TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. There's a familiar line in writer David Treuer's new book that sounds almost like a warning - the call is coming from inside the house. He's talking about America and this belief that the violence we associate with our country's past isn't simply behind us, it's something we've learned to carry within ourselves.
Treuer is Ojibwe and grew up on the Leech Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. He spent much of his career challenging the idea that Native American history is a story of defeat and disappearance. His acclaimed book "The Heartbeat Of Wounded Knee" challenged that narrative. Now in his new book, "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy," Treuer turns his attention to the country itself. He traces America's relationship with violence back to the frontier, where the taking of Native land and the subjugation of people were justified in the name of civilization. His argument is that the frontier didn't disappear when westward expansion ended. Its violence has become part of American life through our institution, our stories and the ways we think and act. And he argues that even the people who recognize that history aren't necessarily free from it.
Treuer has written this book as a letter to his three children. It's also a deeply personal reckoning with his own fears, the contradictions within his family and the stories he inherited. Treuer's mother was Ojibwe and saw America as a country that had tried to destroy her people. His father was a Jewish refugee who escaped the Nazis and saw America as the country that saved his life. And, David Treuer, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
DAVID TREUER: Thanks for having me back. It's a pleasure.
MOSLEY: Yes. It was a pleasure to read this book. And I actually want to start our conversation with the way that you started the book. You take us to the reservation. You are a young man. You're with your cousins and your other relatives, your brother. And you guys are at home by yourselves, and you get this very weird phone call. And then you see down the street that there's a fire at a house, and you guys are scared. You're so scared that you grab a gun and you sit on the couch, prepared to defend yourself. And I'd love for you to read what happened next.
TREUER: (Reading) Deprived of everything, including our imaginations, which are the only thing that will save anyone, we instead did something very American. We found a gun, a single-shot break action 20 gauge. We loaded it and gave it to my brother and sat on the couch facing the door, the hammer drawn back, the barrel resting on my brother's bony knees. And we waited. The only thing that occurred to us was to kill whoever came through the door by blowing their brains out.
I don't know how long I sat on that couch with your uncle and our cousin. I don't know if I've stopped. I think some essential part of me is still there. And here's the thing about terror - although it may well be true of grief, too - it robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place in the world. And it murders time. I am here now writing this to you. And I am there on that couch still. I am there, then, hoping I will be around now to write about it. I'm 55. I'm 9 years old. I'm too old to have old fears, and I'm too young to be able to quiet them myself.
MOSLEY: Thank you for reading that. Eventually, your uncle arrives. And he snatches the gun before you guys could hurt anyone. But as we heard you say, you write that some part of you is still sitting on that couch. What is it about that night that has never left you?
TREUER: You know, I mean, we were just - it was just another night in the village. And then, as you mentioned, you know, we got this call. A stranger called to the house and said, we're going to come burn down your house with you in it. And we were terrified, right? And there were so many things we could've done.
MOSLEY: Yes.
TREUER: We could've run across the road to our other uncle. We could've...
MOSLEY: You could've called someone.
TREUER: Could've called someone, could've gone to my grandparents' house, could've gone to my other - I mean, the village. They're all relatives, you know? None of that occurred to us. And I think that's the part of me that stays stuck, you know? I wanted to write about that and about how my imagination failed me, how I almost hurt my uncle and how we almost did something unforgivable.
MOSLEY: Right, because if your uncle had walked through that door...
TREUER: If he'd walked through the door...
MOSLEY: ...You might have shot him.
TREUER: We would've. You know, my brother paused. And that little pause, you know, my brother saved both my uncle's life - because my brother had the gun - and he saved our emotional lives by not doing that thing, you know? So I have a lot of love for my brother. But, you know, I wanted to write about all that stuff because for me, writing is the way through it. It's the way to restore imagination, you know, and to sort of eradicate the emotional loop that would send me back there all the time, you know?
