I remember liking or at least learning a lot from Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, but Treuer's framing of his work as a response to rather than a continuation of it is absolutely necessary. Treuer's juxtaposition of living Native Americans with historical events post Wonded Knee drives home his point that while it is important to know the history of his people - they should not be relegated just to the past. ( )

Thorough history of ancient indigenous cultures up to wounded knee. About indian life, resilience and hope, not just their struggle. ( )

this was a very slow read for me, but not because it was badly written or hard to pick up. it's so full of information - important information - that i couldn't read it too quickly. (which i know i did, and i will have to go back to this book, i think, a few times.) this is an excellent, full throated, well written explanation of many different tribes of native americans and their histories and heritages, and a trumpeting of their existence and thriving future. it's really well done, and in many cases is a bit of a rebuttal against some well respected and widely read histories.

i'm sure (mostly?) that i'd heard this before, but somehow it hadn't cemented into my brain - but columbus never even made it to mainland north america, after all we gave him "credit" for.

"...it wasn't merely 'germs and steel' that spelled the end of the 'red race.' The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and many others had weathered disease and rebounded. Moreover, they had done almost everything 'right' by the standards of the new republic. They had fought for the government (including under Jackson at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend). They had devoted themselves to farming and trade, developed court and legislative systems - they had proved themselves socially and culturally adaptive. And this had done nothing to assuage the determination of the colonists and settlers to seize their land and resources. "Neither superior technology nor an overwhelming number of settlers made up the mainspring of the birth of the United States or the spread of its power over the entire world,' writes historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. 'Rather, the chief cause was the colonialist settler-state's willingness to eliminate whole civilizations of people in order to possess their land.'"

"I cannot shake the belief that the ways in which we tell the story of our reality shapes that reality: the manner of telling makes the world. And I worry that if we tell the story of the past as a tragedy, we consign ourselves to a tragic future. If we insist on raging against our dependency on the United States and modernity itself, we miss something vital: as much as our past was shaped by the whims and violence of an evolving America, America, in turn, has been shaped by us." ( )

Actual Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Review: This was a really well thought out and well done book. We don’t tend to talk about Native American history after Wounded Knee, instead focusing on how white people progressed on the American continent. I couldn’t give it a full 5 of 5 stars due to the breakdown of chapters being a tiny bit confusing. ( )

There's been a lot of attention recently to how poorly we are taught about the history of race in America. Much of that focuses on our relationship with African-Americans. Our knowledge of American Indian history and culture is even poorer. Treuer's book made me realize how ignorant I am--and at that, I probably knew more than a lot of Americans.

The initial section is a potted history of Indians prior to 1890, the year of Wounded Knee. It's interesting and points up a lot of details that are often omitted to school kids--not just the history of broken treaties, but the ways the US government moved many tribes and effectively created some modern groups by pushing tribes together. Treuer's book emphasizes the diversity of Indian life and culture.

As the book progresses towards modern times, it becomes less a traditional history, and more about the stories of Indians themselves. The politics are covered fairly thoroughly, but Treuer allows Indians from different parts of the US to tell their own stories and remind us that Indians aren't just historical figures, but part of a living culture that has changed and adapted over time both through coercion and by choice. ( )