Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Much of the intrigue of this specific copy relates to the inscription subject Jamake Highwater who was not a Cherokee chief as the claimed in the late 1960's but was really an American writer and journalist of Eastern European Jewish ancestry called Jackie Marks. In his fictional identity, the wrote and published more than thirty fiction and non-fiction books of music, art, poetry and history including one publication that became the basis for an important film documentary about Native American culture. His deceit was exposed in n1984 by an Indian activist and a reporter in separate publications. Despite this, Marks still continued to be widely perceived by the general public as Native American and clearly Dee Brown had been one whom the successfully deceived. Hence this example is a very rare and certainly unique copy of an important book . When Marks died in 2001 the New York Times and others carried obituaries repeating his false claims of his alleged Indian background. Aside from this irregularity, the book is still an eloquent, fully documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century and in the 1970's it changed forever our vision of how the West was really won. The great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyanne and other tribes were allowed to tell the public in their own words of the battles, massacres and broken treaties that finally left them demoralised and defeated. It was an American bestseller in hard cover for over a year post publication, selling many millions of copies and was translated into seventeen languages, Brown becoming a celebrated author of both fiction and non-fiction until the died in 2002.