MOSLEY: One of the things that strikes me, though, is, yes, you were in a state of fight or flight. And so when you say that you're, in many ways, that young boy sitting on that couch still, what do you mean by that?
TREUER: It means that - sort of, I mean, I can talk about my father a little bit as a Holocaust survivor. And, you know, he fled Austria. And it started in 1938, and he didn't make it to the States till 1940. Much of his flight was on his own. And my dad was a really great dad when you were a little kid and when you were an adult. But he was a horrible father when you were an adolescent, like, around the time I was sitting on that couch, although that was a little bit before. And I've thought about this a lot because my dad - and I would get very angry at him, of course, when I was a kid. Like, ugh, Dad doesn't understand me - oh, blah, blah, blah, you know? But it was only much later I realized, well, he was probably a terrible parent when I was an adolescent because he didn't have an adolescence.
MOSLEY: Because he was fleeing the Holocaust as a young child.
TREUER: He was fleeing the Holocaust. He left at age 12. He stopped being a kid at around the time, you know, most of us start being a young adult. And he became - he went from childhood to adulthood with no buffer. And so of course he was going to be a bad father (laughter), you know, to adolescent children, you know?
And so I thought about that a lot in relation to sort of my little journeys of the mind on the couch there, or my lack of them, you know? I mean, I think a lot about terror, fear, grief. And those are some of the big elements of this letter, this book. And one thing that those intense emotions do is they, I mean, like I read, they rob your sense of yourself. And they rob your sense of time.
MOSLEY: I'm super fascinated by this story as a way to get into the book, to set the stage for where you are mentally - this idea that when you're up against the wall, fear has taken over and this propensity for violence. And I want to fast-forward to one night in 2015 during the San Bernardino shootings - after those had happened in San Bernardino, California. Your children are young. They are asleep, and you're standing over them. And you're watching them, and you describe feeling overwhelmed by fear. Here's where fear comes back. But it wasn't only fear of what might happen to them - that inclination as a parent that we all have. What were you afraid of?
TREUER: I - you know, I'm watching them sleep. And I was afraid for them, you know, as sort of Indians in a country that really has been hard on us. And I was afraid for them as Americans. Like, this is the world that they're going to inherit, where these things happen. And I was afraid for myself as the person who was supposed to protect them, but how can I? And all of those were just wrapped up together. And it was just a potent moment.
MOSLEY: You grew up around - surrounded by family on the reservation. Take us to Leech Lake. Describe what it was like.
TREUER: You know, it's - I mean, a lot of people have - you know, a lot of Native people live in and then, in their work, promote a kind of historical nostalgia, you know, that Native life was so great long ago. But the man's got us down, and now it's terrible, right? That's kind of the most common story of Native people told by Native people too.
MOSLEY: In past tense too.
TREUER: In past tense. Basically, that once we were great and we are great no longer - that we may come from beautiful cultures, but those cultures have been destroyed. You know? And that's the dominant narrative. And - well, it's not really my narrative. The - you know, the reservation of my youth is a lot like the reservation now, right? I mean, of course, there are always changes. But Leech Lake was a place I wanted to leave when I was a kid. And immediately upon leaving, it became a place that I've always tried to return to, you know, and have. And I'm there about half the year every year all the - now, and I love it there. I absolutely love it there.
MOSLEY: I get a sense you...
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Resist the question...
TREUER: A little bit.
MOSLEY: ...What is Leech Lake like? And in part - and I...
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: I can, in many ways, understand this...
TREUER: Yeah. Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...As a Native person going out into the world because the reservation is such a mystery to so many people.
TREUER: Right.
MOSLEY: And we have these notions of Natives as the past.
TREUER: Right.
MOSLEY: You've spent a lifetime trying to assert who you are but not wanting to have to explain it every time.
TREUER: Right. Right. Right. That's very true. And it's like - there's a very narrow path. But, like, I did write a book about reservations called "Rez Life" that came out some years ago. And...
