The Colonisation of North America

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1971)

The document in an extract from a book published in 1971 by a native American, Dee Brown. It is about the colonisation of North American from the point of view of the native people; the research is based on both European and native documents.

Right from the first part of the extract, the reader gets a positive impression of the way native Americans behaved with the first American colonists; indeed they are described as “friendly” and it is told that they helped the English puritans to survive during their first years in the New World: “they shared corn with them from the tribal stores, showed them where and how to catch fish, and got them through the first Winter” (lines 3-4-5). Besides, the Pilgrim Fathers are compared to “helpless children” in danger of death, completely vulnerable and unable to survive in their new country.

In the following part of the paragraph, it is described how Indians and colonists lived in peace for several years; many English ships kept on arriving in New England and the settlements “began crowding in upon each other” (line 10).

The frenetic atmosphere that characterizes the arrival of hundreds of white man in the colonies of North America is underlined by the use of onomatopoeic words such as “ring” and “crash”

As European settlements were becoming bigger and bigger, some colonists asked an Indian chief called Samoset to give them 12000 acres of land; even if the native people believed that the land belonged to no man (because it came from the Great Spirit and it was as endless as the sky), they agreed to get through a ceremony to transfer the property of the Indian territory to humour the Pilgrim Fathers.

The “poliptoto” (“repetition”) that connects the words “strangers” and “strange” highlights the fact that the native Americans found very odd that the white men wanted to go through a ceremony to obtain a part of Indian land.

But the native people's generosity wasn't rewarded by the colonists, who kept on coming by thousand, pushing back the natives into the wilderness.

The expression “by thousands”, that is also used in the original text, recalls those used in the previous part of the document, when the writer describes how the white men's settlements crowded in upon each other, becoming bigger and bigger while the Indians were being pushed back into the wildest part of the land.