72. David Treuer in Conversation

Update: This event will be moderated by Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

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 Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Presented in partnership with Talking Stick Festival.

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Event Participants:

Elamin Abdelmahmoud

ELAMIN ABDELMAHMOUD is the host of CBC Radio show Commotion. He was a founding co-host of the CBC Politics podcast Party Lines, and he is a contributor to The National’s At Issue panel. His work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Rolling Stone, the Globe and Mail, and others.

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.