[In the following excerpt, Bordewich examines various aspects of Brave Are My People, Waters's overview of various Native-American leaders and speakers.]

In Brave Are My People, Frank Waters recounts the lives of Tecumseh and more than a dozen other chiefs, battle leaders and orators from the history of Native Americans. Some are well known—Powhatan, Pontiac, Crazy Horse—and others less so. Readers will find Joseph Brandt, the remarkable Mohawk warrior who attended Dartmouth and translated the Acts of the Apostles into his native tongue; Sequoyah, the 19th-century inventor of the Cherokee syllabary, the only alphabet independently created in Indian country; Manuelito, the Navajo who led his people in their bitter war against the United States, and then helped lay the groundwork for their development into one of the strongest tribes in the nation; and Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé, whose incredible 1,700-mile running battle with U.S. troops in 1877 prompted Gen. William T. Sherman to declare that they had "fought with almost scientific skill," and had "throughout displayed a courage … that elicited universal praise."

He also reintroduces his readers to some of the most memorable texts in our history—the documented accounts of orations delivered by important Native American figures. Among these remarkable speeches is Chief Black Hawk's statement of surrender, delivered in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in 1832.

His eloquence in the face of defeat is as moving today as it was the August afternoon that he delivered the words. After nearly six harrowing months, his people constantly on the move, starving and in rags, Black Hawk was captured by federal troops. He had traveled with a band that included old men, women and children, engaging in skirmishes in a doomed attempt to regain the tribe's settlement on the site of present-day Rock Island, Illinois. Many of his companions had been massacred, pinned down on the banks of the Mississippi River near the mouth of the Bad Axe.

"You know the cause," he asserted,

"of our making war. It is known to all white men. The white men despise the Indians, and drive them from their homes. They smile in the face of the poor Indian, to cheat him; they shake him by the hand, to gain his confidence; they make him drunk, to deceive him.

"We told them to let us alone, and keep away from us; but they followed on and beset our paths, and coiled themselves among us like the snake. They poisoned us by their touch. We were not safe. We lived in danger. We looked up to the Great Spirit. We went to our Father [in Washington]. We were encouraged. His council gave us fair words and big promises, but we got no satisfaction; things were growing worse. There were no deer in the forest. The opossum and the beaver fled. The springs were drying up, and our squaws and our papooses were without food to keep them from starving."

Waters does not attempt to break any new ground in this essentially introductory book but, rather, provides a series of positive portraits in a plainspoken style. While this approach makes for well-paced narrative, it has limitations, especially when important ambiguities of character and policy are sacrificed to the demands of storytelling. For instance, Waters writes too facilely of Thomas Jefferson wanting to "expand the swiftly growing United States by exterminating Indian tribes." Jefferson, who often wrote admiringly of Indians, in fact believed that white Americans and Native Americans were eventually destined to amalgamate as one people.

Perhaps the book's best-told tale is that of Irataba, the brave and inquiring mid-19th-century chief of the Mohaves. As the guest of the U.S. Government, Irataba had traveled to Washington, Philadelphia and New York, becoming the first of his people to witness the might of the white man's civilization. Upon his return home, Irataba tried to explain to the Mohaves the wonders he had seen and what they would have to contend with as settlement moved westward. "Irataba, the biggest liar on the Coloradol" scoffers shouted, convinced that the white man's cities were but figments of the chief's imagination. Irataba ended his days in oblivion—though apparently unbowed—shunned by fellow tribesmen, tending pumpkins in a lonely corner near the Colorado River. As with so many other tribes since the arrival of Columbus, the Mohaves' shortsighted disbelief, their failure to grasp what they were up against, sowed the seeds of their destruction as surely as did the howitzers of the U.S. Cavalry.