David Treuer’s Rebellious New History of Native American Life

A book attempts to counter a narrative of tragedy by examining the past.
David Treuer
The novelist and academic David Treuer writes that his latest work emerged from “the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.”Photograph by Dan Koeck

In the 2006 book “Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual,” by David Treuer, the novelist and academic describes an assignment that he gave to students in a Native American-fiction class. They read a short story by Sherman Alexie, in which a character is described shedding “Indian tears.” What, he asked his students, might “Indian tears” signify? The students responded with confidence, “as if unearthing whole mastodons from the soil of their imaginative backyards.” One wrote, “They show what it feels like to be dispossessed of everything”; another, “Indian tears are for pain and suffering at the hands of the white man—just like the tears of the African American man in the ghetto.”

In his book, Treuer recalls these answers with sarcastic amazement. He laments “the legendary mist of Indian misery” that his students found in Alexie’s story (and their quickness to group together experiences of historic oppression). “How does one escape this all-pervading thing, exoticized foreknowledge?” he writes. “User’s Manual” was in part a provocation—a younger writer’s critique of established Native American writers like Alexie, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko. His claim that Native American writing was read more for its cultural authenticity than as literature—he calls Alexie’s “Reservation Blues” “a curriculum designed for an outsider”—at times came off as hubristic takedown. As Alexie once protested in the Times, “What he’s saying is that the identity of the writer doesn’t count.”

Now, in a new book, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present,” Treuer hopes to counter the narrative of tragedy from a historical perspective. With a dose of his old contrarianism tempered by a more magnanimous mission, he offers a rebuttal to Dee Brown’s statement, in his landmark 1970 history, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” that between 1860 and 1890 “the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.” Treuer’s latest work, he writes, emerged from “the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.”

Treuer’s book arrives at a time when tribal sovereignty is a factor in some of the country’s most contentious political battles: the Tohono O’odham tribe’s resistance to a proposed border wall along the southern U.S. border; the intertribal coalition that is protesting against the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument; the involvement of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes in the movements against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Lost in the social-media storm about a video of mostly white high-school boys in MAGA hats who confronted Nathan Phillips, a member of the Omaha tribe and a former Marine, at the March for Life, last month, was that the first Indigenous People’s March was held in Washington, D.C., on the same day. Marchers carried signs that read “We’re still here.” In an echo of Treuer’s frustration, I saw a photo of a man whose sweatshirt read “Stop romanticizing genocide.” The speakers at the march included Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first two Native American women elected to Congress, who won their seats in the 2018 midterms.

David Treuer was raised on the Leech Lake reservation, in northern Minnesota, where his mother, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, served as a judge and his father, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, taught high school. Both sides of the family had histories of family separation: his maternal grandmother was sent at a young age to a government-run boarding school; his paternal grandparents found refuge in the United States, but nearly everyone in their extended family was murdered. “My dad felt at home on the reservation,” Treuer told me when we met last month. “He felt like he understood the people, and what my mother’s people and what my people have endured and suffered and survived.”

Treuer published his first novel, “Little,” in 1994, when he was twenty-four and had recently graduated from Princeton, where he studied anthropology. (He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.) Three more novels followed. “I never aspired to be a nonfiction writer, or even a short-story writer or a memoirist,” he told me. His plans changed, in 2005, when there was a school shooting at the Red Lake reservation, in northern Minnesota, not far from Leech Lake. The coverage of the event seemed cursory to Treuer, folded into a familiar narrative about poverty and a lack of opportunity on reservations. He responded with the reported memoir “Rez Life,” which was published in 2012. “I was trying to tell the story, well, if reservations aren’t simply places of suffering, what are they? Being from Leech Lake, I knew I loved my reservation, not because it was awful but because there was something real and good and powerful vested there.”

Treuer’s new book opens with the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, when United States troops opened fire on a group of Lakota Sioux camped by a creek, most of them unarmed. The troops killed more than a hundred and fifty people, including women and children, some of whom were shot in the back while fleeing the violence. The massacre is often depicted as an end point. As Treuer summarizes it, “There had been an Indian past, and overnight, there lay ahead only an American future.”

Treuer’s counter-narrative documents the roots of the resistance that continued long after Wounded Knee, despite the U.S. government’s strategy to control Native Americans via “debt, dependency, threats, and force.” In 1871, the government ended the treaty process, which until that point had been the primary means of negotiation. Under the treaty system, Native American tribes had been considered foreign nations. After 1871, tribes were considered neither sovereign nations nor United States citizens but wards of the state. As military strategies failed and tribes surrendered to the government, they tried other avenues to secure their rights. In 1879, Chief Standing Bear, of the Ponca, made history by filing a petition of habeas corpus after being imprisoned for trying to return the bones of his son to their ancestral land, a lawsuit that earned Native Americans recognition as “persons” under the law. But until 1924 Native Americans were not granted citizenship by birth, and certain states denied Native people the right to vote until after the Second World War.

Tribes that had refused to sign treaties were often subjected to them anyway, and Native American leaders tried to draw attention to the inequity.“If we ever owned the land we own it still, for we never sold it,” Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce leader, said in a speech made in Washington, D.C., in 1879, which Treuer quotes in full. Chief Joseph surrendered to the government, in 1877, after resisting removal from the tribe’s ancestral lands in Wallowa, Oregon: “Suppose a white man should come to me and say, ‘Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.’ I say to him, ‘No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.’ Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him, ‘Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.’ My neighbor answers, ‘Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.’ The white man returns to me, and says, ‘Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.’ If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way we were bought. On account of the treaty made by the other bands of the Nez Perces, the white men claimed my lands.”

