Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1970. The book covers the thirty-year period from 1860 to 1890 — the era in which the indigenous peoples of the American West were systematically dispossessed of their lands, confined to reservations, and in many cases destroyed. Brown tells this story not from the conventional perspective of settlers, soldiers, and politicians but from the perspective of the people to whom these things were done.
Each chapter focuses on a specific tribe or conflict: the Long Walk of the Navajo, the Sand Creek Massacre, the war for the Bozeman Trail, Little Big Horn, the Flight of the Nez Perce, the imprisonment of Geronimo, and the massacre at Wounded Knee that gives the book its title. Brown draws extensively on primary sources — council proceedings, treaty documents, military reports, and the recorded words of Native leaders — to construct narratives that give agency and voice to people who had been reduced, in most American histories, to obstacles or victims.
The book was published during the Vietnam War and the rise of the American Indian Movement, and its timing was crucial to its impact. A nation already questioning its military adventures abroad was confronted with the full horror of its original military adventure at home. The book sold over four million copies, was translated into seventeen languages, and fundamentally altered the way Americans understood their own history.
The title comes from a poem by Stephen Vincent Benet, and its elegiac quality — “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee” — captures the book’s emotional register: this is a work of mourning as much as history, a sustained lament for what was destroyed.
Collecting Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
First edition (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1970): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200
- Good/good: $30–$80
- Signed: $400–$1,000