Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
The first history of the American West told entirely from the perspective of the Indigenous peoples who lost it, using government documents, council records, and Native eyewitness accounts. Published the year after Woodstock, it permanently changed how Americans understood Manifest Destiny.
The tribe-by-tribe structure of treaty then betrayal then massacre blurs together by the midpoint, and the account is “sadly let down by the slightly dry writing.” Some wanted less blow-by-blow skirmish, objecting that too much is “given over to descriptions of battles and skirmishes” at the cost of actual ethnography. Historians fault the novelistic scene-setting as “imaginatively embellished quite a bit,” with “gaps and a few inaccuracies,” and Francis Paul Prucha flagged long stretches without sources. Peter Cozzens wrote a competing history to rebalance it. And David Treuer argues the book's arc of “declension, destruction and disappearance” is its own distortion, one where “the myth has been reversed.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