MOSLEY: Yes.
TREUER: You know, one of the discoveries in really writing that book was noticing in myself how easy it is to fall into telling a tragic story about sad Native lives as really the only option. And so I discovered that impulse when I was trying to write that book. And then I had to write against that impulse, you know? And then what I end up finding is when we don't reduce people to the sum of their suffering - when we just really listen to them - what emerges are really complicated people living in a really vibrant, modern, complicated place. And it's in those complications, it's - and it's in those contradictions that at least I found beauty, art, meaning and even a way forward.
And that said, my reservation is, you know, 40 by 40 miles, roughly. It's - we have maybe - I don't know - 10- or 12,000 enrollees but about half that live there. You have wildly successful people and also wildly unsuccessful people. You know? It's, to me, as a landscape, even indescribably beautiful. It's a very modest landscape, in my opinion. We don't have mountains or buttes or - you know? And we have lakes, rivers, swamps, pine trees, you know? I think it's beautiful. I think it's perfect.
MOSLEY: You tell the story in the book of this painting on your great-grandmother's wall. And I think it was called "The End Of The Trail."
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yep. Yep. It - and it shows a Native man kind of slumped over a horse, and he's defeated. And you hated this picture growing up. What did it tell you about what it meant to be a Native person?
TREUER: Oh, yeah. Yeah. So everyone in every Native household, you know, it felt - I mean, of course, there's some diversity. But...
MOSLEY: But every one you were in.
TREUER: Every one I was in seemed to have that thing - "The End Of The Trail." It was usually not a painting. It was usually, like, a polyester blanket or a - like, a Velvet-Elvis-type thing.
MOSLEY: I know this. I know it.
TREUER: Yeah. Right?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
TREUER: And it was everywhere. And it's - you know, it's just, like, this defeated Native dude on a horse with a spear, and facing west into the setting sun. And it's emblematic, you know? It's meant to be poignant, but the poignancy of that painting is in defeat.
MOSLEY: When you were a young boy looking at it, what did it mean for you? What did you see?
TREUER: Ugh. Just that. I'm like, that's not me. You know? That's not me. And that's not going to be my story.
MOSLEY: My guest today is writer David Treuer. His new book is "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN'S "EL CIEGO (THE BLIND)")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I'm talking with David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer and the author of "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy."
As I think about you as a writer and how you've evolved, the time that you've spent over the course of your writing career and bringing language to your experience - and this one being the latest - I also think about some of the fears you had. And as you were even writing this book, it took you several years to write it as a letter to your children. And...
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Why do you think that it was so difficult? I think you tried to begin it four times before you could finally write it. What was so difficult to say to them?
TREUER: Well, this book is - and not all books are like this. But this book is the shape of an idea. You know? And the idea is that the frontier and frontier violence are not of the past, but they are still with us, and that America's original sin is, in fact, violence. And it undergirds all of America's ongoing cruelties - racial cruelties, economic cruelties. And until we grapple with that, we don't have a shot. And so that's the underlying idea - that frontier violence was America's original sin. So, the American frontier started as a colonial enterprise to push west.
MOSLEY: Right.
TREUER: Dutch, Portuguese...
MOSLEY: Yep.
TREUER: ...Spanish, English. French? Did I mention French?
MOSLEY: Mm-hmm.
TREUER: But then it became an American project once America came to be.
MOSLEY: Yep.
TREUER: And then it kept going. And so frontier violence can - as I see it has a really easy definition. It is the theft of Native land and the theft of Black and brown bodies and, subsequent to that, the theft of immigrant labor. The violent theft of all of those things - that's the frontier. And that sort of enabled all of these subsequent cruelties that I talked about earlier.
MOSLEY: And the thing about it - so you described it as writing - you're writing to your three children. And I - you described before we started - it's like we're all over your shoulder as you are writing these passages to your children. And there's so much history and historical context in that as well. What was the urgency of writing this at this moment for you?
TREUER: I - well, I feel stuck. And I think we all might be stuck in a certain way. I mean, it feels like the world's falling apart. And I think part of the reason why the world's falling apart, whether it's climate or Palestine or George Floyd - what happened there in 2020, among many such things - is that we've abdicated our responsibility to imagine both the connection between things and some alternate future.
MOSLEY: You know, you worked so hard to give your children a very different childhood from your own. And there's this moment that you write about in the book where one of your children tells you that they had a very great childhood. And that's exactly what you'd hoped to give them. But you describe feeling something almost like resentment.
TREUER: (Laughter) Yeah. We were driving, me and my eldest, and - I don't know - an errand or something. And we're just talking, you know? And he said, yeah, you know, my childhood was really good. And then I said, oh, no (laughter). I said, I should have been harder on you. I should have made it - I...
MOSLEY: That's what every parent wants to hear, though.
TREUER: I should have made it suck.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
TREUER: You know? And he's looking at me. And he's just like, what? And (laughter) - and I said, well, yeah. But, like, how will we ever understand each other?
MOSLEY: That's the fear.
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: How will he understand you?
TREUER: Yeah. Maybe so. Yeah. Maybe so. And I don't know. All that said, I think he's got my number.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is writer David Treuer. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE'S "HARLEM BLUES")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is writer David Treuer. He's Ojibwe and grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His new book, "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy," is written as a letter to his three children and examines how the violence that shaped America's founding still influences who we are today. Treuer has spent much of his career challenging the idea that Native American history is a story of tragedy and disappearance and that Native culture is a thing of the past. His previous books include "The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee" and "Rez Life: An Indian's Journey Through Reservation Life."
At 17, you left. You left Leech Lake determined you weren't going to go back.
TREUER: Yeah, that lasted about three weeks (laughter).
MOSLEY: You left for Princeton. And what did you believe leaving from - leaving for Princeton would free you of?
TREUER: Oh, just, you know, that narrative of diminishing returns, what, in a different context, Leo Tolstoy called the eternal mistake.
MOSLEY: What does that...
TREUER: Well, for Tolstoy, the eternal mistake was always trying to find happiness in success and in external things. But this, you know, error that I'm talking about is sort of like the Native equivalent, which is always thinking that we have a glorious past and no future. And so I was like, I'm getting out of here and I'm going to go do something.
MOSLEY: One of the things that I've heard you talk about is this term narrative scarcity. And I'm bringing this up because, I mean, you bring it up to describe the limited stories about Native people that aren't out there. And then I'm also just thinking about you as a young person, that you grew up hearing and knowing. And scarcity is a word that's very interesting to me 'cause when I think about it, I think about scarcity in terms of resources, like food and water, the things that we need to survive. And I wonder how you're thinking about it. What happens to a person's sense of what's possible when there is scarcity around story?
TREUER: Right. I think stories are a resource and a valuable, important, sort of life-saving resource - not on the level of food and clothing and shelter, of course, but up there. And so to experience - you know, to be in a story desert as well as a food desert I think can be really limiting. And I should state for the record, too, that this idea of narrative scarcity is not my idea. My colleague and friend Viet Nguyen, that - he came up with that one. And when he was - and he was talking about it in relation to Asian American narrative. And...
MOSLEY: But you see it in your own life.
TREUER: Absolutely. I see it in my life. I see it in sort of the Native context, too. And it's another one of these bridges, you know? And I am really fond of Viet, and I'm really grateful for that, you know, idea.
MOSLEY: I'm thinking about how you came into understanding that you would experience narrative scarcity once you're at Princeton. And because you start - 'cause you're exposed to a world that you had not experienced prior, and you're with people, and you're seeing things and...
TREUER: Sure.
