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Introduction


Dee Brown
Dee Brown helped reinvent America’s understanding of Native Americans. Prior to the publication of his 1970 masterpiece, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, what most Americans thought of when they heard the word “Indian” was a famous anti-littering campaign that featured a weeping American Indian (tellingly, though, the model was not of Native American descent). In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Brown laid out the ugly truth of the subjugation, expulsion, and murder of Native Americans in the late 1800s. In doing so, he helped dispel misconceptions fueled by media that had continually portrayed Native Americans as “bad guys” in classic westerns. The book remains Brown’s crowning achievement, not merely for its exploration of Native American history, but also for its exposure of American identity and the foundations upon which it was built.

Essential Facts

  1. Brown worked for the Department of Agriculture before serving in the military in World War II.
  2. Despite his fascination with the American West and Native Americans, Dee Brown was not a Native American himself, as was commonly assumed.
  3. Brown is best known as a writer, but he earned a master’s degree in library science and taught at the university level for several years.
  4. Brown published ten histories, most of which document the American frontier in the second half of the nineteenth century.
  5. A television film of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee premiered to great acclaim in the summer of 2007. It received seventeen Emmy nominations.
 

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