71 pages • 2 hours read
David TreuerThe Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Battle at Wounded Knee
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, was the site of a massacre in 1890 in which the US Army murdered at least 150 Lakota men, women, and children as part of the federal government’s efforts in westward expansion. Treuer takes the book’s title from the battle, as did one of the books on which his text is inspired, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Treuer upends the notion that the battle was a decisive defeat for Indigenous peoples, arguing that, though it was a tragedy, it did not sound the death knell for Indigenous peoples, who have remained resilient and creative in their efforts to prosper economically and to gain political power.
Indian Boarding Schools
Indian boarding schools were institutions supposedly constructed with the purpose of educating Indigenous peoples, though they truly existed to assimilate tribal youth to White, Christian culture and to force free hard labor out of Indigenous children. Conditions in boarding schools were notoriously substandard. Indigenous children were forced to wear threadbare hand-me-down clothing and were frequently malnourished. In some instances, they were the victims of violence, as in the case of a nine-year-old girl who was raped in her bed in her dormitory bed at one boarding school.
Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance is a ceremonial religion that originated with the Paiute in Nevada and was promoted by an Indigenous man named Jack Wilson, who later went by the Paiute name Wokova. According to lore, the idea for the Ghost Dance came to Wilson when he had “a vision during a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889” (3). During the event, Wilson claimed that God told him that he had to return to his tribe and tell them to learn to live in harmony, to refrain from drinking alcohol and stealing, to work hard, and to live peacefully with White people. If Indigenous people followed these tenets and performed the Ghost Dance, Wilson declared, “they would find peace on earth […] and be reunited with the spirits of their ancestors in the afterlife” (4). The Lakota took Wilson’s declaration further in their own legend, believing that Whites would be washed away from their land, allowing it to return to its pre-Columbian state. The US government banned Indigenous peoples from doing the Ghost Dance, alarmed by its encouragement of resistance.
American Indian Movement (AIM)
AIM was an Indigenous activist group formed in Minnesota in the 1970s and which modeled itself on the radical politics of the Black Panther Party. Like the Black Panthers, AIM was first concerned with addressing high rates of unemployment and poverty among Indigenous peoples, as well as fighting back against police brutality by performing armed patrols of police, as the Black Panthers did in Oakland, California. As the decade progressed, AIM staged large protests at Alcatraz, at the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC, and at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, drawing the attention of the Nixon Administration. Though the organization eventually descended into violence and internecine fighting, as the Black Panthers did, the group’s efforts were key in restoring pride in Indigenous peoples and encouraging them to fight for their enfranchisement rights.
