The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. By David Treuer. Riverhead Books; 512 pages; $28. To be published in Britain by Corsair in March; £25.

A CCORDING TO A convenient myth dating back to the 19th century, Native Americans were doomed to vanish, except for a few hold-outs on remote and poverty-stricken reservations. A corrective is urgently required, argues David Treuer, an anthropologist, novelist and member of the Ojibwe people, in his new survey of “Indian country” since the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

That attack on Lakota Sioux by the 7th Cavalry killed at least 150 people and marked the last major armed conflict between Indian tribes and the federal government. For many Americans, it also came to signify the end of Native culture itself, due in part to a hugely influential book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”. Published in 1970, the book held that by 1890 “the culture and civilisation of the American Indian was destroyed”. After growing up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, Mr Treuer found this view not just wrong, but soul-crushing. His sweeping, essential history is “not about the heart that was buried in the cold ground of South Dakota, but rather about the heart that beats on.”

Like its predecessor, his account opens with a catalogue of murder, disease and displacement. His survey of Indian homelands and their destruction is dry but necessary, since many Americans of European descent are unacquainted with the facts (some seem to regard the country as their patrimony alone). But it is in recounting more recent history that Mr Treuer’s storytelling skills shine. He salts a century’s-worth of wrangling over the rights guaranteed by 19th-century treaties with personal stories from numerous tribes.

A host of paternalistic programmes meant to solve the “Indian problem” mainly backfired, he shows. These included forced assimilation through boarding schools, which aimed to “kill the Indian” to “save the man”, the destruction of collective land-ownership on reservations through individual allotments (in which wealthy whites, more often than not, snapped up the best plots), and later manoeuvres that ended the legal status of some tribes.

Yet the schools, as well as military service in both world wars, had an inadvertent benefit: to forge a pan-Indian identity. Like other marginalised groups, Indians moved to the cities and began to organise. From 1970, through the activism of the American Indian Movement and legal training that helped define—and defend—their rights, tribes started to rebound. Indian culture experienced a rebirth.

Mr Treuer’s elegant handling of this complex narrative occasionally falters. For example, he omits to set out clearly how tribal sovereignty works. Only midway through do readers learn that federal funding for such things as Indian health and education “are not pity payments or proto-welfare”, but commitments established by treaty in exchange for the loss of 97% of ancestral lands. That provenance refutes the frequent and mistaken assumption that most Native Americans are on the dole.

But his writing sings when he celebrates recent gains. By 1900 a Native population estimated to have numbered 5m when Christopher Columbus arrived had dropped to 237,000; the census of 2010 counted 2m, plus 3m identifying as partly Native. Casinos are giving some of America’s more than 500 tribes an economic boost. These days, enterprising Native Americans “actively remember and promote indigenous knowledge”; Mr Treuer introduces several, including a Sioux master chef and young women who extol healthy ways of life as a form of “warrior strength”. He ends with the Standing Rock pipeline protest of 2016 (pictured), the largest gathering of Native Americans since the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, which catapulted their struggle into national headlines for the first time in decades.

How Americans imagine their future depends on how they see their past, Mr Treuer argues. In a year in which, for the first time, two Native American women have taken seats in Congress, it is possible to infer that his community has not only survived, but begun to thrive again.