Third, and relatedly, the author’s choice of what information to include and what to leave out is bizarre. The one pre-contact event discussed is the founding of the Iroquois* League, but he only names the leaders involved, without a word about the actual governmental structure resulting. He doesn’t even reference its influence on the later structure of the U.S. government, which for someone trying to lift up Native American history is a bizarre thing not to claim. And despite that initial talk about focusing on resilience, he passes up the opportunity to discuss people who have done well: for instance, there’s a brief reference to the Osage becoming wealthy on oil reserves, without any discussion of how this has affected the tribe or anyone in it, and then they are not discussed for the rest of the book (I checked the index to make sure).
And what achievement does he call attention to instead? Stone axes. No, seriously. In reference to early trade between Native Americans and European traders: “European knives were no better at cutting. European axes were no better at felling” (45). Way to make a wild claim (that stone tools are just as good as metal ones, including for chopping down trees) while pretending you aren’t (by hiding it behind vague assertions that, without the background knowledge to realize what he’s talking about, just make it sound like he’s saying European people aren’t better) and therefore entirely fail to back it up.
Finally, although the pages turn fairly quickly for a history of this length, I simply didn’t find the author’s writing style compelling. In particular, he inserts these human-interest bits about himself traveling about interviewing people, but manages to make them utterly uninteresting and mundane. Likewise, much of the historical information raises questions that he doesn’t follow up on. The writing overall is short on specifics—particularly for readers who already have some knowledge of Native American history—so that the author’s feelings about it all come through far more clearly than the facts.
Hopefully An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States will be better.
* Also inconsistent: whether the author refers to tribes by the names they use for themselves. He always does this for the Ojibwe (his own), about half the time for the Diné (which seems likely to make things even more confusing for readers who also see “Navajo” in there and don’t realize we’re talking about the same group), and rarely to never for most of the rest. I have no idea why.
This book purports to be a different kind of history of Native America, one focused on Native Americans’ real lives and agency and existence in the modern world, but for the most part it’s just more of the same.
First, despite purportedly being a history from 1890 to the present, the entire first 100 pages (out of 455 in the main text) explicitly summarize pre-1890 history, as do most of the following 75, which are labeled as covering the years 1891-1934.
Second, despite the author’s claim at the beginning that he wants “to see Indian life as more than a legacy of loss and pain”—and the fact that he’s Ojibwe himself—the book still represents Native American life as the stereotypical “peaceful and uneventful before the white man showed up, full of death and oppression afterwards.” If it focuses less on massacres and more on unjust government policies, it is nevertheless a chronicle of oppression, loss and pain, in which Native Americans are rarely shown with agency unless they are perpetrating violence. And those 100 pages explicitly devoted to pre-1890 history, bizarrely, mostly just describe pre-contact tribes’ diets and migration patterns. Beside a really exceptional history of the Americas like Charles Mann’s 1491—in which the author made a point of writing the same type of history we write about Europe and Asia, you know, with discussion of technology and government and society—this book compares poorly. Writing a “history” of pre-1890 Native America that’s based almost entirely on archaeology (plus the occasional massacre) gives the impression of people who don’t have a history, or who aren’t even people (seriously, diet and habitat? Every species has those), regardless of vague generalizations to the contrary.
Third, and relatedly, the author’s choice of what information to include and what to leave out is bizarre. The one pre-contact event discussed is the founding of the Iroquois* League, but he only names the leaders involved, without a word about the actual governmental structure resulting. He doesn’t even reference its influence on the later structure of the U.S. government, which for someone trying to lift up Native American history is a bizarre thing not to claim. And despite that initial talk about focusing on resilience, he passes up the opportunity to discuss people who have done well: for instance, there’s a brief reference to the Osage becoming wealthy on oil reserves, without any discussion of how this has affected the tribe or anyone in it, and then they are not discussed for the rest of the book (I checked the index to make sure).
And what achievement does he call attention to instead? Stone axes. No, seriously. In reference to early trade between Native Americans and European traders: “European knives were no better at cutting. European axes were no better at felling” (45). Way to make a wild claim (that stone tools are just as good as metal ones, including for chopping down trees) while pretending you aren’t (by hiding it behind vague assertions that, without the background knowledge to realize what he’s talking about, just make it sound like he’s saying European people aren’t better) and therefore entirely fail to back it up.
Finally, although the pages turn fairly quickly for a history of this length, I simply didn’t find the author’s writing style compelling. In particular, he inserts these human-interest bits about himself traveling about interviewing people, but manages to make them utterly uninteresting and mundane. Likewise, much of the historical information raises questions that he doesn’t follow up on. The writing overall is short on specifics—particularly for readers who already have some knowledge of Native American history—so that the author’s feelings about it all come through far more clearly than the facts.
Hopefully An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States will be better.
* Also inconsistent: whether the author refers to tribes by the names they use for themselves. He always does this for the Ojibwe (his own), about half the time for the Diné (which seems likely to make things even more confusing for readers who also see “Navajo” in there and don’t realize we’re talking about the same group), and rarely to never for most of the rest. I have no idea why.
June 16, 2019
A huge disappointment to me, and I expect I'll be the outlier in my response. I've liked and learned from Treuer's previous work and I'm sympathetic to his project of rewriting Dee Brown's The Heart of Wounded Knee in a way that puts the center of the story in Native American survival.
