The Savage Mind: An Essay on American Violence

Treuer’s Academy project, “The Savage Mind: An Essay on American Violence,” is a book-length personal essay about understanding the nation’s history and most durable crisis – violence in schools, policies, and streets – in order to free ourselves from it. American violence has fallen most heavily on the bodies of women, the poor, the Black, American Indian, and the racial other, says Treuer, and it identifies a defining contradiction in US identity: “America has a deep and emotional investment in the idea of its own goodness, its own greatness,” he writes. “These myths ignore or elide the real ways in which, since the beginning, America has made and unmade itself through systemic violence.” Along the way, “The Savage Mind” shares Treuer’s story of coming of age in America, from growing up Native American on a remote reservation in Minnesota to Princeton University, and on to the growth of his own family in Los Angeles and Minnesota. His reckoning includes the legacy of his mother’s childhood on the reservation (her father was a Native man who was drafted, landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and wounded later that year) and his father’s experiences as a refugee from Vienna in 1938 and Holocaust survivor. “In many ways Germany is where the twinned fates of both sides of my family were forged,” writes Treuer. “Likewise, Germany has had to contend with its own dark past and, by doing so, forge a new national character to replace the old: precisely what the United States needs to do.” Weaving together the personal and the political with what has become his signature blend of history, anthropology, reportage, and memoir, Treuer dives deep into America’s dark heart to find a better way forward.