Bury my heart at the bend of the river
Bury my heart at the bend of the river (original title: "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" ) is a non-fiction book by the American author Dee Brown from 1970. It describes the history of the Indian wars in what is now the USA from the 1860s to the eponymous massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890.
content
The book essentially deals with the years 1860 to 1890, the so-called "opening up of the American West". It is the time of the great land grabbing, displacement and decimation of the indigenous peoples. The white population grew from 20 to 30 million to around 90 million during these years, the number of Indians shrank from 1 million to well below 0.3 million. Through treaties and breaches of treaty, gold rush , war and displacement, the Indians lost almost all of their land. At the end of this period there were no more wild tribes. The survivors were forced to live on reservations. Dee Brown writes in the foreword: "It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality and unrestrained debauchery ... During this time the culture and civilization of the American Indians were destroyed ..."
The book begins with a brief summary of developments in North America since the arrival of the first European settlers in the early 17th century. The events of New England, and in particular the Indian Removal Act of 1830, are briefly outlined. The conflicts and fates of some important Indian tribes of the western plains of North America who suffered from the aggressive land grabbing by white settlers, such as the Navajo , the Cheyenne , the Apaches and the Comanches, are then dealt with in detail . Large space take over the Lakota - Sioux and their leader as Little Crow , Red Cloud , Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull . The transfer of this tribe to the Pine Ridge Reservation , the creation of the ghost dance movement around Wovoka and the resulting massacre at the Wounded Knee are the climax and the conclusion. Detailed descriptions of the respective personalities of important protagonists such as Cochise , Geronimo , Ely Samuel Parker and many others as well as contemporary portraits complete the work.
Each chapter is preceded by a tabular introduction to the historical context.
Evaluation and criticism
“Bury my heart at the bend in the river” is still very popular and valued today and is certainly one of the standard works on the subject. In the United States in particular, it has sparked a renewed interest in the Native Americans, whose fate had hitherto only been insufficiently perceived or from the point of view of the white "conquerors".
Criticism is sometimes expressed that the work portrayed the Indian perspective too one-sidedly. The fact that Indians also waged cruel wars against their own kind and expelled other peoples from their settlement areas is not addressed enough. This criticism is countered by the fact that these facts are by no means concealed in the book. It should also be borne in mind that after decades of one-sided portrayal of the Indians as “cruel savages”, a relativization was necessary.
Cinematic implementation
In 2007 the US film company HBO Films produced an implementation for television. The award-winning television film with the German title Buried My Heart at the Wounded Knee treats the last two chapters of the book up to the massacre at the Wounded Knee from the point of view of the Indian doctor Charles Eastman . It has a length of 127 minutes, directed by Yves Simoneau and cast with Aidan Quinn , August Schellenberg and Anna Paquin . The German version was first shown in 2013 on Sky Atlantic HD .
literature
- Dee Brown: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee ( "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"). Knaur Verlag, Munich 1972, ISBN 3-426-62804-X .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Dee Brown: Buried my heart at the bend of the river , p. 9, Verlag Anaconda, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-86647-836-7