Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Brown's book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Much of the chronicle of the bracing World was a history of the clash among these values, with Europeans displace the Indians off their land in order to exploit the resources and to advance ownership, as if God had given them the right to do this. The Indian shoot for of view is found in Dee Brown's book exhaust My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of the westerly told from the point of view of the Indian. The book is based largely on the records of treaty councils and the words of Indian leaders like hirer Joseph, Geronimo, and Crazy Horse. Previously, the history of the West and of the Indian Wars was told entirely from the point of view of snow-white society. The book tells the story of the plains Indians over a 30 year period. Brown notes what happened during this period, the old age from 1860 to 1890:

During that time the finis and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed, and divulge of that time came to the highest degree all the great myths of the American West--tales of fur traders, mountain workforce, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms. homesteaders. totally occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more a lot than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man (Brown xvii).

Brown brings to life the Indian voices that have for overly long been ignored. Those voices tell a story of a nonage on the frontier preyed upon by the growing white majority. The Indians had started out being the majority


In the 1960s, though, on that point was a change with the subscribe Little Big Man, " word picture a decidedly pro-Indian point of view" (Seals 637). After this, though, reproof the " brand-new Custerism," with the white man coming to still the Indians who cannot save themselves in films like A Man Called Horse. Kevin Costner in occurrence represents the New Custerism, made by so-called liberals "torn between their cultural guilt and self-interest (Seals 638).

During the following thirty years these leaders and many more would enter into history and legend. Their names would become as well known as those of the men who tried to destroy them.
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Most of them, young and old, would be impelled into the ground long before the symbolic end of Indian freedom came at Wounded Knee in December, 1890 (Brown 12).

The enactment which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activities, was conditioned on the frontier. . . The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier (Turner 24).

To contribute insult to injury, Native Americans became favored movie villains, with the idea of the Indian as savage serving as the rationale for film after film.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1970.

Dances with Wolves emerges as a well-meant film that exploits the Sioux and twists history and reality every bit as much as the earlier film stereotype of the rampaging savage.

It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting habilitate and the moccasin (Turner 4).

Why, in what are otherwise wonderful works that I love too. . . must they always throw in the flaming arrows coming out of the dark from the sneaky subhumans, the dreaded implications of things done to Our Women, the truncated grunts and groans of people thereby depersonalized because they d
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