MOSLEY: ...Having conversations. And there's a surprising connection in this book, this story you tell. While you were there, you learned that the parents of a fellow student you knew, Lyle Menendez, had been brutally murdered. And initially, you're horrified, just like the rest of the country. And then you learn, like the rest of us, that Lyle and his brother had killed his parents. And that was not only a shock, it was a revelation for you beyond the tragedy because you began to question something that you'd believed about Princeton and America.
TREUER: Absolutely. There's this idea that is prevalent, and it's been around for a really long time, that there are places in this country that are good and safe and excellent, and there are places that are not. And then there are corresponding values placed on or given to the people who exist in the good and interesting and safe places, that they're good and interesting and safe people, and that those of us from the other spaces, whether it's Leech Lake Reservation or Detroit, are not good, not interesting and not safe.
But I mean, I felt that at Princeton, but it all came crashing down after Lyle murdered his parents. And, you know, Princeton is not a place where those kinds of things don't happen. It's exactly where those kinds of things happen. But I thought about it a lot when I was writing this book, and that's when some of this understanding sort of fell into place, that for so long, I had accepted these versions - Princeton good, reservation bad.
MOSLEY: And so in writing this book, what did you come to in that understanding as you started to think about that story?
TREUER: That Princeton is as much a mixture of the good and bad as anyplace else. And conversely, that the place I'm from and the places like it are much the same. You know, they're not the opposite. These places aren't opposites. They are very alike in their complexity. In the imagination, reservations remain, for most people, as places of suffering, not as places of life in all its complications. They're just basins of suffering in the imagination.
MOSLEY: I'm curious when you fully came to understand that, because on a lot of levels, I mean, I understand when you're from a place and you're in it, you don't see that. You're inside the fishbowl, so you're not necessarily seeing what others are seeing unless you engage with media and you start to see the depictions of yourself in media. But when you became truly aware that people thought of the reservation in this way...
TREUER: Well, I mean, it was clear to me when I stepped foot at Princeton...
MOSLEY: People's reactions to you when you told them?
TREUER: Oh, yeah, people's reactions, like, who are you? Where are you from, you know? And I'm like, oh, I'm Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation. And most people, of course, would say to me, like, you can't be, 'cause I don't look like Wind In His Hair from "Dances With Wolves," right?
MOSLEY: They think you're white passing.
TREUER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, and then they're like, oh, that's so sad. I'm like, is it, though, that I'm from a rez? Like, that's sad to you? And so that idea - you know, the dominant narrative, the sort of imagistic way that sort of Native people appear and - it's difficult for a lot of Americans. It's getting better. It's getting a lot better. But it's difficult for a lot of Americans to be like - to get it. You know, like, oh, OK. You're a complicated, modern person living in a complicated, modern place. Cool.
MOSLEY: My guest today is writer David Treuer. His new book is "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy." We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANAT COHEN & PAQUITO D'RIVERA'S "NIGHTMARE")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, I am talking with David Treuer, an Ojibwe writer and the author of "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy." Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota and left at 17 to attend Princeton University, where he was a student of Toni Morrison.
Can you take us into your first class with Toni Morrison?
TREUER: Yeah. I was really nervous that first class. You know? On my way to class, I kept - there's this mantra I kept repeating, sometimes out loud, as I walked to class, which went something like, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. And then the counterpoint to that melody was, she's just a person. She's just a person with opinions, just a human being. You know?
Then I got to class, and it didn't help, and I was really nervous. And Morrison said, I want everyone to go around and tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're working on. So - very diligent students - everyone was doing that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And this really sweet boy - he was really kind, as it turns out - next to me says, in a very sort of Princeton way - he's in really floppy hair, you know? - I'm writing a story that takes place on Martha's Vineyard. And my protagonist is a half-breed Indian whose mother is the town drunk. And I am suddenly filled with rage.