Having said hat, the book just flat didn't work for me. Part of it is that, although the subtitle indicates the book will pick up in 1890, roughly when Brown's ends, something close to a quarter of it provides an overview of Native nations prior to that date; something like the next quarter emphasizes the oppressiveness and exploitation of the years through Termination and Removal. Although Treuer pauses from time to time reiterate the point that none of that resulted in the final destruction of the Native nations, it's basically a familiar story. Which, while true enough, has been told and retold.
The second problem involves the way Treuer writes history. He's not an academic historian and that's not in itself a problem. But there are many places where he skims the surface of stories that readers who know the academic literature will see as more complicated than Treuer's version acknowledges. He says up front that he's going to incorporate personal and family stories as well as more or less journalistic reports on conversations with contemporary Native Americans. I'm fine with that approach in theory, but the choice of when to include which stories seems almost random. And the space spent on them results in skipping over or entirely ignoring important parts of the story. To cite one instance, readers relying on this book for their sense of post-WWII Native life would conclude that nothing much happened between the termination of the Menominee and the rise of the American Indian Movement.
Finally, while I appreciate his decision to focus on "ordinary" (sort of, which is the point) Native Americans, for me the story also includes the writers and intellectuals who have charted some of the paths the new "warriors"--politicians and activists and tribal elders--have followed, among them N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko.
Having said hat, the book just flat didn't work for me. Part of it is that, although the subtitle indicates the book will pick up in 1890, roughly when Brown's ends, something close to a quarter of it provides an overview of Native nations prior to that date; something like the next quarter emphasizes the oppressiveness and exploitation of the years through Termination and Removal. Although Treuer pauses from time to time reiterate the point that none of that resulted in the final destruction of the Native nations, it's basically a familiar story. Which, while true enough, has been told and retold.
The second problem involves the way Treuer writes history. He's not an academic historian and that's not in itself a problem. But there are many places where he skims the surface of stories that readers who know the academic literature will see as more complicated than Treuer's version acknowledges. He says up front that he's going to incorporate personal and family stories as well as more or less journalistic reports on conversations with contemporary Native Americans. I'm fine with that approach in theory, but the choice of when to include which stories seems almost random. And the space spent on them results in skipping over or entirely ignoring important parts of the story. To cite one instance, readers relying on this book for their sense of post-WWII Native life would conclude that nothing much happened between the termination of the Menominee and the rise of the American Indian Movement.
Finally, while I appreciate his decision to focus on "ordinary" (sort of, which is the point) Native Americans, for me the story also includes the writers and intellectuals who have charted some of the paths the new "warriors"--politicians and activists and tribal elders--have followed, among them N. Scott Momaday, Simon Ortiz and Leslie Marmon Silko.
June 30, 2019
This is a great book if you want to learn about Native Americans and their history since Wounded Knee in 1890. Much of it is first person, when the author speaks with a variety of fellow Native Americans on a variety of subjects. The author also does a great job of laying out the history of Native American tribes after Wounded Knee, including ever-changing government policies, including one called "termination," and how various tribes responded. He is also honest about problems besetting Native Americans, both urban and on reservations. And he is a great writer.
May 29, 2020
Thoughts soon.
March 3, 2019
David Treuer, an Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation, says he doesn't want a new history of North American indigenous tribes to follow the trajectory of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or Peter Matthiessen's In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Rather than emphasize tragedy and the repression of Indians through colonial and U.S. history, Treuer wants to focus on the survival and victory of North American tribes, even if victories can seem rather small at times. In any event, Treur's book is less a history than a personal narrative combined with threads that try to carry the reader through the recent history of tribes in the aftermath of the 1890 defeat at Wounded Knee.
The first part of the book does try to provide a history of tribes from prehistoric settlements to the 19th-century defeat of the Plains tribes. There are places where Treuer does a great job, particularly with the Seminoles in Florida, and the melding of tribes west of the Mississippi following the Trail of Tears. Nevertheless, there are gaps here, even in a recap not intended to be comprehensive. Where is Tecumseh, and the battles around the Great Lakes? Where is Little Turtle, and the battles to suppress the Miamis in southern Indiana and Ohio? These are not minor quibbles, because Americans know so little of Native American histories, they deserve a more thorough introductory chapter. I'm willing to bet Treuer may have been limited by an editor and publisher that thought the book was too long already, but if so, he should have been given the freedom to make sure his lay of the land was complete.
Not every reader is going to like the way Treuer hops back and forth between post-Wounded Knee histories and modern tales of Indians coming to terms with the 21st century, but I find the style fascinating. Some of his areas of focus, however, seem to be a little odd. The section on "Fighting Life," for example, may have been intended to show how the spirit of the warrior was sublimated on the negative side by boxing and barroom brawls, and on the positive side by Indian involvement in the two world wars, but the focus seemed a bit misplaced to me. The spirit of Sparta has been quashed in every culture and every race to some extent in the 21st century, and I would argue that this is a good thing. Warrior culture is always bound up in male privilege and dominance, and I think it's time to just de-emphasize that side of any human culture, incuding Native American culture.
Treuer is one of our few good sources for explaining how allotment, forced removal of children to Indian Schools, and 1950s-era "termination" of treaties were as much aspects of attempted Indian genocide as were the 1920s Jim Crow laws for African-Americans. Treuer is fair in pointing out that there were periods, particularly in the 1930s, when the government tried to atone in part for these actions, but in general, he sees the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal agents as tools of oppression.
