Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee – an Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was thinking a lot about how to review this and where to even begin with this awful, profoundly upsetting, straightforwardly told thing and then I thought perhaps it is there. I knew of this for a while beforehand and when I saw a copy of it, I picked it up with alacrity. And then it took me a long, long while to read it because everything is slowly awful within. This is not a comment on Brown’s style for that is deeply accessible and matter-of-fact but rather a commentary on the stories told within. This is the history of the slow and systematic destruction of people and the resonance of reading that at this present point in time does not escape me.

So how does one read such a profoundly sad and distressing thing? Slowly, I think, for it takes time to realise the detail of what you are reading and how these awful, awful events happened to real people and that it is more than simply black ink on the page, a gentle collection of words that exist on the page before moving onto the next. Books can be safe spaces but sometimes they can mask what is happening because we’ve all seen words before. We know how they work. We know the shape of them and the rhythm of them and sometimes we can read that shape and that rhythm rather than the content itself.

Slowly, then, but also by stopping as well and taking time to think and to understand and to honour, really, the stories that you’re hearing and the fact that you are often hearing them from the people involved. Brown interweaves sources and evidence throughout the text, whether that’s quotes from people, a select history of wider world events, music with translated text beneath, and photographs of many of the key individuals. It is well done and can occasionally be overwhelming, to hear and see so much stuff that was so wilfully and deliberately trodden over and obliterated and destroyed.

I don’t know, really. I did find that some of the detail was lost a little on me and so I ended up googling and reading and checking out more about certain episodes but that is nothing to blame the text for. It is moments like this, when we approach new things and new stories, that we grow and the telling of them is profound and necessary. This is a powerful, potent, and vital thing.

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