"The United States of America committed genocide against Native Americans. It was initially piecemeal; as Manifest Destiny took hold in the mid-nineteenth century, it became exponential. The vast plains of the West were conquered by the US in one generation�1860-1890 (the focus of this book). There was nothing the Native Americans could have done to assuage the US. Treaties were made and ignored. Native Americans were left with no choice but to engage in warfare. They fought valiantly, but mostly in vain. The outcome was inevitable: the destruction of Native American life.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was first published in 1970. It remains relevant to the present day. Large tracts of the American population remain ignorant of this history. Brown uses primary sources to give a voice to Native Americans that desperately tried to placate their conquerors. Each chapter focuses on a particular tribe that resisted the advance of the US army and is mostly ordered chronologically. The content of each chapter is juxtaposed by a very brief prefix of US/world events that highlight the political, artistic, or scientific advancements of humanity. This is a subtle but powerful literary device to illuminate the barbarity of US conduct.

This book has made me think about the casus belli for the American Civil War. President Lincoln declared war on the South to save the union and to end slavery. At the same time, Native Americans were being slaughtered in the West by "bluecoats." The concurrent liberation of one people and destruction of another is inherently contradictory. A dialectical lens sheds light on this (Hobsbawm has influenced my thinking here). What both conflicts have in common is the advancement of Northern industrial capital into the South and West by force. Thus, manumission may have just been a facade for capitalist imperialism."