The author provides a good historical context for understanding the rise of the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s, but he is a young Indian who was not born during the 1972-76 protests, so he holds no romantic thoughts regarding AIM leaders. He explains the role of FBI COINTELPRO and Dick Wilson's GOONs. but he also sees people like Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Leonard Peltier as violence-prone criminals deserving little but scorn. He also incorporates some of the more recent findings of the Denver Post and other media sources in showing that the killing of Anna Mae Aquash was entirely an inside-job assassination by members of AIM, not an FBI act as previously believed.
Treuer goes even further in slaughtering sacred cows in the section on "Boom City," when he addresses the internal battles of the Nooksack Tribe, and the effort of former tribal chairman Bob Kelly to disenfranchise more than 300 tribal members. The whole concept of trying to determine a specific blood quanta for tribal legitimacy is largely carried out in order to allow tribes to share casino wealth with fewer people, Treuer says. Tribal membership at a time when many Indian languages are dying should not be determined solely by purity of bloodline, but on how much culture a local citizen shares with the tribe. Obviously, Caucasians should be excluded, but tribal leaders like Kelly are nothing but greedy bastards in Treuer's eyes. And Treuer has a word for those well-meaning whites who would try to claim that casinos, and possible marijuana outlets of the future, are "destroying" traditional culture. Anything that helps tribes to become self-sufficient should be considered a good thing, at least in Treuer's eyes.
The final section of Treuer's book is called 'Digital Indians, 1990-2018,' but it is not focused on tribes using digital media in the sense one might think. Rather, Treuer talks about how individual Indians use social media to develop new models of healthy living, including good diet and exercise, to avoid the traps of diabetes and heart disease that have plagued so many middle-agers and elders. He moves from this focus to a larger focus of building a digital opposition to the Keystone pipeline. The primary focus here is on the many sins of DAPL, Energy Partners, and the U.S. and Canadian governments, but once again, Treuer does not hesitate to call out tribal bureaucratic behavior. Treuer said that too many tribal leaders sought to avoid early meetings with the Army Corps of Engineers or BIA, because it would mean hard work. Live your life as a constant protest, Treuer said, but never hesitate to engage directly with your adversary because you think it might make your self-image less romantic, or because you shy away from hard work. Treuer lays out the hard work for tribal members moving forward, but he describes that work as a joyful thing. Such a message is useful to anyone who wants to build a life of activism, and not just Native Americans.
The first part of the book does try to provide a history of tribes from prehistoric settlements to the 19th-century defeat of the Plains tribes. There are places where Treuer does a great job, particularly with the Seminoles in Florida, and the melding of tribes west of the Mississippi following the Trail of Tears. Nevertheless, there are gaps here, even in a recap not intended to be comprehensive. Where is Tecumseh, and the battles around the Great Lakes? Where is Little Turtle, and the battles to suppress the Miamis in southern Indiana and Ohio? These are not minor quibbles, because Americans know so little of Native American histories, they deserve a more thorough introductory chapter. I'm willing to bet Treuer may have been limited by an editor and publisher that thought the book was too long already, but if so, he should have been given the freedom to make sure his lay of the land was complete.
Not every reader is going to like the way Treuer hops back and forth between post-Wounded Knee histories and modern tales of Indians coming to terms with the 21st century, but I find the style fascinating. Some of his areas of focus, however, seem to be a little odd. The section on "Fighting Life," for example, may have been intended to show how the spirit of the warrior was sublimated on the negative side by boxing and barroom brawls, and on the positive side by Indian involvement in the two world wars, but the focus seemed a bit misplaced to me. The spirit of Sparta has been quashed in every culture and every race to some extent in the 21st century, and I would argue that this is a good thing. Warrior culture is always bound up in male privilege and dominance, and I think it's time to just de-emphasize that side of any human culture, incuding Native American culture.
Treuer is one of our few good sources for explaining how allotment, forced removal of children to Indian Schools, and 1950s-era "termination" of treaties were as much aspects of attempted Indian genocide as were the 1920s Jim Crow laws for African-Americans. Treuer is fair in pointing out that there were periods, particularly in the 1930s, when the government tried to atone in part for these actions, but in general, he sees the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal agents as tools of oppression.
The author provides a good historical context for understanding the rise of the American Indian Movement in the early 1970s, but he is a young Indian who was not born during the 1972-76 protests, so he holds no romantic thoughts regarding AIM leaders. He explains the role of FBI COINTELPRO and Dick Wilson's GOONs. but he also sees people like Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and Leonard Peltier as violence-prone criminals deserving little but scorn. He also incorporates some of the more recent findings of the Denver Post and other media sources in showing that the killing of Anna Mae Aquash was entirely an inside-job assassination by members of AIM, not an FBI act as previously believed.
Treuer goes even further in slaughtering sacred cows in the section on "Boom City," when he addresses the internal battles of the Nooksack Tribe, and the effort of former tribal chairman Bob Kelly to disenfranchise more than 300 tribal members. The whole concept of trying to determine a specific blood quanta for tribal legitimacy is largely carried out in order to allow tribes to share casino wealth with fewer people, Treuer says. Tribal membership at a time when many Indian languages are dying should not be determined solely by purity of bloodline, but on how much culture a local citizen shares with the tribe. Obviously, Caucasians should be excluded, but tribal leaders like Kelly are nothing but greedy bastards in Treuer's eyes. And Treuer has a word for those well-meaning whites who would try to claim that casinos, and possible marijuana outlets of the future, are "destroying" traditional culture. Anything that helps tribes to become self-sufficient should be considered a good thing, at least in Treuer's eyes.
