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.