Why is the movie titled "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"?

The HBO film Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is based on a book by the same name.  The book is by Dee Brown and was published in 1970.  Dee's book and the film center around the injustices that the Native Americans endured.  The title comes from a line in a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét.  The poem is called "American Names."

Wounded Knee was the site of a massacre in what is today South Dakota.  During the massacre, American Calvary troops shot and killed over one hundred Lakota.  The massacre stemmed from a disagreement over a rifle.  In the Benét poem, the last lines read:

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I shall not be there.
I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

This last line of the poem is where the title of the book and movie come from.  It is also said that the family of Crazy Horse buried his heart and bones in the area of the Wounded Knee massacre.

What historical events are depicted in the movie "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"?

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee is full of very famous historical events.

The film opens with the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Custer and his 7th cavalry were slaughtered by the Sioux under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull’s defeat and his eventual escape into Saskatchewan are also factual. His eventual return and surrender of his rifle at the Standing Rock reservation are also factual.

The conditions at Standing Rock as well as the outbreaks of Whooping Cough and Measles so graphically portrayed are also true. Senator Dawes, played by Aiden Quinn, really did exist and tried to improve the lot of Native Americans by passing the Dawes Act, which sold thousands of acres of Sioux land, including the Black Hills, to white settlers for a pittance. This was also shown correctly in the film.

The young doctor played by Adam Beach is also based upon a real life individual who worked at the reservations and also worked with Dawes to improve the life of the Natives there.

The circumstances of Sitting Bull’s death as well as the facts regarding the massacre at Wounded Knee are also very factual. The evolution of the Ghost Dance ritual are also true.

So, in short, most of the films major plot points are indeed fact.

Wounded Knee Creek is located in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

As 1890 came to a close, Lakota Sioux tribal members who followed Wovoka, a Paiute leader and prophet, were gathered at Pine Ridge to share in the Ghost Dance, a pow wow or gathering based on the belief that a time was coming when non-Indians would be expelled from the area, hunting would return to former levels, and Indian ancestors would come back to life.

Big Foot, a Miniconjou  Sioux chief, and many of his followers, along with some members of the recently killed Sitting Bull's group, were on their way to join the Lakota at Pine Ridge. The Lakota had offered their assistance in trying to negotiate a conclusion to the killing by the white troops attempting to drive the Indians onto the reservation and/or out of the territory.

The Seventh Cavalry leadership became increasingly frustrated as they were unable to locate Big Foot and the others as they traveled through the Badlands on their way to Pine Ridge. Orders were eventually issued to locate the Indians and "If he fights, destroy him."

On December 29, 1890, these orders were obeyed. Historians don't know which side fired the actual first shot, but the heavily armed military forces shot and killed Big Foot and 270-300 of his people, mostly women and children. The massacre, and Wounded Knee, became powerful symbols of the attitude of the United States military (and government that ordered the military) toward the Indians in the Great Plains.