The final section of Treuer's book is called 'Digital Indians, 1990-2018,' but it is not focused on tribes using digital media in the sense one might think. Rather, Treuer talks about how individual Indians use social media to develop new models of healthy living, including good diet and exercise, to avoid the traps of diabetes and heart disease that have plagued so many middle-agers and elders. He moves from this focus to a larger focus of building a digital opposition to the Keystone pipeline. The primary focus here is on the many sins of DAPL, Energy Partners, and the U.S. and Canadian governments, but once again, Treuer does not hesitate to call out tribal bureaucratic behavior. Treuer said that too many tribal leaders sought to avoid early meetings with the Army Corps of Engineers or BIA, because it would mean hard work. Live your life as a constant protest, Treuer said, but never hesitate to engage directly with your adversary because you think it might make your self-image less romantic, or because you shy away from hard work. Treuer lays out the hard work for tribal members moving forward, but he describes that work as a joyful thing. Such a message is useful to anyone who wants to build a life of activism, and not just Native Americans.
August 23, 2021
David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a significant and beautiful statement that Native Americans exist despite all our country's efforts to make them not.
For many historians, Native culture and history ended when the Native tribes were defeated and slaughtered at Wounded Knee in 1890. But through extensive anthropological and ethnographic research, Treuer meticulously tells the stories of Native Americans as they were forced into abusive educational systems, poverty, and loss of land. And then proceeded to fight back, take pride in their identities, and reconnect with and fight for their culture and people. Treuer tells the stories of allotment, termination laws, relocation laws, treaty violations, legal suits, and casinos, fireworks, and marijuana to show that Native Americans are still here and will continue to be here as they fight for their tribes and their identities.
Treuer research is incredible and his storytelling is rich in a way that makes you feel as though you aren't reading history at all. But I walked away from this book wishing for a bit more in two regards. First, it is alarming at how little Treuer discusses Native women activists in his book - not even naming the likes of Madonna Thunder Hawk or Winona LaDuke. Native women have always served as a backbone - and often leaders - of the Native rights movement so leaving this out seems like a glaring error. Additionally, much of the later history especially regarding the various activist movements felt surface level at points, likely, I assume, cut for length requirements. And while I truly loved the opening 100-page historical accounting of Native tribes and the numerous anecdotal stories from Treuer's life, I couldn't help but think that a book that reports to be a retelling of Native history after 1890 ought to limit aspects that don't directly account for this so that time and pages and can be dedicated to more detail of this period.
Nonetheless, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is truly a remarkable book. I am thankful that I read it because I learned so much that I hadn't known before. This is a book that ought to be requirement reading for all Americans lest we forget who we are, what we did, and where we came from.
For many historians, Native culture and history ended when the Native tribes were defeated and slaughtered at Wounded Knee in 1890. But through extensive anthropological and ethnographic research, Treuer meticulously tells the stories of Native Americans as they were forced into abusive educational systems, poverty, and loss of land. And then proceeded to fight back, take pride in their identities, and reconnect with and fight for their culture and people. Treuer tells the stories of allotment, termination laws, relocation laws, treaty violations, legal suits, and casinos, fireworks, and marijuana to show that Native Americans are still here and will continue to be here as they fight for their tribes and their identities.
Treuer research is incredible and his storytelling is rich in a way that makes you feel as though you aren't reading history at all. But I walked away from this book wishing for a bit more in two regards. First, it is alarming at how little Treuer discusses Native women activists in his book - not even naming the likes of Madonna Thunder Hawk or Winona LaDuke. Native women have always served as a backbone - and often leaders - of the Native rights movement so leaving this out seems like a glaring error. Additionally, much of the later history especially regarding the various activist movements felt surface level at points, likely, I assume, cut for length requirements. And while I truly loved the opening 100-page historical accounting of Native tribes and the numerous anecdotal stories from Treuer's life, I couldn't help but think that a book that reports to be a retelling of Native history after 1890 ought to limit aspects that don't directly account for this so that time and pages and can be dedicated to more detail of this period.
Nonetheless, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is truly a remarkable book. I am thankful that I read it because I learned so much that I hadn't known before. This is a book that ought to be requirement reading for all Americans lest we forget who we are, what we did, and where we came from.
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June 28, 2023What happened to the Native American community following Wounded Knee, and feels like Treuer took a hard, clear look. The one statistic that stays with you is that there are estimated to have been five million Indigenous people in North America in 1500. By 1900, there were less than a quarter of one million. I don't know what you would call that other than genocide, but as Treuer writes, his community spent the second half of the last century coming to terms with being both Native Americans and Americans, and he finds reason to hope that that community will only grow in strength and number.
It bothered me that he made only one mention of Alaska. I hope there is an Alaskan David Treuer writing his or her own history right now.
It bothered me that he made only one mention of Alaska. I hope there is an Alaskan David Treuer writing his or her own history right now.
May 17, 2020
With broad strokes, Treuer recounts the history of the native peoples in the portion of North America that would become the contiguous states of the U.S.A. His focus is on how various groups responded to, suffered from, resisted, accommodated and continue to live with their encounter with those who invaded and settled in their land. Woven into this survey are the stories of contemporary individuals who are living this legacy. Although the history was familiar to me, this book filled in many gaps in my understanding.
