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A review by harlando
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
4.0
Awesome! This was a great book and really enjoyed it.
I don't think I was taught (public school, midwest, mid 80s to mid 90s) much about the Indian wars outside to the little bighorn and a passing mention of the trail of tears. It probably should have occurred to me that something was going on. The history texts made it seem like there were lots of native Americans around when Louis and Clark crossed the continent and that they somehow disappeared by the end of the civil war.
Clearly, they didn't just disappear. They were harried and harassed in a long series of military and civilian actions that did leave Native American's vastly depleted and dispossessed by the 1860s with those last battles of the Indian wars just around the corner.
I think the colonization of the Americas is the closest real world analogue to a sci-fi invasion from another planet. Cultural differences between Europeans and native Americans were deep. They were the same species, but I think that the two were about as far apart as one could get. The same would be true of European-aboriginal contact in Australia.
I don't think I was taught (public school, midwest, mid 80s to mid 90s) much about the Indian wars outside to the little bighorn and a passing mention of the trail of tears. It probably should have occurred to me that something was going on. The history texts made it seem like there were lots of native Americans around when Louis and Clark crossed the continent and that they somehow disappeared by the end of the civil war.
Clearly, they didn't just disappear. They were harried and harassed in a long series of military and civilian actions that did leave Native American's vastly depleted and dispossessed by the 1860s with those last battles of the Indian wars just around the corner.
I think the colonization of the Americas is the closest real world analogue to a sci-fi invasion from another planet. Cultural differences between Europeans and native Americans were deep. They were the same species, but I think that the two were about as far apart as one could get. The same would be true of European-aboriginal contact in Australia.