Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses the techniques that Brown uses in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to make his readers see through the common misconceptions about Native Americans.

In Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown relies on many harrowing eyewitness accounts from Native Americans, letting them tell their side of how the West was won. Several reviewers consider these eyewitness accounts the most important part of the book. For example, in her New Statesman review, Helen McNeil says that the book "awakens a more authentic sense of . . . grandeur with the moving speeches of the great chiefs." In fact, Brown's later Native-American books that do not include these eyewitness accounts have often been panned because Brown does the talking. For example, in his New York Magazine review of Brown's Native-American novel...