Bury my heart at Wounded Knee

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 non-fiction book by American writer Dee Brown. It explores the history of American expansionism in the American West in the late nineteenth century and its devastating effects on the Indigenous peoples living there. Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government as part of a continuing effort to destroy the cultures, religions, and ways of life of Native American peoples. Brown borrowed the book's title from the 1927 poem "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benét: "I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee". Wounded Knee was the site of the last major attack by the US Army on Native Americans, and is one of several possible sites of Crazy Horse's buried remains. Joaquin Miller's 1873 novel Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History and Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book A Century of Dishonor are often considered to be nineteenth-century precursors to Dee Brown's book. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book has never gone out of print and has been translated into 17 languages. Before the publication of Bury My Heart..., Brown had become well-versed in the history of the American frontier. Having grown up in Arkansas, he developed a keen interest in the American West, and during his graduate education at George Washington University and his career as a librarian for both the US Department of Agriculture and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he wrote numerous books on the subject. Brown's works maintained a focus on the American West, but ranged anywhere from western fiction to histories to children's books. Many of Brown's books revolved around similar Native American topics, including his Showdown at Little Bighorn (1964) and The Fetterman Massacre (1974).