Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee with David Treuer

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Today, on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, Sharon connects with author David Treuer who writes about the sweeping history of Native Americans in his book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. It’s a history that goes beyond what most Americans are taught about key events or standout figureheads. Native past and present doesn’t pivot solely around tragedy and suffering; and when we tell only those stories, it shapes how we think. David seeks to create a narrative of bounty; Native history may have a surplus of pain, but it also has a surplus of joy and culture. Special thanks to our guest, David Treuer, for joining us today. You can order The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee here. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Guest: David Treuer Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. So glad that you're with me today. I recently read a book that I found so compelling and also just incredibly eye-opening and helpful. It is called The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. And if you are like most Americans, myself included, who finds themselves sort of woefully uneducated about Native American history in the United States, you're going to love hearing today from David Troyer, the author, and I think you're also going to really love what you're going to learn in the pages of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. So let's dive in.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Thank you so much for being here today. I am really excited to be chatting. I appreciate your time. Thank you. We are from the same geographical portion of the United States, the Northwoods of Northern Minnesota. But I would imagine we had very, very different growing up experiences. And I would love to have you tell everybody a little bit more about what life was like for you growing up. Yeah, I imagine we did have somewhat different experiences. I have such a weird family history and background.

weird family history and background. My father is an Austrian Jewish Holocaust survivor who, after living many lifetimes, washed up in northern Minnesota in Cass Lake on the reservation, teaching high school English on the reservation. My mother is from that reservation, Ojibwe, reservation, Ojibwe, from a big, complicated family from Bina, this small town kind of between Castle Lake and Duluth, where you are. And, you know, I'm the sum of their experiences, this strangely sort of, not bifurcated, but amalgamated, half Jewish, half Native, growing up in the Native community, growing up at Leech Lake Reservation. And honestly, you know, when I was a kid, I mean, I was so jealous of my friends in Bemidji and my friends with their Scandi parents. I wanted what I thought of as a normal life and normal parents. There's no way that either of my parents could have been glossed as normal.

They were strange people. And I wanted to leave, honestly. You know, when I was 17, I'm like, I'm getting out of here. And I went away to college. And as soon as I left, I started to feel what I was leaving behind and the sort of unique and irreplaceable and irreducible sort of splendor of the life that my parents had given me and the place where I was raised. And I began missing them, and I began missing my home, and I began appreciating both a lot more than I ever had.

Mm-hmm. How did your dad end up in Northern Minnesota on a Native American reservation? in northern Minnesota on a Native American reservation? My father started life young, first as a refugee and a Holocaust survivor. And then in the States, they settled in Ohio when they fled. And by 1944, my father was 18. He was a naturalized US citizen. And he had one kid and one on the way and enlisted in the army and served in the Philippines and in Okinawa. So like you guys said, the Pacific. So he had so many lives. And then after the war, he had three kids, he had a wife. Her family vacationed in

northern Minnesota. I think they had a cabin like a lot of people do. And so he went up there on occasion with his first wife and their family. So he knew the area from them. And they moved up there after he worked in labor unions for years. He got his teaching degree at Bemidji State University and the only place that would hire this first language, German speaking Jewish refugee was the high school on the reservation. So since this is America, you take a first language German speaker and you put them in suspenders and have them teach Shakespeare in English to native kids. Yeah, that sounds right. That sounds right. And that's how he wound up there. Wow. Yeah. I bet nobody was able to see that coming. That was not the dream. His parents

were like, someday our son will be. Yeah. Wow. What was your impression of your dad's experience living on the reservation? Because you've written a whole book about living on reservations. Right. I wrote all about reservations and what they mean and why they exist and where they're going sort of broadly, kind of centered around my own. And that's my book, Res Life. But I asked my dad that. I interviewed him for the book and he's like, I got kicked out of every other country. No one wanted me. The Austrians and the Germans tried to kill me. France didn't want me. Belgium didn't want me. England barely tolerated me for a short period. And I made it to America. And then I eventually came up to the community. And he said, it was the first time in my life I felt like I was in a place where

people understood me and I understood them. and I felt like I belonged. My dad was a lot. He was very, as the kids say, extra. And I think that was off-putting to some Leach Lakers, you know. Some Native people just roll their eyes like, oh my God, Bob's at it again. That said, he had a lot of profound relationships with people going back and stretching out over 50 years. For a lot of people, he was sweet guy who took them seriously. I remember once I was dating a woman from back home and I picked her up and she goes, oh yeah, my aunt says to say hi to your dad. I'm like, oh God, like how does your aunt know my dad? She's like, well, like when my aunt was a kid,

