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Craft items with a Native American theme

BOOKS

 

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BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE

A STARKLY BEAUTIFUL ACCOUNT OF WHAT AMERICA LOST
It is axiomatic that history gets written by the winners - the losers are invariably made to look like bad men or natural losers or both. The point of "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee" is to take a history that most of us know only from the winning perspective, and narrate it from the point of view of the losers.

Brown accomplishes this objective with considerable grace and beauty in spare, elegant narrative prose and verbatim quotes from key historical personages. Not a single word is wasted on description, sermonising or misguided attempts to explain the unexplainable. The mind-boggling amount of research Brown must have undertaken into state, federal and tribal records over the years is placed entirely at the service of the narrative. This story is broken up into episodes of just the right length and pace, each one revolving around a particular campaign or leader. The author never tries to manipulate the reader's emotions, but then he never has to.

Sadly, I think (with respect) that some readers and reviewers have missed the point of this sublime work. Of course it is not objective, and of course it is not the whole story. There are two sides to every conflict, and in the so-called "Indian Wars" there were rights and wrongs committed on both sides. But it is in our nature to be partisan, to want closure to a debate, to hold a clear judgement on the heroes and villains of the piece with no shades of grey to blur our moral certainties. The popular "Cowboys and Indians" culture of our parents' and grandparents' day was secure in its belief that civilised Christian values had won the day. The more politically sensitive consensus of our own day all too easily falls into the equal and opposite error of glorifying alternative cultures at the expense of our own.

If only real life worked in such simple black-and-white terms! To treat Brown's book as the definitive history of the West - especially as a school history text that at last sets the record straight and for the first time tells it like it was - would be (almost!) as misguided as basing your view of history on Hollywood blockbusters like the Cinerama epic, "How The West Was Won". The value of this book is quite different. It is an unashamedly subjective account of the sufferings endured by the First Americans at the hands of the European settlers and their government. It should be read in conjunction with the standard histories, and (in the mind's eye of the reader) juxtaposed on the images of White American legend.

Only thus, by embracing the tension between these different perspectives, can truth be served. Ultimately, Brown's book serves two valuable functions: Firstly, it provides a necessary antidote to the decades of triumphalist legend that depicted the Native Americans as little more than vindictive savages. But more than that, it gives America (and the rest of Western civilisation) a record of what it lost through the destruction of such a rich and diverse cultural heritage. Given the simultaneous loss of innocence and the environmental damage that went hand in hand with the destruction, it is clear that the "winners" lost more than we have commonly grasped.