Summary

David Treuer begins his account of the lives of Native Americans by telling us that he is writing against a prevailing notion. “It is news to most people,” Treuer says, “that we even have lives” (1). Treuer, who is Ojibwe, takes as his jumping off point Dee Brown’s 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. His intention is to write a “counternarrative” to Brown’s book (11). Why he believes such a new telling is necessary has to do with the lingering impressions of Native America that Brown’s book left in the popular imagination.

The massacre of 150 Lakota men, women, and children by U.S. forces at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota in 1890 has become representative of the dispossession of Native Americans by colonial expansion. Brown’s book conveyed to many non-native people the events of the European migration for the first time...