What I read and how I felt about it

Today I am reviewing "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," which is a history of the military conquest of the American West by white settlers against Native Americans. I read this about six months ago, and I might not remember every single detail of the book. It was pretty dark and quite hard to get through, but it also had a lot of really valuable information that I appreciated a lot. One thing that I wondered about while reading it was the possible bias of the white male author. The book focuses almost exclusively on the military defeats of Native American tribes and acts as though Native Americans were completely exterminated on the American continent. While Native American tribes have certainly suffered tremendous defeats at the hands of white settlers, I don't think it's accurate to state that the defeat was as total as the author makes it out to be. There are many Native Americans still living in the U.S. today, and the book can fall into a genre of white-liberal writing where we wring our hands and moan about how helpless the poor brown people are, while neglecting to mention that colonialism has been resisted in manifold ways over and over again. The French were kicked out of Algeria, Toussaint Louverture led a revolution in Haiti, Fidel Castro overthrew Batista, and on and on and on. This book provides a lot of really valuable history of the white conquest of the American West, but I just wanted to start off by commenting critically on this melancholic bent in Dee Brown's writing, whose problematic nature has a lot of parallels in white scholarship on colonialism.

Anyway, one of the things I found most interesting in this book was understanding more of the timeline of colonialism in the U.S. It never occurred to me how much tribal autonomy persisted well into the 1800s. I guess I just subconsciously assumed that in 1776, the U.S. declared independence from the British, and that the genocide of Native Americans concluded at about that same time. But this is not the case at all. If I am remembering correctly from this book, there were still large parts of the U.S. where tribes were still abundant in the time of Abraham Lincoln. It's interesting to look back on these periods of time where it feels like things could plausibly have played out differently than they ultimately did. What if in the 1800's the U.S. had decided to reverse its exterminationist policies towards Native Americans? What if Native American tribes had, beginning in the 1850s, begun fighting off white settlers, and forced them to return to Europe? What if Native American tribes had fought white settlers to a stand-still in the West and that situation had remained until today, with much of the West still under the autonomy of Native tribes? This is one of the reasons I really enjoy reading about history -- seeing these super ripe moments of contingency where key events could have played out differently than they did. 

Overall, this book left me curious to learn more about the colonial history of the West, and especially the military history of colonialism and anti-colonialism in the American West. I would love to learn more about battles where Native Americans successfully fought off white settlers. Stories like these are painfully absent from the American cultural narrative. (Like, what if we went from land acknowledgements in Starbucks to notes such as: this is where such and such indigenous warrior fought off dozens of white settlers. A boy can dream).