The Savage Mind

From New York Times bestselling author David Treuer comes The Savage Mind, a groundbreaking and intimate reckoning with Turtle Island's history, the violence of the frontier, and finding hope in the dark.

Growing up on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota, the son of a Holocaust survivor and the first American Indigenous woman judge in the country, Treuer inherited two often opposing views of America. His mother grew up in extreme poverty, suffering through discrimination and violence perpetuated by racist institutions and their envoys—the America she experienced was a constant threat to her safety. Treuer’s father, meanwhile, escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, fleeing Austria in 1938 and finally landing in Ohio, and he came to view America as the country that offered him refuge and freedom from persecution. Through a seamless blend of memoir, history, and reportage, Treuer leverages this unique dual perspective to offer an examination of North America's—and its citizens’—continuing acts of violence throughout history aimed at diminishing and controlling our freedom and autonomy. 

The Savage Mind is, at its heart, a rumination on the distinct nature of North American violence that can be traced back to the founding and later expansion of our countries. Treuer invokes Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis of American history that for over a century America had been defined by westward expansion, imperialism, and the violence committed in its name. That history created a false idea of frontier violence as an external force, but Treuer argues that it has actually entered the culture, and finally taken root in our very selves. By reckoning with these histories, the book confronts our complicity in either normalizing violence, or blaming it on outside sources, instead of seeing its recurring patterns and reckoning with its significance.  

A short work of gorgeous prose and movingly intimate storytelling, The Savage Mind does not hazard to offer an easy diagnosis of the violence and grief that is core to who we are as nations, nor does Treuer offer unrealistic solutions. Yet he does choose to embrace a hopeful view of Turtle Island, one that is all the more critical in a moment when it may feel very challenging to do so.