Adaptation and Resilience

The standard story of the European “discovery” of America is one of the great crimes perpetrated against its Native inhabitants. It not only sanitizes a deliberate and brutal colonial enterprise by framing it as an accident of history, it also silences Indian voices. At the heart of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee is a reparative project to reframe the story of Indians as eternal victims who just happened to have lost the struggle for technological advancement with one that celebrates the achievements of adaptation and resilience. The history of Native contact with Europeans, Treuer says, “showed the supreme adaptability and endurance of Indian tribes across the continent” (172).

Treuer recounts that history, in particular from 1890 on, in terms that highlight the resistance to domination that Indians engaged in at every turn. We are not trapped in the past, Truer says of Indians. With every effort at removal...