Summary of David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Columbus’s second voyage was even more violent than the first, as he captured a beautiful Carib woman and gave her to a friend. She was unwilling, so he tried to take his pleasure with her, but she was resistant. He then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly.

#2 While Columbus was funneling Native families into slavery, his own brothers joined him in the New World. Ferdinand and Isabella were reluctant to allow him to continue slaving, but eventually he realized it would be more profitable to keep Indians in slavery than to send them back to Spanish markets.

#3 Columbus’s third voyage in 1498 was met with an insurrection at Hispaniola. The colonists claimed he had misled them about the opportunities to be found there. Columbus had them hanged for insubordination.

#4 During the 1500s, John Cabot, João Fernandes, and the Corte-Real brothers reached Atlantic Canada, and Juan Ponce de León founded Caparra on Puerto Rico. The Spanish, English, and French all tried to colonize North America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Aug 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822563414

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Insights on David Treuer's The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Columbus’s second voyage was even more violent than the first, as he captured a beautiful Carib woman and gave her to a friend. She was unwilling, so he tried to take his pleasure with her, but she was resistant. He then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly.

#2

While Columbus was funneling Native families into slavery, his own brothers joined him in the New World. Ferdinand and Isabella were reluctant to allow him to continue slaving, but eventually he realized it would be more profitable to keep Indians in slavery than to send them back to Spanish markets.

#3

Columbus’s third voyage in 1498 was met with an insurrection at Hispaniola. The colonists claimed he had misled them about the opportunities to be found there. Columbus had them hanged for insubordination.

#4

During the 1500s, John Cabot, João Fernandes, and the Corte-Real brothers reached Atlantic Canada, and Juan Ponce de León founded Caparra on Puerto Rico. The Spanish, English, and French all tried to colonize North America.

#5

Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean and the subsequent colonization of mainland North America are often treated as a single event. However, this was not the case for the colonists who came to America for money and stayed for money.

#6

When Columbus arrived in the Bahamas in 1492, and when Giovanni Caboto landed on the mainland of North America in 1497, they arrived in a vast land with a diverse cultural landscape that had been evolving for ten millennia.

#7

The Kiowa, for example, believe that they came into the world one by one through a hollow log. The Diné, or Navajo, believe they traveled from the center of the earth through a series of worlds until they reached this one.

#8

When Europeans first arrived in the Atlantic coast, they landed on a richly populated and fertile homeland. The water levels were lower than they are today, so coastal archaeology has only uncovered a fragmentary record of habitation.

#9

The Spanish colonization of Florida was a schizophrenic endeavor driven first by the search for treasure, then by the need to hold territory as a buffer against British and French interests. The Indian response to the Spanish was determined by three constants of first contact: the spread of disease, attempts at slavery, and the spread of information.

#10

The southeastern tribes were already largely agricultural, and the Americans wanted to eliminate that way of life. They wanted the Indians to become dependent on them, and then force them to move.

#11

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, and many other tribes had weathered the disease and had bounced back. They had proven themselves to be socially and culturally adaptive, but this did nothing to assuage the determination of the colonists and settlers to seize their land and resources.

#12

The Seminole were also subject to removal, but they charted a very different course for themselves in relation to the American government. They worked with the Spanish to displace other tribes, and they began raiding across the border into Georgia.

#13

The Seminole wars were a result of the government trying to force the Seminole to cede their land, which they didn’t want to do. The wars lasted for decades, and the government eventually had to move the remaining Seminole west to Indian Territory.

#14

The prehistoric tribes of the American Northeast were as diverse as their homeland. They lived off of the ocean and its many resources, but when the climate changed, they switched to hunting smaller game inland.

#15

The Iroquois Confederacy, which was home to the five original tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, was formed to organize and protect themselves from other tribes. They created protected villages surrounded by cornfields and acres of squash and beans.

#16

The first contact between Europeans and Indians in the Northeast was not a binary story of Pilgrims arriving in New England