Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. That book changed how I looked at life itself.

[SeattleVet]

15. Read it when it came out, and it was very eye-opening.

Another excellent book is Vine Deloria's 'Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto', which had come out the year before. The information in the combination of the two was a real shocker and wake-up call for me, given the 'American History' we had been taught since beginning school.

A year or so after reading these two our family went on a summer vacation to visit my grandparents in rural Eastern Tennessee (Rogersville). Since I was going to be entering the Air Force a month or so later, we did a few side trips and visited Cherokee, North Carolina. Not sure what it is like now, but back then I was astounded to see that the few Native Americans that I saw were the clerks and menial laborers in the shops and restaurants, and white people were the managers and bosses. After having read both books, I saw this as yet another example of the levels of exploitation that were still ongoing, even at that late date.