Wounded Knee, South Dakota, was the site of a massacre in 1890 in which the US Army murdered at least 150 Lakota men, women, and children as part of the federal government’s efforts in westward expansion. Treuer takes the book’s title from the battle, as did one of the books on which his text is inspired, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Treuer upends the notion that the battle was a decisive defeat for Indigenous peoples, arguing that, though it was a tragedy, it did not sound the death knell for Indigenous peoples, who have remained resilient and creative in their efforts to prosper economically and to gain political power.

Indian boarding schools were institutions supposedly constructed with the purpose of educating Indigenous peoples, though they truly existed to assimilate tribal youth to White, Christian culture and to force free hard labor out of Indigenous children. Conditions in boarding schools were notoriously substandard. Indigenous children were forced to wear threadbare hand-me-down clothing and were frequently malnourished. In some instances, they were the victims of violence, as in the case of a nine-year-old girl who was raped in her bed in her dormitory bed at one boarding school.