Bury my heart at Wounded Knee', appears at the beginning of Brown's book. The full quotation, 'I shall not be there. The title is taken from the final phrase of a twentieth-century poem titled 'American Names' by Stephen Vincent Benét. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book has never gone out of print and has been translated into 17 languages. īury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews.

Many of Brown's books revolved around similar Native American topics, including his Showdown at Little Bighorn (1964) and The Fetterman Massacre (1974). Brown's works maintained a focus on the American West, but ranged anywhere from western fiction to histories to children's books. 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 at Urbana–Champaign, he wrote numerous books on the subject. īefore the publication of Bury My Heart., Brown had become well-versed in the history of the American frontier. Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book A Century of Dishonor is often considered a nineteenth-century precursor to Dee Brown's book. The government's dealings are portrayed as a continuing effort to destroy the culture, religion, and way of life of Native American peoples. Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government.

The book expresses details of the history of American expansionism from a point of view that is critical of its effects on the Native Americans. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 non-fiction book by American writer Dee Brown that covers the history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century.

Bury my heart at wounded