all the kids from the village, it's this little community called Mission, which is near Cast Lake. It's like all the kids from Mission would gather at that convenience store and your dad would roll up on a Saturday and he had this big black car and he'd pile all the Indian kids from Mission into his car and bring them to Bemidji, give them pocket money and tell him he'd pick him up in 10 hours, bring him back home. And she's like, my aunt said he was the first white man who ever sort of considered how we might feel and what we might want as Native kids and

cared about us, like was really thoughtful and cared about us. I read your book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. I mean, first of all, it's absolutely fascinating. If anybody is thinking to themselves, I would really benefit from understanding more about Native American history in the United States. This is a fantastic choice. We were talking before we started recording about how you had intended to start it at one point in history, and then you realize like, well, we're going to understand that. We got to go back a little bit, and soon we're in prehistoric times. But you do it in a very compelling way and in a way that moves the reader through the story. So it's not an 800-page book

about the year 4999 BC. You know what I mean? So I love it for the sweep of history because so often Americans' understanding of Native American history is relegated to specific events. It is this thing, this one event that occurred. The sweep of Native American histories in the United States is not well understood by most Americans. And so one of the things I was interested to talk to you about was that your book is really intended to be sort of a counter narrative to a lot of what is written about Native American communities. You even talk in the book, you say the same old sad story of the quote unquote dead Indian, our history and our continued existence came down to a list of tragedies. We had somehow outlived without really living, without civilization, without culture,

without a set of selves. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that. What has it been like to work on a project like this? What has it been like to have this sense of being raised in this idea that Native American history is just a set of tragedies? Well, in a word, it's been complicated. I read somewhere recently that 87% of the materials used to teach Native American history or material about Native Americans don't mention anything about us after 1890. So the vast majority of the things that people learn about us, to the degree that they learn anything at all, is about the deep past. The Lakota once lived on the plains. The Cherokee once developed a syllabary and wrote down their language.

The Ojibwe, my tribe, once traveled by canoe all over the Great Lakes. Trading with the French voyagers. Trading with the French voyagers. It's always in the past tense. And our history is not understood by outsiders or by us as contributory in that the way that history is understood and taught is simply the number of things that have been done to us and that destroyed us. But I don't think that's the best way to see Native history. Is this something, is this a litany of abuse, right? I think that deprives, when we see history that way, deprives us of the chance to see American history for what it really was. see American history for what it really was. And it deprives Native people from seeing the sort of potency and power of our own lives, communities and sovereign nations, and how we have and continue to

shape this country. I love that. And I have been told, this is a concept that people from various tribes all over the country have told me over and over, we're still here. I would amend that. And I would say like, it's not just that we're still here, but that we're still here and we are powerful. You know what's crazy? I like the year 1917. I think it's a great year. I'm very fond of the year 1917, among other things, like there's bad things happening, right? You like the worldwide influenza pandemic and World War I. Is that your it's a great year. I'm very fond of the year 1917, among other things, like there's bad things happening, right? You like the worldwide influenza pandemic and World War I, is that your favorite? Those aren't my favorite parts of that year. You know, my favorite part of 1917 is that it was the

first year since 1492 that Native births in North America outstripped Native deaths. It took us 400 years and change to rebound. But starting in 1917 and continuing to this day, there are more Native people that are being born each year than are dying each year. To the point where now, as of the 2020 census, I think something like 6 million Americans identified as Native in varying degrees. So there are twice as many Native people in this country than there are people who consider themselves Muslim American. And there are slightly more Native people in this country than those who identify as Jewish American. We're everywhere. We're doing everything and we're doing it surprisingly well. So it's not just that we're still here. We are still here and

we are excellent. You mentioned that in the book, you say that the biggest shift you can see in your own lifetime is a kind of collective determination to do more than just survive. Totally. That's kind of like my dad. He ended up working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He worked in Johnson's War on Poverty through the Community Action Program and other programming like that. And he was a strange man, because when he approached Native people in that work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for CAP, as it's called, he didn't approach Native people as like, well, I'm the person with the funding, and I'm the person with the knowledge, and you poor Indians need to sort of do what I say. And he was not like that. He was very un-paternalistic.

