"The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee"...Book Review

By Faye Herold

“Like many origin myths, the idea that everything began in 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue is a fiction.”  David Treuer, author, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019)

If you want to feel that you are reading a truly important book, here is your chance.  David Treuer, Minnesota Ojibwe, takes the reader through the unhappy history of U.S. Government-Indian relations since Wounded Knee and, with the slowly building successes of Native peoples, to today.

Treuer visited tribes in all parts of the country and narrates stories of real people, like David Schildt, Blackfeet tribe, rodeo rider in the '70s, now citified in California, who says, “I’m a relocated Indian.  I see myself as a classic example of what the government wants. The government wants you separated from your family, your home, your kids, your spiritual belief system, and they got you in the city, in white America.” But for Treuer, cities have brought different tribes together, strengthened their spirit, their pride in being Native, and given them new stories with better endings.

Not always an easy read, Heartbeat brings us up-to-date on an important part of our national history, smoothly told.  Find this in our Library at “Native American Issues,” 3rd floor.

P.S.   For a bonus read, look for  Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexandra Fuller, a recent novel of two unlikely cousins, You Choose Watson and Rick Overlooking Horse, on and off the rez, the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota.