Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
book by Dee Brown
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West is a 1970 non-fiction book by American writer Dee Brown. It explores the history of American expansionism in the American West in the late nineteenth century and its devastating effects on the Indigenous peoples living there. Brown describes Native Americans' displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government as part of a continuing effort to destroy the cultures, religions, and ways of life of Native American peoples.
Brown borrowed the book's title from the 1927 poem "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benét: "I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass. Bury my heart at Wounded Knee". Wounded Knee was the site of the last major attack by the US Army on Native Americans, and is one of several possible sites of Crazy Horse's buried remains.
Joaquin Miller's 1873 novel Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History and Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 book A Century of Dishonor are often considered to be nineteenth-century precursors to Dee Brown's book.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book has never gone out of print and has been translated into 17 languages.
The public source identifies “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” as book by Dee Brown. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bury, Heart and Wounded.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1339541. VIAF identifies the subject as 182205340. The Library of Congress control number is n2011008178. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1927, 1873 and 1881.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.