very un-paternalistic. His most basic assumption was you are intelligent, capable, experienced people. You are more than capable of solving your own problems. So how can I help you solve what's most important to you? He was radically un-paternalistic in his dealing with Native people. And that made him very rare. Do you think paternalism is the default posture of European Americans towards Native communities? Looking back in the past, is that your general impression of how the relationship is a paternalistic one? It's my impression of the bureaucratic and administrative leanings of various government officials, programs, and policies. If you look at things like the boarding school programs, you can see evidence of that extreme paternalism of like, we need to take your children from you because we know what is best and what is best is for your children to look and act like us. Totally. You know, and also like there was a big bit of legislation that was

passed in 1934 called the Indian Reorganization Act, and it brought modern government to native communities. Essentially a good thing, like let's help you set up governments that work for you so you can govern your sovereign nations. But the guy who is spearheading this, his name was John Collier. He had an infatuation with Pueblo cultures and communities. He spent a lot of time there.

He had a lot of Pueblo friends. He spent a lot of time at various Pueblos. So his great idea for native government was largely based on how Pueblos already functioned, which works for Pueblos. It may not work for the Lakota or for the Diné or for the Ojibwe or for the Blackfeet. It worked for the sedentary, small farming municipalities, which are what the Pueblos are, largely. And it was applied across the country. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work for every tribe. You can't paternalistically apply a model of government that works for you in communities and cultures and places with histories that don't correspond to America's histories and cultural leanings and so on. It's always a disaster.

It's like, yo, America, take a beat. This hasn't worked the other 28 times you tried it. Right. It's unlikely to work this time either. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. right it's unlikely to work this time either i'm jenna fisher and i'm angela kinsey we are best friends and together we have the podcast office ladies where we re-watched every single episode of the office with insane behind the scenes stories hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office

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Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. and wherever you get your podcasts. I remember reading that your mom was a tribal court judge. And I'm curious in part because I know the listener is curious about these three levels of sovereignty in the United States, about this concept of like federal, state, and tribal sovereignty. It is a topic that is very poorly understood by a lot of Americans. What tribal sovereignty even means. Sovereignty is radically misunderstood. To do it quickly, Europeans and then subsequently the United States government treated Native tribes as sovereign nations with whom they had to enter into agreements with.

And that treaty period lasted a while, but it concluded in the 1870s. No treaties per se were signed after the 1870s. It closed. But we were treated as sovereign nations in the way that sort of, you know, the way the United States would interact with France, sovereign nation, Britain, and so on. But with some caveats, we were sovereign, mostly sovereign, kind of. There were a series of Supreme Court cases in the 1830s, known as the Marshall Trilogy around Indian removal, and around the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, which codified sort of our sovereignty in ways that were complicated and incomplete and paternalistic. And we were

called domestic dependent nations. So sovereign nations inside of the United States that were sovereign, kind of. We can't raise armies, don't issue our own currency. Some of us do issue passports, though. The state of Minnesota is kind of sovereign, kind of not. It can issue its own forms of identification. It can pass laws. It can elect its own leaders, different from the leaders of South Dakota or Wisconsin, but not completely sovereign. When you were growing up on a reservation, what was your understanding of tribal sovereignty? How was it taught to you? Because you also say in the book, and I loved this line, this is so good, the how of the telling shapes the what.

Yeah. I mean, those two ideas are a little dissociated from me. But like, I was lucky growing up, my mom was the first Native American federal judge in the country. The first Native American female attorney in the state of Minnesota, the first Native American tribal judge in the state of Minnesota. So like, she was a first in so many ways. And my dad, he's a history guy. And he's a current events guy. He's a politics guy, was. So there were dinner table conversations about things like sovereignty and the tribal constitution and policing and court systems and all that kind of stuff. Of course, I was tuning most of it out because I wanted to get back

to playing Dungeons and Dragons. But that other thing that you mentioned that you quote me as saying, like, that's something I feel very strongly. Like, for me, it's true of all of my writing. It's also true for my teaching, because I'm a professor as well. My job when I'm teaching a course to my college students is not to take 16 weeks and teach them 10 books, and then they're master of those 10 books.

