The Savage Mind

“Unlike anything I have read…this book will make a mark.” —Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of James

A searing exploration of American violence, interweaving memoir, history, and reportage 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 personal and powerful work of his storied literary career.

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.

• “David Treuer's The Savage Mind is unlike anything I have read. Combining elements of memoir, history and current events he makes all three more intimate and more real and so much more important. Full of subtle irony and astute observation, this book will make a mark.”
  Percival Everett, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of JAMES
• "An extended meditation on fear, violence, history, and other products of the unseemlier angels of our nature...Just as there is beauty in all that terror, there are moments of relief in Treuer’s narrative: his account of studying writing with Toni Morrison (who clearly did a very good job), his love of family, and his wish for a better country than the one we live in...An often grim, always provocative study of the contradictions that shape our lives—for better, but more often for worse."
  Kirkus (starred review)
• "A searing blend of history and memoir, written as a letter to his children. Moving seamlessly between the centuries-long legacy of dispossession of Indigenous peoples and today’s political 'crisis'....” Treuer’s elegiac narrative probes how family intersects with systems of power, and taps the deepest wells of feeling. It’s a singularly powerful work."
  Publishers Weekly (starred review)
• “A piercing and propulsive treatise on the distorted relationship between America’s violent history and its treasured frontier mythology…Treuer charges through the nation’s past at a brisk pace, sparing no one from his incisive analysis. This is Treuer at his best, emotional, brilliant, and relentless.”
  Booklist (starred review)
• “Following up on The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, his incredible, far-ranging history of this country’s treatment of Indigenous First Nations, Treuer’s latest is a personal and historical exploration of America’s tradition of frontier violence, that bloody legacy of settler-colonialism that continues to manifest in the 21st century, from the streets of Minneapolis to the tent cities of Gaza."
  Literary Hub