The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America

The European “discovery” and conquest of America was one of the most cataclysmic events in history, leading to the wholesale destruction of millions of people and hundreds of flourishing societies. As far as history books are concerned, Native Americans have been secondary to an essentially Euro-American story. Now, James Wilson presents a rigorously authoritative, beautifully written, comprehensive history that—as Richard Gott wrote in the London Literary Review—“places the ‘Native Americans’ at the center of the historical stage, abandoning the traditional version of the American past in which the ‘Indians’ had a subservient role on the periphery of someone else’s epic.”

The Earth Shall Weep is a groundbreaking book with a pioneering approach that sets it apart from any history now on the market. Drawing not only on historical sources but also on ethnography, archaeology, Indian oral tradition, and his own extensive research in Native American communities, James Wilson sets out to make the Indian perspective on the past and the present accessible to a broad audience. He charts the collision course between indigenous cultures and European invaders, from the first English settlements on the Atlantic coast to the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, explaining how Europeans justified a process that reduced the Native American population from an estimated seven to ten million to less than 250,000 in just four centuries. Finally, as The Independent on Sunday noted, “whereas most accounts of the North American Indian take the Wounded Knee massacre as constituting, in the words of Black Elk, an end to the Indian experience on the continent, James Wilson pursues the story further into the twentieth century and up to the present day.” Wilson shows how old ideas about native people have continued to underpin government policy and popular perception in the twentieth century, leaving a painful legacy of ignorance and misunderstanding.

The story of Native America is the invisible subtext to every American history book ever published. James Wilson’s splendid tour de force of narrative history redresses the historical balance and sets the standard for work to come.

“A sweeping, well-written, long-view history of American Indian societies … a trustworthy telling of a sad epic of misunderstanding, mayhem, and massacre.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)