June 26, 2022
Many people are familiar with or have read Dee Brown’s famous 1970 book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” which describes the last century or so of the conflicts between Native Americans and the United States government. That book ends, however, in 1890, with the Wounded Knee Massacre. That event became symbolic of the “end” of the American Indian, as if they sort of vanished into thin air after that. Once I finished that book recently I wondered, what has become of Native Americans over the last century since that tragic event? I was grateful to find this book, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” which seeks to answer that question. And what an incredible title for this book - instead of the heart being buried, this book sought to give a "heartbeat" back to Native Americans in the modern consciousness and explain what they’ve collectively and individually faced over the decades since.
Author David Treuer first begins with a section called “Narrating the Apocalypse” which explains as much as we know and as far back as we can go about Native life prior to the arrival of Europeans. I found this section fascinating and learned so much. After this, he summarizes essentially up through where Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee left off and then begins in full in 1891, right after that fateful event. He then takes us through the decades following, organizing them as certain “phases” of history played out e.g. the boarding school system, World War II, etc. This book really shines in its telling of history in a linear fashion. I loved learning, for example, about the fight for rights Native Americans went through in the 1960s and 1970s. I had no idea there were clashes with the government and activists and full on sieges, etc.
The main negative aspect for me about this book is when the author would hyper focus on one individual. Oftentimes, we would be in the middle of an interesting story linearly moving through the history and then a seemingly random story about someone he met would appear. We’d get some pages on their life story and then what would follow would be pages upon pages about foraging for pine cones, for example. I feel bad critiquing this aspect of the book, because if I really want to know about Native life through recent history and today, why am I turned off when an individual is hyper focused in on? But the stories often felt like they were told not really in relation to what was happening linearly in the history. They felt almost like a tangent. For example, the aforementioned 1970s Native activism was being talked about and then out of nowhere, we had endless paragraphs about the intricacies of one man’s leeching business. A couple hundred pages in I wrote in the margin “really not excited to pick it up now”. By the last 100 pages or so, I started to speed read and it was really hard to keep picking it up. I finished it out of a sense of duty.
I feel bad giving those negative comments on the book. I am assuming that the author’s intent was to give us modern examples of real people living real lives and I really appreciate that. It’s totally possible that had these same stories been put more in a linear context they would’ve been much more interesting to read. It also pained me to take stars away from this review as you can tell the author put an incredible amount of time and research into this book and it was deeply personal and important to him.
All in all, I would definitely recommend this book to all those interested in Native American life and history and United States history. You might not have as much issue with some of the critiques I mentioned. I’m glad I read it and learned so much from it.
Author David Treuer first begins with a section called “Narrating the Apocalypse” which explains as much as we know and as far back as we can go about Native life prior to the arrival of Europeans. I found this section fascinating and learned so much. After this, he summarizes essentially up through where Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee left off and then begins in full in 1891, right after that fateful event. He then takes us through the decades following, organizing them as certain “phases” of history played out e.g. the boarding school system, World War II, etc. This book really shines in its telling of history in a linear fashion. I loved learning, for example, about the fight for rights Native Americans went through in the 1960s and 1970s. I had no idea there were clashes with the government and activists and full on sieges, etc.
The main negative aspect for me about this book is when the author would hyper focus on one individual. Oftentimes, we would be in the middle of an interesting story linearly moving through the history and then a seemingly random story about someone he met would appear. We’d get some pages on their life story and then what would follow would be pages upon pages about foraging for pine cones, for example. I feel bad critiquing this aspect of the book, because if I really want to know about Native life through recent history and today, why am I turned off when an individual is hyper focused in on? But the stories often felt like they were told not really in relation to what was happening linearly in the history. They felt almost like a tangent. For example, the aforementioned 1970s Native activism was being talked about and then out of nowhere, we had endless paragraphs about the intricacies of one man’s leeching business. A couple hundred pages in I wrote in the margin “really not excited to pick it up now”. By the last 100 pages or so, I started to speed read and it was really hard to keep picking it up. I finished it out of a sense of duty.
I feel bad giving those negative comments on the book. I am assuming that the author’s intent was to give us modern examples of real people living real lives and I really appreciate that. It’s totally possible that had these same stories been put more in a linear context they would’ve been much more interesting to read. It also pained me to take stars away from this review as you can tell the author put an incredible amount of time and research into this book and it was deeply personal and important to him.
All in all, I would definitely recommend this book to all those interested in Native American life and history and United States history. You might not have as much issue with some of the critiques I mentioned. I’m glad I read it and learned so much from it.
April 28, 2019
Always interested in American Indians through my background of anthropology and history, I was drawn to The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by that but also by its claim to be a counter narrative to Dee Brown's famous 1970 work Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee which was considered the Indian side of the history of the west but which I thought too sentimentally told. Treuer's book is more balanced. He sees the sentimentality, too, but he also criticizes Brown for his portrayal of Indian life as ultimately descended into poverty, 2d class citizenship, and reservation squalor. Where Brown's title suggested a surrender to victimhood and the death of a way of life, Treuer sends a message that the Indian heart today strongly and confidently beats.
