Heartbeat of Wounded Knee Young Readers Adaptation : Life in Native America

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover a profound and inspiring story of Native American resilience and cultural preservation in this beautifully adapted book for young adults.

“Utterly vital in its historical prowess, essential in its portraits of lived experiences.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“The history related here is necessary for all Americans to understand, and Treuer’s personalized accounting ensures that readers will learn it with both their minds and hearts.”—Booklist, starred review

Native American history has been traditionally presented as a dead past, a civilization that ended in 1890 with the massacre of more than one hundred fifty Sioux at Wounded Knee, the last major armed conflict between Indians and the US government.

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Ojibwe author and academic David Treuer shatters that myth. Through a brilliant blend of historical research, eye-opening interviews with a broad cross-section of tribal members, and moving personal reflection on growing up Indian, Treuer tells the true story of Native resilience and resistance to being written out of modern American history. The struggle of Native Americans to preserve their tribes, their languages and cultures, and their very existence is intense, complicated, and often heart-wrenching. From broken treaties to land seizures to forcing Indian children to live in state-run boarding schools, the history of treatment toward Native Americans is bloody.

But this groundbreaking book shows that despite all efforts to scrub the existence of Native Americans from the record of American history, the heartbeat of Native American life, identity, and self-rule beats steady and strong.

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of four previous novels, most recently Prudence, and two books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate, and The Washington Post, among others. He has a PhD in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.