The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

When Europeans made their first contact with Indigenous populations around 1500 CE, Indigenous people numbered around five million in North America and existed within over 500 distinct tribes. Four hundred years later, there were only 237,000 Indigenous people all over the US. Indigenous people also had only three percent of the land in their possession. Still, Indigenous people lived on and continue to prod the American public on modern questions regarding environmental protections and the extent to which corporate interests overwhelm the public good.

Wounded Knee was “the last major armed conflict between Indian tribes and the U.S. government” (452), but Indigenous people have fought many other battles against the federal government. Indigenous parents fought to keep their children; Indigenous children sent to boarding schools fought to remember their parents and traditions; and Indigenous leaders fought allotment and termination.

Treuer asserts that his account is an attempt “to remember the good and the bad, the personal and the social” and to remember the details of Indigenous people’s lives (454). Indigenous tribes are, he argues, the heartbeat of the US republic.