This is a history of Native America during the 129 years since the fight at Wounded Knee, South Dakota between the Lakota Sioux and the 7th Cavalry, considered the last resistance by Indians against the westward-reaching modern society overrunning the continent. It's thought of as the moment when America's frontier period ended. It's true that the estimated population of 5 million indigenous peoples had been reduced to about 237,000 by 1900. It's true that by that same year Indian ownership of the land, once continent-wide, had been reduced to about 3% of it. But Treuer's stories of Indian life today show the beating heart and a strong recovery. He doesn't ignore the familiar stories of the violence and poverty once associated with reservation life. But he shows that a century of progress has taught the Indians assimilation along with the need to retain their original cultures. The many portraits of individuals Treuer presents show a fascinating blend of old ways and new ways. Apparently Indian use of smartphones surpasses the national average by a lot. I was surprised to learn that 70% of Indians live in cities. At the same time many still participate in traditional ceremony.
There's a lot to tell in this history. From the era of the Indian boarding schools and religious conversion to the times of stumbling, inept Indian Bureau programs, service during the world wars, the rise of the American Indian Movement and the protest years surrounding that organization, right up to the casino boom and the most recent confrontation over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock Reservation. I found some of this, like the discussion of government programs, dry reading. The book is vibrant, though, when Treuer writes individual portraits of Indian lives today. Those he profiles are resourceful and ambitiously active in our modern world while at the same time deeply, proudly Indian. These anecdotes and portraits are my favorite parts of this interesting book.
This is a history of Native America during the 129 years since the fight at Wounded Knee, South Dakota between the Lakota Sioux and the 7th Cavalry, considered the last resistance by Indians against the westward-reaching modern society overrunning the continent. It's thought of as the moment when America's frontier period ended. It's true that the estimated population of 5 million indigenous peoples had been reduced to about 237,000 by 1900. It's true that by that same year Indian ownership of the land, once continent-wide, had been reduced to about 3% of it. But Treuer's stories of Indian life today show the beating heart and a strong recovery. He doesn't ignore the familiar stories of the violence and poverty once associated with reservation life. But he shows that a century of progress has taught the Indians assimilation along with the need to retain their original cultures. The many portraits of individuals Treuer presents show a fascinating blend of old ways and new ways. Apparently Indian use of smartphones surpasses the national average by a lot. I was surprised to learn that 70% of Indians live in cities. At the same time many still participate in traditional ceremony.
There's a lot to tell in this history. From the era of the Indian boarding schools and religious conversion to the times of stumbling, inept Indian Bureau programs, service during the world wars, the rise of the American Indian Movement and the protest years surrounding that organization, right up to the casino boom and the most recent confrontation over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock Reservation. I found some of this, like the discussion of government programs, dry reading. The book is vibrant, though, when Treuer writes individual portraits of Indian lives today. Those he profiles are resourceful and ambitiously active in our modern world while at the same time deeply, proudly Indian. These anecdotes and portraits are my favorite parts of this interesting book.
January 5, 2023
The American mainstream narrative of Indigenous American is a hodgepodge of contradicting ideas. On one side, there is the myth of Thanksgiving, Pocahontas, and other white-washed tales, and on the other side, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. These stories are told by non-Indigenous Americans. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is different. David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. I went to his book talk back in 2019, but only had the courage to read it just now.
The history book is organized chronically. Part 1 is the ancient history and history since Columbus. The rest of the book is the Wounded Knee Massacre and what happened after. It is a mixture of historical facts and life stories of several David Treuer’s family members and friends. The details of multiple genocides and how the US federal government “dealt” with the “Indian Problem” is so shocking that I had to stop several times. The author doesn’t contest the facts in Dan Brown’s book, but he dislikes the way the story was told and its narrow focus.
The author states: “This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.”
A common belief is American Indians were washed out by the tide of progress because they didn’t adapt. The author disagrees. Indians did adapt, and they have been continuously adapting ever since. The history of Indians in World War II and the 1960s’ Red Power Movement is new to me.
The author writes that despite the insurmountable hardship, Indian people preserve. Indian culture didn’t die. Modern American Indians, like all other races, begin contemplating their identity:
“The story of ‘the Indian’ has been a story of loss, loss of land, loss of culture, loss of the way of life. Yes, Indians remain, we remain cross country as modern Americans, modern Indians. But inwardly we wonder, how much of our culture actually remains? How authentic are we? At what point do you cease to be Indian and become simply people who descended from Indians?”
In the epilogue, the author summarizes his thinking as follows: “We are so used to telling the stories of our lives and those of our tribes as tragedy, as a necessarily diminishing line. Once we were great. Once we ruled everything. And now we rule nothing. Now we are merely ghosts that haunt American minds. That we deprived ourselves of the very life we yearn for. I can not shake the belief that the ways that we tell the story of our reality shapes that reality. The manner of the telling makes the world, and I worry if we tell the story of the past as tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future. If we insist on raging against our dependency on the United States and modernity itself, we miss something vital. As much as our past was shaped by the whim and violence of an evolving America, America, in turn, has been shaped by us.”
The history book is organized chronically. Part 1 is the ancient history and history since Columbus. The rest of the book is the Wounded Knee Massacre and what happened after. It is a mixture of historical facts and life stories of several David Treuer’s family members and friends. The details of multiple genocides and how the US federal government “dealt” with the “Indian Problem” is so shocking that I had to stop several times. The author doesn’t contest the facts in Dan Brown’s book, but he dislikes the way the story was told and its narrow focus.
The author states: “This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.”
A common belief is American Indians were washed out by the tide of progress because they didn’t adapt. The author disagrees. Indians did adapt, and they have been continuously adapting ever since. The history of Indians in World War II and the 1960s’ Red Power Movement is new to me.
