The best Children's Reading & Writing Education Books eBooks: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Stop being a pussy, step outside your echo chamber and learn something

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown

I dare you

It pales in comparison to the systematic reduction and genocide practiced on Native Americans by the US Army and government.

I don't buy the 'noble savage' trope that is trotted out all the time but to compare internecine and tribal warfare with wholesale one-sided slaughter and theft that was perpetrated on Native Americans is a bit disingenuous.

"Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" is a good primer on what the Native Americans in the West faced. It made me both furious and sick to my stomach in turn.

My father gave it to me when I was a kid in the late 1970s and I didn't really pay attention to it. I reread it about two months ago and took it all in. It's fucking horrifying.

You're welcome! I just ordered Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and it's on my TBR list as well (as soon as I get done with some of the other books I'm reading now).

Math guy here:

Far too few people understand grey areas, "odds" if you will, especially in the past year or two.

It's called innumeracy. More people should read that book, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences

A million times yes! It is considered the seminal work on the destruction of the Native Americans, even after 50 years. It's written in a very approachable read but still highly academic. It's not a dry read by nature of the material, but it does have spells here and there of explaining what is occurring within the tribes themselves. Be warned, it gets much more graphic than this excerpt at times.

The description of Wounded Knee is only a small part of one chapter: each chapter details the relations between the American government and a single Native American tribe, so as to describe the different experiences of each tribe with the government. It covers the time span between 1860s-1890s.

It's free on Amazon Prime if you have that, and most libraries carry it. I won't link the PDF because I'm guessing there would be copyright issues, but you can easily find it with a Google search.

After you're done with that, Check out Bury my heart at Wounded Knee. It gives a really good "Before and after" affect in conjunction with the book you're reading to the real tragedy of the extermination and genocide of Native Americans/First Nations/etc and how many of them lost their lands, culture, and lives.