NPR

'The Heartbeat Of Wounded Knee' Aims To Usher In A New Narrative For Native Americans

Author David Treuer calls his new book a "counternarrative" to Dee Brown's 1970 classic. "I have tried to catch us not in the act of dying but, rather, in the radical act of living," he writes.
Memorial to the Wounded Knee Massacre that occurred on Dec. 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota.

In the 1970 work by Dee Brown Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the author — a non-Indian with seemingly little connection to any current tribes — declared that "the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed" during the late 1800s.

Not so fast, says author David Treuer.

Treuer calls his new book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present a "counternarrative" to Brown's classic — which sold millions of copies with its story of U.S. government betrayal, forced relocation and massacres.

Treuer recalls reading Brown's book

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