The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Anthropologist David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019) revives Indigenous history and centers Indigenous people as subjects, not as mere victims of American avarice. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Treuer is a member of the Ojibwe tribe from the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota. He has a doctorate in anthropology, teaches at the University of Southern California, and is the author of six other works of fiction and nonfiction.

The title of the book was inspired by both the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, during which federal troops murdered around 150 Lakota, and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an account of American expansion into the West from the perspective of Indigenous tribes, written by novelist and historian Dee Brown. For Treuer, Brown’s canonical work reinforced the public’s misguided belief that the lives of Indigenous people had largely evaporated by the turn of the century. Treuer’s work revises Brown’s tragic narrative by focusing on the ways in which Indigenous communities have endured despite displacement, forced assimilation, and cyclical poverty.

Treuer’s exploration of Indigenous life and history in what are now the United States uses the tragic massacre at Wounded Knee, where the US Army murdered at least 150 Lakota people on December 29, 1890, as the narrative touchstone from which to tell a broader and more complex story than others that have been told about Indigenous life. For Treuer, the massacre does not represent the slow descent of Indigenous cultures, but it is one episode of many in which Indigenous tribes faced defeat after battles with the US government, only to recover, adapt, and thrive.

Treuer’s history goes back tens of thousands of years, into prehistory. He narrates the lineages of tribes from every region of the United States and describes their earliest contact with Europeans—both the early post-Columbian explorers and the French fur traders who traversed into the Midwest. Treuer describes the unfair and dishonest treaty agreements that the US government forged with Indigenous tribes in the 19th century and how Americans’ relentless pursuit of Manifest Destiny—the idea that the United States was destined to stretch to the Pacific—threatened Indigenous tribes’ existences and resulted in their being forced onto reservations.

Further injustices, including the construction of assimilationist and abusive Indian boarding schools, termination policies, and uneven allotment policies, resulted in the rise of Red Power, culminating in the organization of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 1970s. Indigenous people sought to restore their cultural identities and fought back politically by staging sit-ins at both Alcatraz and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC. Unfortunately, some AIM leaders were themselves agents of violence and corruption, which resulted in the dissolution of the organization but not in its vision of a future in which Indigenous people could take pride in their histories and traditions.

In the 20th century, some Indigenous tribes found their fortunes by opening casinos, but other tribes and tribal members have found prosperity in other arenas. Some continue to source from the land in ricing and leeching businesses. Others have segued into more mainstream roles and, in some instances, occupy places in government. In 2019, Deb Haaland of New Mexico and Sharice Davids of Kansas became the first two Indigenous women to be elected to Congress.