On the one hand, a fantastic document; Black Hawk's autobiography (in reality, more an extended interview) from the stories of his grandfather who met the first French colonists in Canada, to his decision to make a stand against the United States after having one too many deals disregarded and his people gunned down under parliamentary flag, to his defeat. As a first-hand account, it's invaluable, and paints a much-needed counternarrative to the traditional view - which, yeah, has become much more commonplace over the last 50 years or so, but this was written and published THEN, making it even clearer that the contemporary view of Native Americans as "savages" was little more than wishful thinking; all the evidence to the contrary was easily available if they wanted it. Black Hawk's analysis of the colonial attitude is, occasionally, still frighteningly applicable.

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them was hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites [who were settling on his land] were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect their property.

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

On the other hand, Black Hawk lost more than just land, people, and a war. While his translator and biographer no doubt were sympathetic to him and did their job as fairly as was possible, there's still the feeling that not only do they still play up stereotypes (positive ones rather than negative, but still) and as one commenter has said, use the noble defeated warrior to make white people feel good about themselves. But above all they rob him of his language. After he's filtered through two well-meaning 19th century gentlemen writing for their audience, he comes out speaking like a Dickens character. Couple this with the decision to present his story as one long monologue, unedited and without contextualisation, and this rare authentic story looks curiously inauthentic and inaccessible to a modern reader. I find myself wanting to go back in time and hand the translator a tape recorder, so it'll be possible for someone in a future where people actually want to read Black Hawk's own words to retranslate the book.

The Gutenberg edition helps this somewhat by not only containing Black Hawk's own story but also a number of appendices about the Black Hawk War. It also adds some unfortunate proofreading errors, though, such as the US ordering Black Hawk to "buy the hatchet", which, um...