Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

Dee Brown's book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee will forever remind myself of the cruelty of those who came before us. Are we still a cruel nation? I am certain that those dealing with Native Americans in the 19th century felt they were not. The term Manifest Destiny was first defined by journalist, John L. O’Sullivan in 1845 as, “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” In my own terms I would define Manifest Destiny as the American governments mission to remake the world in the image of America. After reading the book “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. I noticed many key examples of how the Native American Indians continue to struggle to preserve their culture, religion, and way of life. Brown presents the story with a brief history of the settlement of American in 1492. Manifest Destiny was shown multiple times throughout the book when the whites tried to take over the Sioux Land. This book takes place in the late nineteenth century. The warfare shown in this book portrayed a continuing effort to destroy the Native Americans culture, religion, and way of life. Many treaties were set up to get the Native American people to move to the Black Hills, but Sitting Bull always refused. “Let me be a free man – free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself – and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty” (Brown, 385).
The Native American people cried out for help many times throughout the book for freedom. They wanted to protect their own culture and way of life. The book is told by many different narratives. One narrative, who specifically stood out the most was a Native man who was taken out of the