Bury My Heart In Sacred Ground

One of my research sources was Bury My heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (Henry Holt and Company, New York).  First published in 1970, this extraordinary book changed the way Americans think about the original inhabitants of our country.  Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos in 1860 and ending thirty years later with the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it tells how the American Indians lost their land and lives to a dynamically expanding white society.  But what makes this book stand apart from so many others is that, for the first time, a book describes the opening of the West from the Indians' viewpoint.  It shocked the American reading public.   

Continuing to be controversial even today, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is published all around the world in many languages, and over three decades after it first opened white people's eyes, it has lost none of its importance or emotional impact. As Dee Brown says in his introduction: "Perhaps those who read [this book] will have a clearer understanding of what the American Indian is, by knowing what he was.  They may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages."

Dee Brown's book inspired me to likewise temper my own depiction of Southern California Indians in Sacred Ground, and to help me to tell their story from their point of view.  Therefore, if Sacred Ground's story of Southern Californian Indians has helped shed some light on the people who were here before us, and if it has whetted your appetite for a larger overview of Native American history, I cannot do better than to recommend Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.