One of the overriding thematic elements of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is that of tragedy. Brown regularly evokes sorrow by offering Native American peoples’ reflections on their historical experiences in their own words. Presenting the history of the period from a Native American point of view makes the book elegiac, as it tells the story of peoples whose physical possessions and cultural heritage were slowly and systematically taken from them, conveying their history to readers who could never know the full scope of the rich civilizations and cultures that were destroyed. To add to the sense of grief, rather than being seen in a sympathetic light by their contemporaries for the tragedies they suffered, the Indigenous groups Brown depicts were almost universally despised as barbaric savages by bigoted white settlers and were regularly blamed for the tensions that arose from their dispossession.

Though Indigenous leaders tried tactic after tactic to find a better way of relating the threat of US encroachment—from resistance to full submission—they found themselves locked in a no-win scenario. No matter what they did, their lands were taken from them, their people killed, and their cultures and languages repressed.