David Treuer

After George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, David Treuer sat down to write a letter to hold himself and his family together. The result is The Savage Mind — the most personal work of his storied career, and a searing exploration of the violence at the heart of America. Join us for a conversation that interweaves memoir, history, and reportage in search of a wound, and a way to heal it.

How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish — quite the opposite.

Today, Treuer explains, America’s frontier — and all its violent pathologies — has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament — one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind , and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth.