Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by American writer Dee Brown is a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century. He describes the people's displacement through forced relocations and years of warfare waged by the United States federal government. It was first published in 1970 to generally strong reviews, although scholars criticized it on several grounds. Published at a time of increasing American Indian activism, the book was on the bestseller list for more than a year. Translated into 17 languages, the book has never gone out of print.
The title is taken from the final phrase of a 20th-century poem titled "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benet. The full quotation, "I shall not be here/I shall rise and pass/Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," appears at the beginning of Brown's book. Although Benet's poem is not about the plight of native Americans, Wounded Knee, (a village on a reservation in South Dakota) was the location of the last major confrontation between the U.S. Army and American Indians. The event is known formally as the Wounded Knee Massacre, as more than 150, largely unarmed, Sioux men, women, and children were killed that day.
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