On the morning of Dec. 29, 1890, soldiers of the 7th Cavalry—a unit reconstituted after being destroyed at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876—surrounded a Sioux Indian encampment in South Dakota. The troops demanded that the Sioux surrender their weapons. One man objected, saying that his rifle had cost him a lot of money. A melee ensued, and cannons and Gatling guns rained down on the mostly unarmed Sioux. Some 300 men, women, and children were killed. After the slaughter, which the Army insisted on calling a battle, 20 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Wounded Knee Massacre ended the Indian Wars, which had begun less than 30 years earlier. For a long time it also ended any interest in hearing the Indians’ side of the story. Apart from a few considerably embellished as-told-to memoirs by Geronimo and Sitting Bull published in books and magazines, the narrative of the conquest of the West was the province of White writers and historians.

That changed when a librarian and amateur historian told the story of the conquest of the West from the viewpoint of its Indigenous inhabitants, those who suffered violence at the hands of the White invaders. Indignant, he was determined to tell their story as one of victims of institutional, racist violence, made “relevant” by what was unfolding in the news from Vietnam as well as anti-war demonstrations on the streets and the Nixon government’s violent reaction to them. In 1970, Holt published Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a book that depicted most of the invading Whites as monsters and the Indians they encountered as innocent victims, reversing the moral order of earlier narratives in a history that Brown—who was White, with no Native ancestry—deemed “a morality play of personified abstractions.”

The book was a bestseller, though some critics observed that, after all, real people and not abstractions were the actors in that tragic history. Ursula K. Le Guin might have been thinking of Brown’s book when she wrote, “Writers of a dominant group who assume the right to speak for members of a less powerful one take…risks in complacent ignorance of their existence.”

Brown was not ignorant, though some paternalism shows through in his suggestion at the book’s opening that White readers “may be surprised to hear words of gentle reasonableness coming from the mouths of Indians stereotyped in the American myth as ruthless savages.” Even so, eminent Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday praised Brown’s book for revealing “a dimension to our national experience that has remained relatively unknown,” calling Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee a “narrative of singular integrity and precise continuity.”

Brown’s book was more than that. Along with near-contemporaneous works such as Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins and Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man, it helped open the door to a wealth of narratives—historical and literary, many by Native writers themselves—that brought about a shift in received views of American history and found a wide audience of White readers. That revisionist tradition continues to this day with books such as The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, by the Ojibwe historian and novelist David Treuer, which continues where Brown left off, turning a narrative of victimhood into one of resistance—and of a continued struggle for justice.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.