When the occupation and siege at Wounded Knee hits the news, Patsy’s classmates are annoyed or dismissive, but Patsy is worried for her aunt’s family, who live nearby on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
When I was younger I was completely hooked on those Dear America diaries about girls living through turbulent eras of American history. There was something about getting an average girl’s perspective of historic events that really immersed me in the story. Brave Bird at Wounded Knee follows a similar format, though it blends diary entries with traditional narration from Patsy’s perspective.
In this short book we cover a lot of ground. Patsy is white-passing and doesn’t have much connection with her Lakota heritage, but over the course of the book she comes to become more interested in connecting with her roots and gains the confidence to talk openly about being half-Lakota. I liked how a young reader would learn about the importance of witnessing and recording history alongside Patsy, and how we got to see a plethora of perspectives on the occupation through various supporting characters.
However I did think that the story took a little while to get going, with Patsy not even leaving to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation until about the halfway point. While we learn plenty about the history of the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 and the events on the reservation that led up to the occupation, Patsy and the reader remain rather removed from the whole situation. As such, this book felt like it was more about how the protest sparked Patsy’s increased interest in her Lakota heritage than about the protest itself – which is not a bad thing, but not what I was expecting from the story going in either.
Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.