The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present Paperback – November 5, 2019

Indian history is often taught to young Americans as an unmitigated tragedy. The once proud stewards of the Americas being gradually decimated by disease and conquest. The last stand of the Indian, at Wounded Knee, is symbolic of this history. Women, children and soldiers all cut down by the rapacious white man. Since then Indians have been content to live out such lives as they can on poverty stricken reservations.Except, as native historian David Treuer points out, this simple narrative couldn’t be farther from the truth. Just as Christian Europe once tended to view Jewish history as, for all intents and purposes, one of mere sorrow and wandering after the rejection of Christ, twentieth and twenty-first century Indian history has been mis-told and misrepresented by European Americans.With a certain edginess to it, Treuer recounts it all: from attempts at forced assimilation in schools to the violent uprisings at Alcatraz and other locales in the sixties. What unfolds is a story of, not only survival, but adaption along with a strong desire to preserve traditional ways.And what emerges is a modern people, or peoples, who are not mere victims but proud heirs of a tradition which has endured far longer than the American republic.Treuer does this by weaving history and anecdote. The history, though it does come to some new conclusions such as that the Machiavellian treaty practices of the American government have been too little stressed in the narrative of how Natives lost their land, is written for popular consumption. A fortiori are the anecdotal accounts of modern Natives interwoven throughout the text.So, though written for the general public and not the professional historian, I cannot help but feel that Treuer wants his book to change the way Native history is taught in America. And, even more, how European Americans view their fellow Native American citizens.The Native tradition, or traditions, is not just a tale of many tears. It is a millennia old tale of adaption, transformation and resistance that continues into the present. If the typical reader walks away with a sense that Native Americans are not to be pitied or looked at as our unfortunate victims, I think the author will have achieved his purpose.Written with elegant but non-technical prose, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is an excellent introduction to the Native experience. A must read for those, like myself, who are unacquainted with Native American history since their schooldays.

We all know that Native people have suffered under a dominant culture for the past five centuries. However, David Treuer makes the point that they have prevailed, and in some cases, even thrived, despite that oppression. Treuer’s history The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee makes the point that Native people are still vibrant and alive and making their way in a society that, for hundreds of years, tried to destroy them.Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He has a PhD in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.Treuer’s point is that the December 29, 1890, massacre at Wounded Knee, S.D., of men, women and children – many of the men elderly – was not the end of Native resistance but the start of Native resilience and their ability to survive.“This book is written out of the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. It is written with the understanding that our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”Like many other Native authors, Treuer decries shrinking Indian lands through broken treaties, loss of Indian land through the allotment process and the cultural genocide of Indian boarding schools.“Perhaps no other aspect of Indian education during the sixty years of the boarding school era is more tragic than the fact that the school grounds at Carlisle and Haskell and all the other schools included graveyards,” said Treuer, later adding, “According to the Meriam Report, Indian children were six times as likely to die in childhood while at boarding schools than the rest of the children in America.”However, Native resistance helped them survive. Treuer tells of the Red Lake Ojibwe who refused allotment, the Menominee who kept control of their forest and Native people turning back a reenactment of the Columbus voyage in 1992.While he criticizes the American Indian Movement’s methods, says Treuer, “Yet much of the work that AIM rank and file had accomplished – in schools and job-training programs and housing – carried on. And somehow – despite AIM’s ineffectiveness, violence, and chauvinism; despite the violence that always seemed to erupt around it – by the time the 1980s drew to a close Indian life had become Indian again, due in no small part to the activism begun in the 1960s.”Treuer also discusses the Dakota Access Pipeline occupation.This is an important book to anyone interested in Native American studies, history or law. It’s also an inspiring testament to the resilience of Native people.