My job is to use those 10 books and those 16 weeks to train my students to think differently. And how we tell stories shapes how we think, the method. So if we keep using, for example, the narrative frame of tragedy to describe Native life and Native history, if that's our how, then that's all we're going to be able to see. That's all outsiders will see when they peer in at our lives. And it's all we'll see when we look at our own lives as Native people. We'll see loss, powerlessness, hopelessness. Those aren't things that are true. Those are things we are trained to see. We suffer broadly as Native people from what a colleague of mine in a different context

called narrative scarcity. There are lots of stories told about us. There are lots of stories, history, fiction, poetry told by us, but there aren't that many different kinds of stories being told. And that's what narrative scarcity is. We suffer from it. That narrative scarcity just means that sort of we get canalized into the ruddy, crappy road of tragedy. That's it. So my job is always as a teacher, but also as a writer to reverse that and create narrative bounty.

I love that. What was the biggest motivation for you in writing The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee? What was it that set you on a path to say, this is my work and I have no choice but to do it? Well, it's a little bit of a long answer, but it's funny because every time I finish a nonfiction book, I tell myself, I tell my family, I tell all my friends, I tell the world, I'm like, I tell myself, I tell my family, I tell all my friends, I tell the world, I'm like, that's the last time. It's too hard. And then I always break that promise to myself, to my friends, to my

family, to the world. It's vastly more difficult for me than writing fiction. That said, I got into writing nonfiction in the first place in 2005, when there was a school shooting at Red Lake Reservation, if you remember. At the time, it was the second worst school shooting in American history, second only to Columbine. For Jeffrey Weiss, the shooter at Red Lake, Columbine was for him like the model. It was the goal. And I was heartbroken when the shooting took place. We have a lot of friends, a lot of family at Red Lake, directly involved and at that school. So it was heartbreaking and devastating,

the shooting itself. But then as heartbreaking and devastating was the reporting that followed in the wake of the shooting. And the headlines were mostly on a poor remote reservation, the shooting. And the headlines were mostly on a poor remote reservation, tragedy strikes. That was the dominant headline for weeks. And I remember like yelling at my friends and like, you know what, when Columbine happened, they didn't say on a largely affluent, mostly Anglo excerpt, tragedy strikes. They didn't mention race. They didn't mention class. They're just telling the same old sad story about reservations that they think is true, which is not true. These places are more than little basins of suffering. And as my old writing teacher and mentor and friend, Toni Morrison said on occasion, if there's a book you really, really want to read and it doesn't exist, then you have to write it. And so I was

like, well, here we go. Let's do it. And so I wrote a book about reservations as places of extra, of more, of surplus, of bounty. Surplus of pain, but a surplus of joy. Surplus of poverty, but a surplus of hustle. You get more of everything. A surplus of crime, but a surplus of law. I tried to flip the script on how we see reservations to get us away from that tragic telling. And so I think I did an okay job. And then I was done. And I'm like, that's it. I'm out. Mic drop. Did it. Did it. And then I sat with it. And I'm like, you know, there's a bigger story to be told. Maybe you can't have reservations without native people, but you can certainly have native people without reservations.

And it seemed like there was something I had more to say that I had to say. I had to look at all of us and what we've been up to. And I remembered reading Dee Brown's classic, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in the year of my birth. It remains the bestselling book of Native American history ever published. And on the very first page of Brown's book, he says, this book is about the Plains Wars. And I started in the 1850s and I ended the 1890s at the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, where the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed. I read that coincidentally when I was in college on the 100th anniversary of the massacre.

And I remembered thinking even then, like, that's not true. Our cultures and civilizations aren't destroyed. We're not gone. I'm not gone. My reservation is not gone. My tribal government, my culture, our ceremonies, our language, none of it's gone. It's nonsense. And it stuck with me. And so after I wrote Res Life, and when I'm thinking that there's a bigger story to tell, I'm like, well, why don't I

tell the follow-up and counter-narrative to Dee Brown's book? Why don't I start in 1890 and bring the story of Native American life up to the present with the opposite thesis that 1890 was not the end. It was a low point, maybe the lowest, but a point from which Native peoples and communities and nations have been emerging in power, in influence, in health, and in numbers. to numbers. Writing nonfiction is so hard. It's so difficult and it's so difficult to do well. It's really easy to do boring. You can just write a list of bullet points and list of facts. It's really hard to do well. So congrats on doing well at it. Are you somebody who's like, I hate the process of having to write, but I'm glad that I did it when I'm done? No, you know, in all honesty, I mean, I still enjoy the experience of writing nonfiction. It is much harder than fiction for me.

