Dee Brown’s 1970 book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee remains perhaps the best-known account of American Indian history, but Ojibwe writer David Treuer has long seen problems with its takeaways. That book, as he told TIME in January, paints the massacre at Wounded Knee as “the point at which Indian culture and civilization died.” So, in his The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present, Treuer offers a stirring rejoinder to that idea. The book weaves together more than a century of history with Treuer’s own memoir and original reportage about modern American Indian life, challenging received wisdom about the American past—and proving that past has a present.
Buy now: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee