Book review:

‘Bury My Heart’ in Sinhala

During the height of Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement in America, an American librarian wrote a book. Being the first book written from the perspective of the Indigenous people of America who were known as Indians or Red Indians, it was a groundbreaking publication in its time. It changed the world view about the Native Americans who were mentioned as savages by American historians who chronicled the American history.

By the time Dee Brown’s Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee came out in 1970, Native Americans who survived many genocides committed by the Euro-Americans had been removed from their original habitats and were confined to the land areas known as reservations.

They had been denied their freedom of movement, their livelihood- hunting, freedom to practice their ancient religion, freedom to communicate in their own languages and freedom to bring up their offspring within their tribal families.

In popular culture they were viewed as wicked and whooping warriors and sometimes friendly farmers in Thanks Giving Day ceremonies .These ceremonies were held by the European settlers to give thanks to God for guiding them safely to the New World, which is America.

Dee Brown changed this view.

He uses a number of references to write the book. American Congress council records, reports of the treaties signed between the US government and the Native American tribes, records of the meetings of the two parties before the treaty signing, autobiographies and firsthand descriptions, reports in contemporary Journals which were obscure and did not have much circulation, to document a history of a people who were demoralized and defeated.

Brown’s focus is on the thirty year span of history between 1860 and 1890. Beginning with the removal of five Native American tribes at gunpoint from their habitats to an arid and most inhospitable land area near New Mexico, in 1864, ending thirty years later with the massacre of 350 Indian men women and children at Wounded Knee South Dacota, Brown tells how the American Indians lost their land and culture to an expanding white people.

When the book came among the American readers some 80 years after the last massacre at Wounded Knee, many US citizens were already feeling guilty about their government’s involvement in the Vietnam War. With his book Brown focuses attention on another national disgrace- extermination of the natives of the land. He depicts in detail, the US government’s grabbing of Native Americans’ lands by using mix of threats, deception and murder, its attempts to crush the indigenous culture.

The acts were justified by the theory of Manifest Destiny, which stated that European settlers turned US citizens had a god-given right to own the land and its wealth from the natives.

Each chapter tells the plight of a different Native American tribe in a different region of the continent. But with each tribe in each region the story is familiar; when valuable natural resources are discovered on Native American land, the US government agents are sent out to negotiate with the Indians for the rights of the land. They force the Indians to sign a treaty that guarantees the Indians land and supplies in exchange for their compliance.

When Americans discover more wealth in the new Indian land, the Indians are forced often at gunpoint to sign a new treaty ceding their new land to relocate to smaller land areas known as reservations. Eventually the desperate and angry Indians attack the soldiers who have been sent to enforce the treaties that the tribal chiefs have signed.

The US soldiers attack the Indian villages, burning houses, murdering men women and children. Sometimes they would preserve the corpses of notable Indians and exhibit them at carnivals and fairs.

At the end, the massacre at Wounded Knee breaks the Indians’ will to retaliate anymore.

This epoch-making book is a scathing indictment of the US government, its army and the American people at a particular period of American history.

It fully documents the systematic destruction, the slow inexorable holocaust of the indigenous American during the second half of the 19th century. And it tells the story of what the US was built on.

Translated into almost every language of the West, now Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is available in Sinhala translation as a Wijesooriya Grantha Kendraya publication titled Ma Hada Sangavan Wounded Knee ye.