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The heartbeat of Wounded Knee : native America from 1890 to the present

Author

Treuer, David, author

Title

The heartbeat of Wounded Knee : native America from 1890 to the present / David Treuer.

Format

Book

Published

New York : Riverhead Books, 2019. ©2019

Description

512 pages : illustrations, maps ; 21 cm

Portion of title

Native America from 1890 to the present

Notes

Includes bibliographical references (pages 461-488) and index. I-UNIVLIB: Johnny P. Flynn Collection of Native American and Indigenous Studies.

Contents

• Narrating the apocalypse: 10,000 BCE-1890
• Purgatory: 1891-1934
• Fighting life: 1914-1945
• Moving on up: termination, and relocation: 1945-1970
• Becoming Indian: 1970-1990
• Boom city: tribal capitalism in the twenty-first century
• Digital Indians: 1990-2018.

Summary

The received idea of Native American history -- as promulgated by books like Dee Brown's 1970 mega-bestselling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee -- has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. Not only did one hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U.S. Cavalry, but Native civilization did as well. Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative. Because they did not disappear -- and not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their language, their traditions, their families, and their very existence -- the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the U.S. military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.

Subject headings

Indians of North America--History--20th century. Indians of North America--Social conditions--20th century.

Genre heading

Fiction. History. Fiction.

ISBN

1594633150 (hardcover) 9781594633157 (hardcover) 9780399573194 (trade paperback) 0399573194 (trade paperback)

Standard Identifier

40028872184