Bozeman Magazine

Country Bookshelf is thrilled to welcome author David Treuer, who will discuss and sign The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to Present, Tuesday, March 12th at 6pm. Read on for more information about the event, the author, and their new book!

More about Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Almost from the moment it occurred, the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was cast in the popular imagination as a point of no return, at which not only did hundreds of Lakota men, women and children perish but so, in a sense, did Native American life itself. The romantic idea of a once-noble race doomed to oblivion crystallized into gospel over the decades, and was further cemented by Dee Brown’s bestselling 1970 bestseller, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Now David Treuer—the critically acclaimed writer, anthropologist, and journalist, himself Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota—brings to that mythology its long-overdue reckoning. THE HEARTBEAT AT WOUNDED KNEE  —is a landmark, a powerfully illuminating counternarrative that dispels the misconceptions of Indian history as unmitigated tragedy. Treuer traces the rich, resilient and multi-dimensional story that Native people have been living over the past century, and adds new chapters to the story of American Indian creativity and resilience in our modern times.  Wounded Knee was indisputably a devastating low point—but seen clearly, it is only one of many challenges to which Indian people have risen tirelessly and with ingenuity since first contact. This book makes visible their accomplishments, and the full scope of their largely unrecognized lives.

Timely and engaging, Treuer brings the deep past into contact with the evolving present. Expertly combining detailed history with compelling on-the-ground reporting, David Treuer follows tribes’ first contact with European settlers and brilliantly analyzes the subsequent disruptions to tribal ways of life: the seizure of land, the relocation to reservations, the sundering of family ties as children were forced into boarding schools, the migration to urban areas, and more.  Treuer acknowledges the violence and treachery with which these changes were imposed, as well as the poverty and disenfranchisement that resulted, but he also explores the creativity and ingenuity with which Native people responded to each new loss and hardship—the emergence of a unifying Native identity, the formation of intertribal social networks, the codifying of new political structures, and the expansion of Native-generated industry and wealth, to name only some of the channels that developed.