The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

This book is written out of the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.  It is written with the understanding that our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else's.  In a sense, it is a selfish project.  I want--I need--to see Indian life as more than a legacy of loss and pain, because I want to pass on to my beautiful children a rich heritage and an embracing vision of who we were and who we are.  But I have not allowed myself to conjure alternative (hopeful but false) realities out of the desire to make up for a traumatic past or to imagine a better future.  Looking at what actually was and is, beyond the blinders that the "dead Indian" narrative has imposed, means reckoning with relentless attacks on our sovereignty and the suffering it has created.  But it also brings into view the ingenious and resourceful counterattacks we have mounted over the decades, in resistance to the lives the state would have us live.

David Treuer's terrific history of Native America, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, is both a sequel and a response to Dee Brown's seminal Bury Me at Wounded Knee.  It begins in 1890, the year of the Wounded Knee massacre that serves as the endpoint of Brown's history.  But Treuer objects to Brown's suggestion that Wounded Knee was the end of history for Native Americans, a point at which a total conquest was completed and white America claimed victory.  Although that reading of Brown is a little simplistic, it's not hard to see how Treuer, who grew up on Minnesota's Ojibwe Leech Lake Reservation, is frustrated by Brown's history, which plays into modern ideas of the vanished or vanishing Indian.  We're here, Treuer says, as we've always been.

Heartbeat isn't sanguine.  It's honest about the state of Native American reservations today--the Standing Rock reservation remains the heart of the nation's poorest county--and the challenges that still face Native communities.  But there are stories here you might be surprised to never have heard, like the story of the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota who successful resisted government allocation (a process by which communal tribal land was parceled out to individual stakeholders and the remainder sold to whites) and who have held onto their tribal government for a hundred years.  A chapter on Native casinos and entrepreneurialism profiles the wealthy Tulalip, whose casino outside Seattle has enriched and enlivened the tribe there.  Beside these historical accounts are anecdotal profiles and interviews with living Native Americans to emphasize the central thesis of the historical: Native Americans are not ghosts or relics.

Reading Heartbeat has really helped me put some of the reading I've been doing into context.  Treuer explains how Piegan Blackfeet saw raiding as "quasi-spiritual" and "ceremonial" activity that helped me understand the development of the title character in Fools Crow.  The explanation of allotment shed a light on Louise Erdrich's Tracks, in which Native characters are always actively avoiding the Indian Agent who wants to allot Ojibwe land; I never quite got what it was they were afraid of until now.  His history of the messy but idealistic occupation of Alcatraz Island is crucial for understanding the cultural and political ambivalence of Tommy Orange's There There.  But more than anything else, it was a reminder of why these books seem so vital: because they are evidence of contemporaneous Native voices and speak with the same urgency.  Like Treuer's history, they insist: We are here; we never left; we have a future as well as a past.