Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West - Dee Brown

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a title I’d always heard without knowing much of its contents. Its connection with American Indians was obvious from context, but whether it was a film or a novel or what I didn’t know. As it happens, the book is a historical chronicling of America’s western expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, told entirely from the perspective of the tribes that were displaced or destroyed. It is a sad book, sympathetically told, and an important one, in that it collects the words and recollections of a people who were rarely allowed t ospeak for themselves—certainly not in as wide a forum.

There is a depressing repetitiveness to the book, which proceeds chronologically forward and, for the most part, geographically westward. In each chapter we meet (or occasionally revisit) a tribe, and watch as the same cycle repeats itself: pressure fro mwhite settlers forces the indians to accept some sort of treaty. The treaty is either a swindle from the outset, or bargained in good faith but reinterpretted later to be more beneficial to the United States government and less to the tribe. Tensions rise until the tribe is corralled into a reservation or goes to war with an enemy it cannot beat. Tactical intelligence sometimes brings brief victories, legal or martial, but the tide is inexorable, and it sweeps always west.

Though unflinching in its portrayal of history, this is not a bitter book. There are good white men who see the Indians as human beings and want to do right by them, and cynical tribes who ally with the American soldiers against other Indians in order to secure better terms for themselves. Yet individual goodness cannot perservere against an unfeeling system, and those who attempt to resist are either worn down into apathy or destroyed. In this sense it reminds me a bit of The Wire, a more modern example of flawed but good people bashing their heads against an unfeeling system in an effort to budge it an inch, and coming away with nothing for their troubles but pain.

Brown’s writing is strong and crisp, capturing some of the poetry of the men for which it speaks. Long passages are sometimes quoted which give particular evidence to the lyrical nature of native tongues, rich in metaphor and anchored closely to the land. I wouldn’t call Bury my Heart a light read, but it is an engaging and important one.

Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—the Yanomamö and the Anthropologists - Napoleon Chagnon

Noble Savages is another book scooped from my wife’s collection of library checkouts. I read it on her recommendation, and didn’t know anything about the subject matter before picking it up. The book is a memoir by cultural anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, a man I’d never heard of but who was apparently the main flashpoint of a controversy that tore the discipline into two camps: those who view anthropology as a fundamentally scientific pursuit in alignment with biological principles, and those who view it as one of the humanities with a mandate principally to identify and right the wrongs of past colonial encounters with native populations. Chagnon is staunchly a member of the first group, a leaning that is alluded to often throughout the book and becomes the central issue in its final chapters.

But despite being a memoir, the book isn’t as much about Chagnon as about the principal subjects of his decades-long research career: an Amazonian tribe called the Yanomamö, who were at the outset of his fieldwork in the late 60s among the last of the human tribes that could reasonably be called “untouched by civilization.” They had encountered the modern world, of course, but such encounters were fleeting, and their way of life remained as it had been for thousands of years before.

Chagnon describes his first encounter in detail, but much of the book takes a non-chronological approach, focusing instead on different aspects of Yanomamö culture as an organizational principle. After a lifetime of writing academic works, Chagnon seems incapable or unwilling to deviate from his observational stance, which makes it a bit unusual as a memoir, though also makes it more interesting overall to someone unfamiliar with the Yanomamö. His respect for them as a people is clear, and while he does not hesitate to point out their foibles, he does so in a way that acknowledges their full humanity. This stance seems to implicitly argue that kid gloves approach of his opponents, who see the West as the aggressor and native tribes as fundamentally innocent, is an infantilizing and ultimately prejudiced viewpoint, denying the Yanomamö the full gamut of human traits, good and bad.

Its final chapters shift to his life after his research was curtailed by interference from local missionaries, who he claims saw him as a threat to their dominance, and pressure from rival academics, culminating in a hatchet job book that appears at this point to have been largely discredited. His bitterness is apparent but understandable. I have studied only his side in detail, but his arguments are convincing, and the bit of reading outside I did seems to confirm the perspective that the was wrongly accused of unethical conduct. His true sin seems to have been his unwavering conviction that Yanomamö follow biological imperative, and that basic biological drives—procreation, namely—drive their conflict more than scarce access to resources, which is the Marxist perspective.

All in all, an interesting book. I don’t think I’ll necessarily get out his other, more academic work, but i greatly enjoyed learning about the Yanomamö.