Introduction

“HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS,” said British prime minister Winston Churchill. It’s easy to understand why. The victors want to brag about their success. The surviving victims often don’t want to talk about their defeat because the memory is too painful.

The history most people know about Indians is told from the point of view of the white people who conquered them. There’s another reason for this. Almost all Native American tribes in North and South America did not have a written language. And human nature being what it is, the conquerors, from the Spanish conquistadors to the U.S. Cavalry, wrote about their heroic deeds and pretty much ignored the bad things that happened to the Indians.

That’s why Dee Brown’s book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, is so important. When published in 1971, it was as if a thunderbolt had struck. It used as many primary sources as possible—interviews with Indian chiefs who fought the battles, government records, letters, diaries, articles, and other documents—to tell the Indians’ side of the story from 1860 to 1890.

And what a sad story it is—a saga in which few white men are heroes. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee revealed that an overwhelming number of white settlers, hunters, soldiers, and men of authority were arrogant, greedy, racist, murderous, and cruel beyond belief. To get Indian land, they lied, cheated, stole, and killed those Indians who crossed their paths, from warriors to innocent women, children, and the elderly. Today it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how these people could have done what they did and feel no shame. But that’s what happened—and not to just one tribe or nation. As Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee revealed, from sea to shining sea, it happened to them all.

Dee Brown’s classic is a big and powerful work. Condensing the entire book into one volume for a younger audience ran the risk of distorting it through oversimplifying the facts and unfairly leaving out many important events. All tribes suffered similarly from United States government policies and its citizens. Though all were eventually defeated, one nation stood out as having fought the longest and most successfully.

That is why this adaptation focuses on one Indian nation from Dee Brown’s book, the Sioux. As the largest and most powerful nation, the Sioux represent the story of the Native American experience in the American West. Their epic fight against the United States covered the entire three decades written about in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Their leaders included some of the most famous warrior chiefs in Indian history: Red Cloud, the Sioux’s greatest diplomat; Sitting Bull, the Sioux’s greatest strategist; and Crazy Horse, the Sioux’s greatest field general. The struggle to keep their land produced some of the most famous events in the Indian Wars: the Fetterman Massacre, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Ghost Dance, and finally, the Massacre at Wounded Knee.

In this retelling of the saga of the Sioux, details about events that don’t directly deal with the Sioux story have been removed or condensed. Some extra information about people and locations mentioned in Dee Brown’s original text has been added to help readers who may be unfamiliar with those individuals and the places where they lived, fought, and died. And some names, such as “Bozeman Trail” for “Bozeman Road,” have been changed into a form more familiar to today’s readers in order to reduce confusion. There are two new sections: the first chapter and the epilogue. The first chapter provides important background about the Sioux people. The epilogue summarizes what has happened to them since 1890. It contains some previously unpublished material from Dee Brown’s files. It also briefly reveals the Sioux nation’s ongoing epic struggle to keep its identity and tells how, eventually, they were able to achieve a measure of success against a federal government that had so often wronged them.

Because most people are more familiar with the English translation of Sioux names, those translations are used throughout to avoid confusion. But, in the case of important chiefs, their native-language names are also included.

In the 30th-anniversary edition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown wrote, “We rarely know the full power of words, in print or spoken. It is my hope that time has not dulled the words herein and that they will continue through the coming generation to be as true and direct as I originally meant them to be.”

In 2011, as Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee celebrates its 40th anniversary, it is my hope that Saga of the Sioux will inspire readers to want to know more about this tragic chapter in our history. And that they will continue this quest of discovery by reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, as it remains a landmark history of the conquest of the West from the Native Americans’ point of view.

—DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN

An undated Mathew Brady studio photograph (opposite) of a delegation of Sioux and Arapaho led by Chief Red Cloud in Washington, D.C. Indians in photo, from left to right: (seated) Red Cloud, Big Road, Yellow Bear, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and Iron Crow; (standing) Little Big Man, Little Wound, Three Bears, and He Dog. The white men are not identified. Note that Big Road, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses, and Iron Crow are wearing a large cross on their chests, indicating that they had converted to Christianity. Missionaries probably insisted they wear this large cross in order to publicize their success in converting important Sioux chiefs. [LOC, DIG-cwpbh -04474]