The author writes that despite the insurmountable hardship, Indian people preserve. Indian culture didn’t die. Modern American Indians, like all other races, begin contemplating their identity:
“The story of ‘the Indian’ has been a story of loss, loss of land, loss of culture, loss of the way of life. Yes, Indians remain, we remain cross country as modern Americans, modern Indians. But inwardly we wonder, how much of our culture actually remains? How authentic are we? At what point do you cease to be Indian and become simply people who descended from Indians?”
In the epilogue, the author summarizes his thinking as follows: “We are so used to telling the stories of our lives and those of our tribes as tragedy, as a necessarily diminishing line. Once we were great. Once we ruled everything. And now we rule nothing. Now we are merely ghosts that haunt American minds. That we deprived ourselves of the very life we yearn for. I can not shake the belief that the ways that we tell the story of our reality shapes that reality. The manner of the telling makes the world, and I worry if we tell the story of the past as tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future. If we insist on raging against our dependency on the United States and modernity itself, we miss something vital. As much as our past was shaped by the whim and violence of an evolving America, America, in turn, has been shaped by us.”
March 25, 2019
Before I share my thoughts, a few caveats: This is my reading experience and reactions to the book. I am not academically qualified to comment on the historical accuracy of the contents. I am also not culturally qualified to comment on how it represents Native experiences and cultures. I picked up this book to (re)educate myself about Native American history and present-day realities, though it has affected me much more profoundly than I anticipated.
.
There are a few books that have completely reoriented my view of American history: The Devil in the Grove. The Sun Also Shines. We Were Eight Years in Power. I'll now be adding The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee to that list. This book takes time and intent - at 450 pages long and dense with historical facts, you need to commit to reading it and digesting what it has to say. But it is so, so worth it, and it's one I encourage others, especially white people, to invest in reading.
.
Though the title refers to Native history from 1890 to the present, the book deals with the full arc from contact with colonizers to today. His narrative focuses on continental tribes, jumping from tribe to tribe and coast to coast as he winds his way through history and the story of so many people - at once diverse, but increasingly swept up into an all-encompassing, singular status as Indian. I appreciate that Treuer lays it all out, fact after fact after fact, without getting lost in tangential details. The facts speak for themselves (loudly).
.
Did you know that at the time of first contact, historians (conservatively) estimate that there were 5 million Indians in North America. By 1900, there were only 237,000 according to the US census. There were more than 500 distinct tribes spread over the entire content. Of the 2.4 billion acres in the US, by 1900 Indians only "controlled" 78 million acres (3%), many of them displaced from their tribal homelands and forced to subsist on land unfit for industry.
.
I'm embarrassed by how little I knew of this legacy. Or maybe, I knew, but I never internalized this history in a lasting way (white privilege). The arrogance of white settlers is astounding (why am I still surprised?). There was so much greed, so much death, so much destruction, for hundreds of years after the "discovery" of America (why does this still shock me?). And after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, Indians continued to suffer abuse from the government ("death by administration"). It was only around the mid 20th century that the tide really started to turn for Native Americans - and even then it's been a long, uneven road.
.
Ultimately though, Treuer is trying to tell a story of triumph, of adaptability, of pride. He doesn't want the story to stop at Wounded Knee - because it didn't. Native Americans - now some 2 million identify as such in the US - continue to live and many now thrive in this country. They are not gone and they are not an anachronism. They have also helped shape the very country that set out to destroy them for so long. In the end, how we think of and treat Native Americans brings up important questions for all Americans. What is our relationship with the government? Is it meant to be a force of good, or should it be very "hands-off"? What matters more - corporate prosperity or the public good? How do we reconcile our "ideals" as a nation with our abhorrent historical record of violence and marginalization?
.
There are still many feelings I'm processing. Guilt is a big one. Shame is another. Confusion - what can/should I do to help? I'll be sharing more reflections in my stories. In summary, read this book. It's important. I wish I had learned more of this in school. Native history shouldn't be reduced to a few battles and Supreme Court decisions in US History classes. This is history (and present culture) that we all should understand, acknowledge, and incorporate into our democracy going forward. I hope to better honor that legacy, more conscientiously support Native Americans going forward, and continue to do my part in building an inclusive, just America.
.
And thank you, David, for writing this book and for telling these stories.
.
There are a few books that have completely reoriented my view of American history: The Devil in the Grove. The Sun Also Shines. We Were Eight Years in Power. I'll now be adding The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee to that list. This book takes time and intent - at 450 pages long and dense with historical facts, you need to commit to reading it and digesting what it has to say. But it is so, so worth it, and it's one I encourage others, especially white people, to invest in reading.
.
Though the title refers to Native history from 1890 to the present, the book deals with the full arc from contact with colonizers to today. His narrative focuses on continental tribes, jumping from tribe to tribe and coast to coast as he winds his way through history and the story of so many people - at once diverse, but increasingly swept up into an all-encompassing, singular status as Indian. I appreciate that Treuer lays it all out, fact after fact after fact, without getting lost in tangential details. The facts speak for themselves (loudly).
.
Did you know that at the time of first contact, historians (conservatively) estimate that there were 5 million Indians in North America. By 1900, there were only 237,000 according to the US census. There were more than 500 distinct tribes spread over the entire content. Of the 2.4 billion acres in the US, by 1900 Indians only "controlled" 78 million acres (3%), many of them displaced from their tribal homelands and forced to subsist on land unfit for industry.
