The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer **** (of 4)

David Treuer, an Ojibwe from Minnesota, lays out his thesis up front. "We are still here: proud, growing in numbers and strength, American and Indian."

The book's subtitle suggests the primary focus is Indian history from the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to the present. The first third of the book, however, begins 10,000 years ago as Natives established more than 500 tribes in North America with populations in excess of 20 million people at the time of European conquest. What follows is genocide as European settlers set to eradicate Indians. When armed slaughters, disease, displacement, and demolition of Indian sources of food failed to complete the project, Christianizing do-gooders took over. Even into the mid-19th century, when Abolitionists were making clear that black-skinned Americans were as American as paler Americans, there was general agreement that Indian unwillingness to absorb Christianity meant that America's first people were neither worthy of citizenship, nor actually people.

From the Civil War forward, Indians were subject to concentration camps, forced reeducation programs for Indian children taken to far away private schools, and a series of insidious treaties allowing white invaders to usurp reservation land.

Treuer's book is a direct response to a 1970s book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown), which for the next 50 years confirmed in the American psyche that Indians were impoverished, forsaken, crime-ridden, reservation-bound alcoholics whose response to the destruction of their cultures was despair and stagnation.

Not so fast, says Treuer. More than 500 tribes of Indians represents many cultures, not just an oversimplified, unified Indian culture. Tribes struggled, fought back, connived, and held on in hundreds of different locations. Indian populations in America have rebounded from a few hundred thousand to 3 million. The Internet and urban migration have been followed by new alliances and a resurgence of Indian ways in America.

Yes, poverty, unemployment, crime, obesity, drugs, and alcohol still rage at higher rates on reservations where American bigotry seems to know no limits. But Treuer also points to Indians all over the continent who have reclaimed sovereign governance systems, devised clever business strategies (not just casinos!), played America's legal system to their own favor, and revitalized their languages, foods, customs, and relationship to Mother Earth.