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Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

 

            Dee Brown, author of the book, "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," spent countless hours working on this inspired project. Brown realized the need to maintain a sense realism when it came to the American idea of how this country was created. Regardless of the positives, every nation and culture has had dark, regrettable moments; "something often overlooked in American education." In order to create logos - factual evidence - for his masterpiece, Brown turned to the pentacle of all sources: the Smithsonian, The Library of Congress, a number of newspaper articles, biographies, and numerous interviews with the Native Americans. By using these sources, Brown supports his pathos "emotion "throughout the book and pulls it away from being just a sad story, but turning it into historical facts. Brown's methods were evoked beautifully with balance in both pathos and logos creating text so vivid and distressing that you felt as if you were a native yourself experiencing the massacre. Due to Brown's overwhelming amount of research one could not help but feel reassured in the legitimacy of the text "a safe feeling for readers of nonfiction who have been lead astray in the past.
             Brown opens up chapter 19 with a broken-hearted quote from Red Cloud taken from an article by Robert M. Utley in 1963 "claiming that God had forgot the Sioux people." As we listen to Cloud's despairing view of the native life at the time, we realize the pain and suffering these people had been undergoing. They had been waiting for a second Messiah to arrive since they believed the White Men were some form of plague "a punishment for something they had done wrong. They would cry to the heavens seeking favor and repentance from God but it never arrived. The white men looked at the people and viewed their cries not promoting a Savior, but promoting war. This quote in turn paints the picture of sorrow and sadness foreshadowing the chapter to come.


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