YOUR starter for ten, no conferring: Which ethnic group in the United States is most likely to die a violent death at the hands of law enforcement officers? Most of you will say black people, especially young males. You will be confident of this because protests across the US at the latest shootings of black citizens by white police officers have featured in UK news broadcasts in recent months.

It began with the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri a year ago, the non-indictment of white officer Darren Wilson for gunning him down, and the series of black deaths before or during custody which were always happening but have attracted media attention since then.

But African Americans are not the ethnic group most likely to die at the hands of law enforcement, nor are young Hispanics who, it is true, also face disproportionate shooting by officers. That sorry distinction goes to Native Americans.

Almost half a century after white historian Dee Brown pricked the conscience of his nation and the wider world with Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee there has been scant improvement in the modern day plight of the red man.

The Indian Wars of 1860-1890 described in beautiful prose but merciless detail in that history book — genocide, holocaust, ethnic cleansing, Manifest Destiny, pick your description — marked a high tide in the blood-drenched frontier spirit which entrenches American attitudes to "freedom" in general and gun ownership in particular today.

The US Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice analysed the 4531 people killed by law enforcement officers between 1999-2011 and concluded that with 0.8 per cent of the population (surely a remarkable figure in itself), the rate of 1.9% of police killings showed: “The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans.”

Earlier this year the Lakota People’s Law Project published Native Lives Matter. It opened starkly: “In light of the debate surrounding police violence against minority populations in the United States, one group that is consistently affected, yet continuously excluded from broad public discourse, is Native Americans.

“Much of the rhetoric has been justifiably dedicated to African Americans in urban areas, who certainly suffer from disproportionate criminal justice outcomes. However, statistics uncovered and compiled by the Lakota People’s Law Project demonstrate that American Indians, in fact, suffer the most adverse effects of a criminal justice system which consistently reifies itself as structurally unjust.”

Apart from detailing a number of high profile killings and failures to investigate abuse against Indians, the report even describes a case of an eight-year-old girl in a residential home Tasered by police.

The project found that young members of their community were harshly treated, sentenced to distant incarceration or to adult prisons. With only 1 per cent of the national youth population, 70 per cent of youths committed to federal prisons are Native Americans. Their adult peers are imprisoned at four times the rate of white men, their women at six times the rate. And they are victims too, experiencing violence at more than twice the overall US rate, 88 per cent of that at non-Native hands.

When Dee Brown’s book was published in 1970 there was a sense that the horror of his historical narrative must surely lead to better treatment of Indians today and an appreciation of their beliefs, which chimed with growing environmentalism.

From his book I learned that it was not the British who invented concentration camps during the Boer War as I had supposed, but President Van Buren 60 years previously to house Cherokees evicted from their homelands.

Brown wrote: “It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.”

The latter, of course, is key. For those who did not already have freedom it was their Manifest Destiny to be extinguished by the superior white race.

Brown expressed hope: “This is not a cheerful book, but history has a way of intruding upon the present, and perhaps those who read it will have a clearer understanding of what the American Indian is, by knowing what he was.

“If the readers of this book should ever chance to see the poverty, the hopelessness, and the squalor of a modern Indian reservation, they may find it possible to truly understand the reasons why.”

It would appear that his great work has not been required reading at US police academies.