The Savage Mind

A searing exploration of American violence in the vein of Eula Biss and Ta-Nehisi Coates, interweaving family memoir with settler and Indigenous history to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation—and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.

In the wake of George Floyd's murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most innovative and powerful work of his storied literary career. 

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 how frontier violence 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, on both sides of the physical borderline. Treuer shares how, after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish from the culture. Rather, America’s frontier—and all its violent pathologies—migrated overseas and into Americans' hearts and minds, where it endures today. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament—one that Treuer makes startlingly visible, and which he offers hope for burying once and for all, in The Savage Mind.