From the Heart: voices of the American Indian

"If there is one thing that genocide does", Lee Miller writes in her introduction to this splendid anthology, "it creates heroes". From the Heart introduces Americans to a new pantheon of heroes - men and women of the five hundred Indian nations that have been nearly eradicated, over the past five hundred years, by Europeans and their descendants. More than half of those nations are represented in the speeches gathered here, a greater number and wider geographical range than appear in any other single volume. Lee Miller's heartfelt commentaries supplement a running oral history of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries as experienced by the natives of this continent - a far different story, with a far different moral, than that which children learn in school. In their own eloquent words, Moctezuma, King Philip, Tecumseh, Osccola, Sitting Bull, Sarah Winnemucca, Chief Joseph, Geronimo, and many others impart a sense of both the variety of cultures that coexisted here prior to Cristobal Colon's arrival and of their shared grievance, the terrible fate they were all to meet at the will of European invaders and settlers. Interspersed are the remarks - some sympathetic, some chilling - of such non-Indian witnesses as Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, George Catlin, Thomas Jefferson, and various U.S. Army officers and newspaper editors. As all of these voices echo through the reader's mind - and heart - it is hoped that a proper appreciation will be reached, not only of the magnitude of the tragedy, but of the unfaltering strength, honor, and dignity of those who resisted it every step of the way.