#native indians

by Dee Brown ★★★★☆

I feel as though the genocide of the Native Americans has been massively glossed over, in comparison to other mass genocides. Even this book was once banned in a US school because they didn't want to cause controversy! This gradual genocide began not too long after European settlers were originally welcomed and shown hospitality by the Native Americans when they first arrived on American soil.

I can't name a movie (other than the one made after this book, which I found only after I finished the book) that focuses exclusively on the experiences of the Native Americans. Every cowboy movie I've seen, the Native Americans are always a background nuisance; savages that will kill any white man they see. Brown gives you a much clearer picture of what happened, and why they behaved the way they did, often copying the atrocities committed against them by white soldiers, but that is, of course, wiped out in the white men's narrative. He shares how the whites created false narratives in order to gain support so that they could continue stealing land and sending the Native Americans to reservations.

This book is a good introduction to the main tribes and most notable chiefs during the period of 1860-1890, and what each tribe experienced. I found the book hard to read at times because there is a lot of information and names; quite a lot of names seemed thrown in and I felt like I was expected to know them from the get go, but over time, I got used to how Brown had laid out the chapters - each chapter is essentially a new tribe/massacre/fight and you have to accept that you might not remember all of the white army men's names and their positions, and that's okay because this is definitely a book to come back to, not least because of the many real photographs of the Chiefs and other notable Native Americans. It really helped to bring a face to the people you're reading about; a reminder that you're not reading fiction, but the lives of real people. I read this through my library but I'm tempted to buy my own copy in the future to look back on.

This book has encouraged me to learn even more about the true history of what these incredible people endured, and still endure. It blew me away when I learned that there are still Native American reservations and they experience horrendous poverty. What kind of a world do we live in? I hope for the day when the US government finally put their egos aside, accept their wrongdoings and give back to the Native Americans so that they can lead good lives in their own country. It took until 1978 for Native Americans just to be allowed to practice harmless ceremonies in public! I now see Mount Rushmore as nothing but a huge insult to Native Americans; calving 4 white men into their sacred mountains that they fought so hard to protect. I only recently learned that Native Americans were holding protests against it.

I hope that all of the Native American tribes still around today can continue to share their history, revel in their culture and be unapologetically proud of their heritage.