FINALIST FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE

A NEW YORK Moments BESTSELLER

Called a best book of 2019 from the New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Collection, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal.

‘Chapter after chapter, it’s like one shattered misconception after another.’ – NPR

‘An informed, moving and kaleidoscopic portrait… Treuer’s about The Heartbeat of Wounded Leg: Local America from 1890 to the Present powerful reserve suggests the necessity for soul-searching about the meanings of American background and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation’s past..’ – New York Situations Book Review, entrance page

A sweeping history–and counter-narrative–of Native American life in the Wounded Knee massacre for this.

The received notion of Local American history–as promulgated by books like Dee Brown’s mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee–has been that American Indian history essentially ended with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Leg. Not only did a hundred fifty Sioux die at the hands of the U. S. Cavalry, the sense was, but Local civilization did as well.

Growing up Ojibwe on the reservation in Minnesota, schooling as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his non-fiction and novels, David Treuer provides uncovered a different narrative. Because they didn’t disappear–and not really despite but rather for their intense struggles to protect their vocabulary, their traditions, their families, and their very existence–the story of American Indians since the end of the nineteenth hundred years for this is one of unparalleled resourcefulness and reinvention.

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes’ distinctive civilizations from first contact, he explores the way the depredations of each era spawned brand-new modes of survival. The damaging seizures of land provided rise to significantly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that place the lie towards the misconception that Indians have no idea or value property. The pressured assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in america military and the pull of urban existence brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the growing form of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is the important, intimate story of the resilient people within a transformative era.