Then it's my turn. And so Morrison looks at me. This is the first time we met, you know? And she says, and you? I said, well, I'm going to talk about why I write as opposed to what I'm working on. I write because [expletive] like this don't know what the heck they're talking about. They've seen "Dances With Wolves." They've read "Last Of The Mohicans." But they don't know anything about anything. And there were lots of expletives, by the way. And (laughter) everyone's looking down at their - at the ground, like they're at - like, staring - they're standing next to a grave, and the grave is mine.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
TREUER: You know? And Morrison's got these papers on - in a manila folder on her lap. She says, says here that you're an anthropology major. And I said, and? And she said, well, you write better than most anthropologists. And then I said, what? Is that supposed to be a compliment? And then she starts laughing. And she said, yeah. That is intended as a compliment. And then I finally woke up to the danger I was in. I was like, oh, OK. Oh, Professor, thank you very much.
MOSLEY: She told you, don't be ethnographic. Don't explain in your writing.
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And what was she trying to teach you about the writer that you were becoming, you think?
TREUER: Oh. The temptation is there, right? Always. I think it's especially there for Native creatives, we might say. The temptation is this - to feel like you're an emissary from a distant and strange land, and then to lift up the corner of the buckskin curtain - or what I call the buckskin curtain - so that outsiders can peer in and learn something about Native people. And the temptation is strong.
MOSLEY: But the inclination from you has always been not to be that. I mean, that's...
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Why this guy and what he - that story he gave...
TREUER: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Triggered you so badly.
TREUER: Well, it triggered me because it's just a stereotype.
MOSLEY: Yep.
TREUER: You know, there's no life in a stereotype. And that's what triggered me. And it also triggered me because, you know, the popular idea that Native people were just troubled drunks was more real than the real lives of Native people as lived by us, you know? And so the stereotype actually had more life in the imagination than my life had in the imagination. And that was enraging. I couldn't articulate it then. I didn't. I was 19, right? What do I know? But that kind of became clear to me later.
But, you know, Morrison struggled in a different way, too, because, you know, people interpret - often interpret "Beloved" as basically a window onto the ravages of race-based slavery. And so they treat "Beloved" - and, you know, "Sula" and "Song of Solomon" to a lesser extent - as ethnographic and with - leaning toward history. Right? And that was problematic for her.
MOSLEY: Yep.
TREUER: You know, she's picking up the grand themes of American literature - place and freedom and belonging and love. She's picking up American themes, you know, even universal themes. And she was often prevented from doing so. I mean, no one could prevent her from anything. But the interpretations fell short of the grandness of what she was up to. And so I don't want the grandness of my themes to suffer the same fate.
MOSLEY: And so how do you think about that as you try to articulate your ideas while still writing from that place that Toni told you personally to write from?
TREUER: What I would say about this is, like, this is a letter to my children that invites people to read over our shoulders. So I would say the same thing that Professor Morrison said. You know, she's not writing for non-Black folk. But non-Black readers can gain an enormous amount from reading her, even though it's not directed to them. I would say the same thing, you know? And she famously is like, say, you know, I love Tolstoy. I get a lot out of reading Tolstoy. But was he writing for a Black girl from Lorain, Ohio? No. Do I still profit enormously from reading Tolstoy? Yes. Same thing.
MOSLEY: You know, we've only scratched the surface of your book. And maybe my last question is, since this is a book to your children, what do you hope that your children will be able to imagine that you couldn't?
TREUER: You know, it was hard for me to feel when I was younger that I had anything more than a great future behind me, like a lot of Native people. And I want them to feel very differently. I want them to not just know, but to feel that they collectively, not just as individuals, but as members of a tribe, and as citizens of this country, too - that's what I want them to take away, that they come from a great people and they remain great.
MOSLEY: David Treuer, thank you so much.
TREUER: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
MOSLEY: David Treuer's book is called "The Savage Mind: An American Legacy."
After a break, rock critic Ken Tucker reviews a four-song EP of previously unheard Stevie Wonder recordings. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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