72. David Treuer in Conversation

Growing up on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota, bestselling author David Treuer inherited two often opposing views of America. His mother, the first American Indigenous woman judge in the country, grew up facing poverty and violence perpetuated by racist institutions. His father, a Holocaust survivor, came to view America as the country that offered him refuge and freedom from persecution. Treuer leverages this unique dual perspective to offer an intimate rumination on the distinct nature of North American violence in his groundbreaking memoir, The Savage Mind: An Indigenous Legacy. In this moving conversation, he’ll reckon with the history of violence in North America and our complicity in normalizing it, while offering a hopeful view of Turtle Island’s future. Moderated by Stephanie Sinclair.

Presented in partnership with Talking Stick Festival.

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Stephanie Sinclair

STEPHANIE SINCLAIR is Publisher of McClelland & Stewart. She is Anishinaabe and German/Jewish settler. She has worked for more than twenty years in the performing and creative arts, and from 2012-2022 in literary management. Through it all, she has been a ﬁerce advocate and activist, serving as a mentor and curator, and organizing publishing events to challenge colonial practices in publishing and to advance the work of reconciliation. Stephanie has also published two nationally bestselling anthologies: You Were Made for This World, published by Tundra Books in Summer 2025 and A Steady Brightness of Being, published by Penguin Canada in Fall 2025.

David Treuer

DAVID TREUER is an Ojibwe Indian from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. His book, the New York Times bestseller The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, was a finalist for both the 2019 National Book Award and the 2020 Carnegie Medal. He is also the author of four novels and two other books of nonfiction, as well as essays and stories that have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and Slate, among others. Treuer divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is also an editor at large at Pantheon Books, where his focus is on Native writers and emerging voices.