Review of We Are a People in This World: The Lakota Sioux and the Massacre at Wounded Knee By Conger Beasley, Jr

Authors

Joe Starita, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

1996

Document Type

Article

Comments

Published in Great Plains Quarterly 16:1 (Winter 1996). Copyright © 1996 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Abstract

To tell the group's story, Beasley has employed a kind of literary double helix-juxtaposing chapters which alternately flash back to summarize the massacre of 1890, then flash forward to chronicle the memorial ride of 1990. Occasionally tedious, the device fulfills one vital function: it provides a superb context while poignantly illuminating similarities between two events separated by a century. Beasley, a poet, is often at his best describing the almost unimaginable cold (temperatures of 40 below, wind chills approaching 80 below) endured by the group.