.
I'm embarrassed by how little I knew of this legacy. Or maybe, I knew, but I never internalized this history in a lasting way (white privilege). The arrogance of white settlers is astounding (why am I still surprised?). There was so much greed, so much death, so much destruction, for hundreds of years after the "discovery" of America (why does this still shock me?). And after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, Indians continued to suffer abuse from the government ("death by administration"). It was only around the mid 20th century that the tide really started to turn for Native Americans - and even then it's been a long, uneven road.
.
Ultimately though, Treuer is trying to tell a story of triumph, of adaptability, of pride. He doesn't want the story to stop at Wounded Knee - because it didn't. Native Americans - now some 2 million identify as such in the US - continue to live and many now thrive in this country. They are not gone and they are not an anachronism. They have also helped shape the very country that set out to destroy them for so long. In the end, how we think of and treat Native Americans brings up important questions for all Americans. What is our relationship with the government? Is it meant to be a force of good, or should it be very "hands-off"? What matters more - corporate prosperity or the public good? How do we reconcile our "ideals" as a nation with our abhorrent historical record of violence and marginalization?
.
There are still many feelings I'm processing. Guilt is a big one. Shame is another. Confusion - what can/should I do to help? I'll be sharing more reflections in my stories. In summary, read this book. It's important. I wish I had learned more of this in school. Native history shouldn't be reduced to a few battles and Supreme Court decisions in US History classes. This is history (and present culture) that we all should understand, acknowledge, and incorporate into our democracy going forward. I hope to better honor that legacy, more conscientiously support Native Americans going forward, and continue to do my part in building an inclusive, just America.
.
And thank you, David, for writing this book and for telling these stories.
May 23, 2020
I liked this book quite a bit in parts. Treuer is attempting the redefine the narrative about Indians in the United States. (He uses the term "Indians" throughout the book, so for this review, I will, as well.)
Rather than a narrative of loss and destruction, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee, Treuer focuses on Indians's history since that date and how they are rewriting that narrative in society and history.
Where Treuer is at his best is in his interviews with people. But at times he gets caught up in lengthy quotations from speeches, legal documents, and legislation. And it's tedious. For the sake of the narrative, he easily could have summarized these excerpts and kept the pace moving. But quoting the entire document at times derails the pace of his narrative.
All that said, it's definitely an important work to read, even if you have read Dee Brown's classic history leading up to 1890. This counter-narrative is an important corrective to that tale of loss.
Rather than a narrative of loss and destruction, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee, Treuer focuses on Indians's history since that date and how they are rewriting that narrative in society and history.
Where Treuer is at his best is in his interviews with people. But at times he gets caught up in lengthy quotations from speeches, legal documents, and legislation. And it's tedious. For the sake of the narrative, he easily could have summarized these excerpts and kept the pace moving. But quoting the entire document at times derails the pace of his narrative.
All that said, it's definitely an important work to read, even if you have read Dee Brown's classic history leading up to 1890. This counter-narrative is an important corrective to that tale of loss.
February 12, 2020
So I heard Treuer on a podcast giving an interview about the book and he described it as taking on the myth that Indians have vanished and all are dead. He spoke from the point of view that the narrative is at least apologetic in current media, but it is still slanted towards "all the Indians that are left are drunks on the reservation". And he took issue with that and specified that he wanted to write about "new" (or contemporary) Indian history. Having recently read Takaki's A Different Mirror, I felt like I had the rough brush strokes for historical Indian abuses and genocide and picked this up as a way to learn more about recent times.
Unfortunately, the first half of the book is not really very current. It wasn't until until Part 5 (of 7 parts) that I really felt like I was reading stuff to which I hadn't already been exposed. I really liked the end of the book, it charted the AIM movement to present times and included lots of interviews and vignettes about modern people. It was exactly what I had hoped the book would be based on Treuer's interview. I just wish I didn't have to slot through 280 pages of history to get to it.
Ultimately, I learned a lot about exactly how and why there are casinos on reservations (started with an overdue tax bill on a mobile home) and met some interesting characters. I found the end to be very readable and enjoyable.
As an aside, I use "Indian" instead of "Native American" because Treuer does; normally I would have used "Native American" above.
Unfortunately, the first half of the book is not really very current. It wasn't until until Part 5 (of 7 parts) that I really felt like I was reading stuff to which I hadn't already been exposed. I really liked the end of the book, it charted the AIM movement to present times and included lots of interviews and vignettes about modern people. It was exactly what I had hoped the book would be based on Treuer's interview. I just wish I didn't have to slot through 280 pages of history to get to it.
Ultimately, I learned a lot about exactly how and why there are casinos on reservations (started with an overdue tax bill on a mobile home) and met some interesting characters. I found the end to be very readable and enjoyable.
As an aside, I use "Indian" instead of "Native American" because Treuer does; normally I would have used "Native American" above.
June 21, 2019
In the 1970 work "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee", Dee Brown declared that "the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed". In "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee David Treuer revise that image of the Indian which has long been prevalent in American literature and historiography. The Indians are seen as the "Vanishing American", a race so compromised by disease, war and intermarriage that it is destined to disappear. " David Treuer's book is a moving portrait of “Indian survival, resilience, adaptability, pride and place in modern life.” “This book,” Treuer writes, “is adamantly, unashamedly, about Indian life rather than Indian death.”
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