A Counter Narrative of Native American History

Wisdom has power (KPFA FM, Pacifica Free Speech Radio, Berkeley, California).

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Where are the Indians today?

Guest: Anthropologist and writer Professor David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California (USC) and is author of several novels and non-fiction works including his latest, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. Is he a sell out or a sane voice about American Indian history? More: AUDIO

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

This book was named a best book of 2019 by The New York Times, TIME, The Washington Post, NPR, Hudson Booksellers, The New York Public Library, The Dallas Morning News, and Library Journal. NPR says, "Chapter after chapter, it's like one shattered myth after another."

"[It's] an informed, moving, and kaleidoscopic portrait... Treuer's powerful book suggests the need for soul-searching about the meanings of American history and the stories we tell ourselves about this nation's past." - New York Times Book Review, front page.

This is a sweeping history and counter-narrative of Native American life from the U.S. massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee to the present.

The received idea of Native American history — as promoted by books like Dee Brown's mega-bestselling 1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee — has been that American Indian history essentially ends with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee.

Not only were 150 Sioux killed by the U.S. Cavalry, but the sense was that Native civilization was killed as well.

Growing up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, training as an anthropologist, and researching Native life past and present for his nonfiction and novels, Prof. David Treuer has uncovered a different narrative.

Because American Indians did not disappear. This is not despite but rather because of their intense struggles to preserve their languages, their traditions, their family structures (largely matriarchal), and their very existence. The story of American Indians since the end of the 19th century to the present is one of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention.

In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Prof. Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact with Europeans, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival.

The devastating seizures of land by invading Whites gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians neither know nor care about property.

The forced induction and assimilation [and molestation] of Indian children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the U.S. military. And the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modernity, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of Red resistance.

This book is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era. More