I finished The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee (David Treuer, 2019) last
night. It took a few weeks of on-and-off reading; it’s close to
450 pages (without the references) and small print. And dense.
I knew some
of the pre-1890 history from reading other books, but the way
it was presented in the first section of this book made me think
about it in a completely
different way. It had never dawned on me how different the pre-1890
experience was for different tribes. Different geographies, different
cultures, different relations with their neighbors, different encounters
with colonizers, different experiences with disease, different and shifting
alignments during times of warfare. And so on. The first section of the
book opened my eyes to how richly varied things were.
Subsequent sections dealt with 1890-present and most of that material
was new for me. I came away from the book with (I think!) a much more
realistic and nuanced understanding of Native America.
Highly recommended.