Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, from the series Samplers

In the 1980s Reichek began to focus on issues of post-colonial identity, with works relating to Indigenous cultures, including those in Fiji, East Africa, and Lapland. In the late 1980s and early 90s her work focused largely on Native American groups. In this work, she revives a traditional form of instructional “women’s work”, the sampler, inserting text that references one of the bloodiest conflicts in Native American history, as opposed to depicting the English alphabet.

Here, a typically Victorian cemetery plot is embroidered with traditional icons – raven, angel, and urn – while on the gravestone appears the phrase which is the title of the important 1970 book by Dee Brown covering the history of the Indigenous peoples of the American West in the 19th century, including their forced relocations and wars waged by the United States government. The phrase is taken from a line in a poem by Stephen Vincent Benét, and references the site of the last major attack by the United States Army on Native Americans.