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My disclaimer to this review is that I listened to this book rather than read it, which I do not recommend if only for the fact that you miss out on the timelines at the beginning of every chapter. This is important because the book jumps from tribe to tribe rather than focusing on a chronological telling. So I would have appreciated being able to consult the timelines when I had a question about the order of events.
Everyone should read this book in order to dispel the myths and lies that were taught to you in the American public school system. I exited school knowing that the Native Americans had been wronged in many ways and that most of them were peaceful people. However, I still left school under the impression that certain populations of Native Americans were in fact “savage,” an impression that was enforced by tales of scalpings and games of Oregon Trail, on which you could always be attacked and killed by Indians. So imagine my surprise when Dee Brown describes the bounties that white settlers collected when they turned in Native American scalps. Perhaps the public school system would have thought it slightly controversial to describe the coin purses made out of Native American genitalia that white settlers were so proud of (yes really), but if they were talking about the Indians scalping white settlers to imply that there were still unruly populations of natives, why weren’t we taught that whites were scalping the Native Americans right back?
One of the drawbacks of this book was that I found myself thinking of the Native Americans as naïve at some points. After Brown’s description of the roughly millionth broken treaty, I started to resent the Indians for continuing to sign them. While this was partially my fault for reading this book so slowly that it was days between chapters, I also lay some blame at Brown’s feet for keeping the sections on massacres and the sections on treaties so dichotomized. When reading about the treaty, I was in no way thinking about how the natives must have felt at that point due to the ever-present threat of violence.
Everyone should read this book in order to dispel the myths and lies that were taught to you in the American public school system. I exited school knowing that the Native Americans had been wronged in many ways and that most of them were peaceful people. However, I still left school under the impression that certain populations of Native Americans were in fact “savage,” an impression that was enforced by tales of scalpings and games of Oregon Trail, on which you could always be attacked and killed by Indians. So imagine my surprise when Dee Brown describes the bounties that white settlers collected when they turned in Native American scalps. Perhaps the public school system would have thought it slightly controversial to describe the coin purses made out of Native American genitalia that white settlers were so proud of (yes really), but if they were talking about the Indians scalping white settlers to imply that there were still unruly populations of natives, why weren’t we taught that whites were scalping the Native Americans right back?
One of the drawbacks of this book was that I found myself thinking of the Native Americans as naïve at some points. After Brown’s description of the roughly millionth broken treaty, I started to resent the Indians for continuing to sign them. While this was partially my fault for reading this book so slowly that it was days between chapters, I also lay some blame at Brown’s feet for keeping the sections on massacres and the sections on treaties so dichotomized. When reading about the treaty, I was in no way thinking about how the natives must have felt at that point due to the ever-present threat of violence.