by Mary-Ellen Mess
“What is history, but a fable agreed upon?”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
It has been 50 years since Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown hit the bestseller list with a fresh perspective on the mythology of the American frontier. Since that time, poverty and government neglect continue to plague Native American communities but new found wealth from casinos has empowered some tribal governments to restore cultural pride and reassert treaty rights via the federal courts.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs lists 574 recognized tribes and 300 reservations on its website. Despite more than 150 years of displacement, genocide, broken treaties and forced cultural assimilation; Native American communities remain resilient as evidenced in recent headlines about mascots, monuments, and court decisions. Author David Treuer, an Ojibwe from Northern Minnesota, documents the political and legal struggle for tribal survival in two books: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to Present and Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey through Reservation Life.
For readers who want to understand the strength and wisdom of indigenous peoples who once occupied the North American continent from sea to shining sea, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. Classics such as Red Earth, White Lies by Vin Deloria, Jr. and The Wisdom of the Native Americans edited by Kent Nerburn challenge the orthodoxy of the “Discovery of America” and “Manifest Destiny” and provide context to the furor over symbols and statues venerating those who contributed to the extermination of a people and their culture.
Insight into the lives of Indians in the United States today may also be found in award-winning novels by Native American authors Tommy Orange (There, There), Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, A Plague of Doves), and Sherman Alexie (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven.) along with many others.
Recorded history is usually an interpretation of whom ever is doing the record-keeping. At a time when long-held beliefs about our national heritage are being questioned and the reputations of cultural icons once considered heroic are in dispute, it’s easy to pick a side and dig in. The books mentioned here provide an opportunity to view history from another perspective. I hope you enjoy them.
Working at the RBPL is a second career for Mary-Ellen, who spent 30 years managing youth programs in Newark, NJ. In anticipation of her retirement from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of NJ, Mary-Ellen returned to school and earned a MLIS in 2013. A part-time Reference Librarian at RBPL, she resides in Red Bank with her husband. Mary-Ellen considers herself fortunate to have raised two sons in Red Bank, a diverse community with great public schools.