But that said, it's still the best job in the world. I love storytelling and at its heart, nonfiction, history, it's all storytelling and it's fun. It's a game and I enjoy it. It's just taxing. This is so much work. I'd rather just sit in my room and make up a story. It's so much easier. Yeah. There's no fact checking in fiction. No, I don't have to know anything really. I just have to be convincing. Yeah, totally. That's the hardest part though. And I think that's the hardest part for nonfiction too, honestly, all joking aside. I mean, it's easy to be boring, which is another way of saying unconvincing and unmoving. It's very hard to be the opposite,

It's very hard to be the opposite, engaging, convincing. It's so hard to get a reader to lean forward and be like, okay, what happens next? What's going to be the result of this? And where's that going to go? And how is it going to turn out? That's hard to do. Yeah. And there's always this balance to be struck between the narrative and the facts,

and you have to be true to the facts, but you have to have a narrative that moves the reader through the story or it's just a list of facts. Yeah. Exactly. Which is not that fun to read. One of the big things that is looming large at the Supreme Court is a decision about the Indian Child Welfare Act. Why is it important for Native children to remain in their communities, to remain with tribal members, and to not be fostered or adopted out to other groups other than as a very, very last resort? I mean, you know, we can talk about the importance of it to sort of individual Native children. We can also talk about it sort of its importance in relation to sort of tribes and tribal community sovereignty. One of the main ways the United States government tried in the past to do away with Native people as citizens of sovereign nations was to destroy Native families and to destroy the tribes and communal holdings.

And one way to do that was allotment of land and to break up tribal land holdings and allot them to individuals. Another way to do that was with the institution of American Indian boarding schools. If you can break families, you can break tribes. Now, this wasn't done out of hatred. This wasn't done because I don't like Indian peoples and cultures. Like it's not so simple, right? So it's important that we keep our kids close to keep our community strong, to keep our nation strong. So that's a social answer, right?

So that's a social answer, right? As for individual kids, study after study after study that deals with rates of mental illness, drug kids are healthier, happier, live longer, have fewer issues with drug and alcohol use if they are tied to and remain a part of Native families and Native communities. It's so overwhelmingly obvious. What is it that you hope that the reader takes away from your book? Just the one thing, David. Just one thing. Just the one thing. That's so unfair.

Such an unfair question. Sharon, come on. What are some things, plural, what are some things that you would hope that people would take away from The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee when the reader closes the book? What will you hope that they carry forward? I've been touched, you know, when people have reached out, especially when Native folk reach out. Like when someone said, you know, some years ago, they're like, I just see myself so differently now. That meant a lot to me. And to the extent that sort of, you know,

non-native readers have reached out, which has also been significant. I've had a lot of kind words headed my way. I'm sure there have been plenty of unkind words that are headed some other direction, but I don't hear them. So, which is nice because I don't want to, but it's the kind of surprise that people register. Like, I didn't know that. I didn't know that that's how things went down. I didn't know that. I didn't know that that's how things went down. I didn't know how deeply I was implicated in all of this. They too maybe see themselves as Americans differently. And I don't know. I mean, I'm just a guy in a room with a bunch of books writing about things that happened a long time ago and that are still happening, but not so long ago. So what do I know? Like, I don't have my finger on the pulse and that are still happening, but not so long ago. So what do I know? Like,

I don't have my finger on the pulse of most people's reaction, but I like to think that the book has changed both how we see the world and that's how the world is. So in terms of what I want people to take away, like I want them to let their brain be changed. Like, I want them to let their brain be changed. I hope you are fundamentally a different person. I mean, yes.

At the end of my book. That's right. It's sort of like that Monty Python skit where someone wrote the funniest joke in the world. It's actually lethal. It's so funny. And so they run through battlefields reading it out loud and killing the enemy. It's like, I always think of that. I'm i'm like yeah i want my book to have that effect not death of course but like you know it's just sort of it's so irresistible that you emerge forever changed it's a worthy goal yeah it's a worthy goal we can try we can try that's all we can do.

Well, thank you so much for your work. And thank you so much for your time today. Thank you. I really enjoyed your book. I learned a lot. And I really enjoyed speaking with you. Thank you. But were you changed? Absolutely.

There we go. I'm not even the same person that I was yesterday. That's perfect. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. You can find David's book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, wherever you buy your books. Thanks for being here today. This show is researched and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And if you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review on your favorite podcast platform? That helps us so much. And we always love to see your shares and tags on social media. We'll see you again soon. you