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write a passage explaining how these two passages one from bury my heart at wounded knee explaining the sand creek massacure and the other from the pioneer girl reflecting on the expierence of westward expansion differ in their portrayal of the impact of westward expansion on native americans and settelers
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When you place a passage from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee about the Sand Creek Massacre alongside a reflective passage from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Pioneer Girl, the two texts treat westward expansion very differently — in purpose, tone, and whose pain they center.
Brown’s account reads like an indictment. Focused on the Sand Creek Massacre, it emphasizes brutal violence, broken treaties, and the systematic dispossession of Native peoples. The language is documentary and unforgiving: individual atrocities are named, chains of policy and military action are traced, and the human cost — death, displacement, cultural devastation — is made central. The effect is to force readers to confront the moral responsibility of the U.S. government and settler society and to privilege the Native victims’ suffering and loss.
Wilder’s autobiographical reflections, by contrast, typically frame westward expansion through the eyes of settlers: hardship, resourcefulness, and the promise of new beginnings. Her prose often dwells on daily life, the weather, household struggles, and the emotional texture of pioneering. Native Americans, when they appear, are more likely to be backgrounded, stereotyped, or treated as obstacles or curiosities rather than as people undergoing dispossession. The focus is on settler resilience and community formation, and the overall tone tends toward nostalgia or pragmatic optimism rather than moral reckoning.
Those differences reflect genre and intent. Brown writes as a historian and advocate whose aim is to expose injustices and recover silenced Native perspectives; his passage uses explicit moral judgment and graphic detail to do so. Wilder writes personal memory; her aim is to record experience and feeling from a settler viewpoint, which naturally centers settlers’ interests and minimizes structural violence. As a result, the same historical process — land settlement, military encounters, broken agreements — appears as atrocity and national crime in Brown, but as challenge, opportunity, or an ambiguous moral background in Wilder.
Reading the two together highlights what each leaves out as much as what each includes: Brown’s account foregrounds Native loss and governmental culpability, while Wilder’s foregrounds settler hardship and achievement, often eliding the suffering inflicted on Indigenous peoples. Comparing them invites a fuller understanding of westward expansion only when you combine the documentary critique of works like Brown’s with the lived, subjective perspective of memoirs like Wilder’s — and when you supplement both with Native voices and scholarship that center Indigenous experience.
Brown’s account reads like an indictment. Focused on the Sand Creek Massacre, it emphasizes brutal violence, broken treaties, and the systematic dispossession of Native peoples. The language is documentary and unforgiving: individual atrocities are named, chains of policy and military action are traced, and the human cost — death, displacement, cultural devastation — is made central. The effect is to force readers to confront the moral responsibility of the U.S. government and settler society and to privilege the Native victims’ suffering and loss.
Wilder’s autobiographical reflections, by contrast, typically frame westward expansion through the eyes of settlers: hardship, resourcefulness, and the promise of new beginnings. Her prose often dwells on daily life, the weather, household struggles, and the emotional texture of pioneering. Native Americans, when they appear, are more likely to be backgrounded, stereotyped, or treated as obstacles or curiosities rather than as people undergoing dispossession. The focus is on settler resilience and community formation, and the overall tone tends toward nostalgia or pragmatic optimism rather than moral reckoning.
Those differences reflect genre and intent. Brown writes as a historian and advocate whose aim is to expose injustices and recover silenced Native perspectives; his passage uses explicit moral judgment and graphic detail to do so. Wilder writes personal memory; her aim is to record experience and feeling from a settler viewpoint, which naturally centers settlers’ interests and minimizes structural violence. As a result, the same historical process — land settlement, military encounters, broken agreements — appears as atrocity and national crime in Brown, but as challenge, opportunity, or an ambiguous moral background in Wilder.
Reading the two together highlights what each leaves out as much as what each includes: Brown’s account foregrounds Native loss and governmental culpability, while Wilder’s foregrounds settler hardship and achievement, often eliding the suffering inflicted on Indigenous peoples. Comparing them invites a fuller understanding of westward expansion only when you combine the documentary critique of works like Brown’s with the lived, subjective perspective of memoirs like Wilder’s — and when you supplement both with Native voices and scholarship that center Indigenous experience.
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