The several decades of Native American history that followed Wounded Knee are marked by a series of botched land policies and programs of forced assimilation that Treuer characterizes as “purgatory.” Among the worst of these was the Dawes Act, which privatized land on reservations and meted it out to individual tribe members, with the “surplus” often ending up in the hands of non-natives. As the bill’s opponents wrote at the time, the “real aim of this bill is to get at the Indian lands and open them up for settlement.” Treuer writes that between the passage of the Dawes Act, in 1887, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which restored the right to self-governance, an estimated ninety-five per cent of land allotted to native people ended up under white ownership. Equally destructive were the federally run boarding schools, where Native children were separated from their families and denied their culture. Treuer quotes Luther Standing Bear, who attended one of the boarding schools in the late nineteenth century. “Our accustomed dress was taken and replaced with clothing that felt cumbersome and awkward,” he wrote. “Of course, our hair was cut, and then there was much disapproval. But that was part of the transformation process and in some mysterious way long hair stood in the path of our development.”

Treuer also documents the ways that tribes resisted the Dawes Act, often at great cost. Red Lake, the reservation that Treuer saw misrepresented as hopeless after the school shooting, was one such place. “Time and time and time again, the government came to Red Lake and they wanted Red Lakers to sign certain agreements that would take Red Lake’s land, and in the midst of crushing poverty and isolation they didn’t take the money,” Treuer said. “They said ‘No, this lake is what’s important to us, this land is what’s important to us and we will never take the money.’ ”

“Each new policy was supposedly a solution for our enduring problems but also our problems created by the last policy,” Treuer told me. It wasn’t until after wave of American Indian activism in the late nineteen-sixties that Richard Nixon acknowledged, in a 1970 address to Congress, that Native Americans had been “oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands, and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny.”

“It was, surprisingly, Nixon, of all people, who said, yeah, self-determination,” Treuer said. “We’re going to let tribes figure out what they need for themselves and we are going to empower them to figure out how to do it. And he was, shockingly, really, really good for native people.” The Indian Self-Determination Act was passed under Gerald Ford, in 1975.

Treuer does not refrain from myth-busting, particularly regarding the American Indian Movement, which was founded in the late nineteen-sixties, in Minneapolis. Inspired by the Black Panthers’ militant approach to addressing economic inequality and police brutality, AIM’s first act was to form patrols that monitored law-enforcement officers in the neighborhood of Phillips, which was known for police brutality against Native Americans. Treuer, who recounts the AIM occupations of Alcatraz Island, the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, and the Pine Ridge reservation, in South Dakota, depicts AIM leaders such as Dennis Banks and Russell Means as more concerned with television appearances and self-promotion than the well-being of their people. Treuer adds that the movement was primarily urban in nature: “Despite its focus on reclaiming Indian pride by way of Indian cultures and ceremonies, and by privileging the old ways, reservation communities were not entirely sold on AIM.” (For skeptics, he writes, the acronym AIM stood for “assholes in moccasins.”) But Treuer also acknowledges the commitment of the rank and file, whose accomplishments included the opening of Native American-led schools and the Minneapolis housing project known as Little Earth, which prioritized Native American applicants, and the broader promotion of cultural pride.

Treuer told me that his mother has expressed worry about his contrarianism. “She gets really nervous when I start kicking at the foundations of this or that edifice, and she’s, like, are you sure you want to do that?” he said. But, he continued, “I want better heroes than Russell Means, I want people with more integrity than Dennis Banks. I think we deserve people with more honesty and integrity, I do, there’s too much at stake. So I’m not going to give them a nice redwashing and pat them on the head. I want to look at the ways in which it was effective and important, but also the ways in which it could have been better. So, yeah, I’ll probably get some heat. It’s not the first time.”

In addition to history, Treuer’s book has more journalistic passages that reflect his training as an anthropologist. His subjects include his mother’s cousin, Bobby Matthews, who makes his living hunting and gathering leeches, pine cones, wild rice, and cranberry moss; Sean Sherman, the Sioux chef who cooks food with only ingredients that would have been historically available to indigenous people in the Upper Midwest; and Chelsey Luger, an Ojibwe-Lakota health educator. He documents how tribes have used revenue streams from casinos, fireworks sales, and, more recently, marijuana, to strengthen infrastructure and invest in education. The period of 1990 to 2015, Treuer writes, “had a pointillist feel to it: one can see points of light—disparate, separate—beginning to come together into a picture of Indian survival, resilience, adaptability, pride, and place in modern life. Many of these points came together in North Dakota on and near the Standing Rock Reservation during the pipeline protest that erupted there in 2016.”

“I think it’s possible to draw a line between Standing Rock and Sharice Davids, and Deb Haaland,” Treuer said. “The kind of energy that they exhibited around what life is like in flyover states, and how to fight against interests, many of them corporate, that don’t care about us, natives and non-natives, in places like Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, and stuff like that, I think empowered and affected those elections.” Even at this moment, and even as contrarian as he is, Treuer said, “I’m more hopeful than I’ve been, I’m more hopeful than I probably should be.”

A previous version of this story misstated the name of the chief who filed for a writ of habeas corpus in 1879.