Day Sixty-Six

6/6

The Book: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

ISBN: 0-8050-6669-1

Suggested By: Sissy Vaughn

Where: Home

When: 1:30-2P

Music: None

Company: Alone

Pages: 405-460 (55)

The Lead In: This book will be finished today and I am glad to have read it. I began it with some fear that it would bother me with its revisionist approach. But it didn’t. At least, not so much that I couldn’t read it.

The 411 on the 55: Sitting Bull had taken his tribe into Canada and was living peacefully away from the settlers. He had been there for four years without causing trouble. However, the United States government saw him as a threat to the status quo. He was a chief with a tribe uncontrolled by the system.

So the US government began to put pressure on Canada to push him out. Over time, political pressure from North and South of the border forced Sitting Bull to return to the lower 48 and take his medicine. Of course, it eventually led to his death in Nevada. 

The 20/20: The travails of the Native Americans contained within this book are nothing to be ignored. The depth of suffering and destruction is awful. How terrible that a country who had so recently removed the stain of slavery could not see that the murder of its Natives was just as evil. Well-written and thorough, this book is a disturbing yet truthful.

Line of the Day: “I hate all the white people. You are all thieves and liars.” pg 426

The Fact on the Fiction: In 1885, Sitting Bull was allowed to leave the reservation to join Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show.  He earned about $50 a week for riding once around the arena, where he was a popular attraction. Although it is rumored that he often cursed his audiences in his native tongue during the show, some historians argue that he did not, and there have been reports that Sitting Bull in fact gave speeches relaying his desire for education for the young and the normalization of relations between the Sioux and whites. Wikipedia