Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee Author's Intent

Dee Brown was a librarian and then became a professor of library science. He died at the age of ninety-four but in his life time wrote many books that have to do with frontier life and Native Americans. His most famous and best selling book was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which tells the Indian’s side of the Americans settling the west.

Brown was not an Indian himself or of Native American decent, but he grew up in an area where there were many Native Americans. He would hear their stories of their past and ancestors and he realized that the history usually learned and the way the media portrayed the Indians was not the same as the stories he heard. He did research and wrote Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to expose much of the treatment of the Indians that wasn’t widely known and to show how the Indians felt about what was happening to them at that time.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee details how many Europeans worked to settle the land in the west and most in an unpeaceful manner towards the Indians. Many bloody battles were had and reservations set up. Many Indians who tried to act peaceably with the Europeans were misused. When peace treaties were made they were usually broken, or made with unreasonable demands on the Indians. At the Battle of Wounded Knee, which is considered one of the last major European Indian battles, the Indians gave up their arms in hope of avoiding major conflict, the English cruelly massacred men women and children. In the book Dee Brown quotes Louise Weasel Bear who said “We tried to run but they shot us like we were a buffalo.”

When Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970 many people were unaware of much of the cruelty that the Indians had suffered and little was known about their culture as well. The contents of the book shocked many people as they learned the little spoken of truths. People were able to see and better understand the Indian motives and culture, and with both stories, the European’s and the Native American’s, were better able to understand the whole picture of the settling of the west.

Dee Brown wrote his book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to express the little known standpoint of the Indians during the early years of America. From it a depiction of Native American history and culture was finally seen by many people who had never heard it, and since then Native Americans are better understood.