On Sale: Sep 22, 2026
Page Count: 288 pages
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
ISBN-13: 9780316599436

$30.00

$40.00 CAD

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A searing exploration of American violence in the vein of Eula Biss and Ta-Nehisi Coates, interweaving family memoir with settler and Indigenous history to reveal the wound at the heart of our nation—and to offer hope that the country, and we, might be healed.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted is The Savage Mind, the most innovative and powerful work of his storied literary career.

Ranging from Treuer’s upbringing on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota to the experiences of his parents, a Jewish Holocaust refugee and the first American Indigenous woman judge, The Savage Mind reveals how frontier violence has defined our country, our culture, and our very selves. The frontier, Treuer shows, was a site of epic, phantasmagoric bloodshed, initiated by white settlers but perpetuated by all of us, on both sides of the physical borderline. Treuer shares how, after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish from the culture. Rather, America’s frontier—and all its violent pathologies—migrated overseas and into Americans’ hearts and minds, where it endures today. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament—one that Treuer makes startlingly visible, and which he offers hope for burying once and for all, in The Savage Mind.

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New York Times bestselling author and editor David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, three Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a Fellow at the American Academy Berlin. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and is an editor-at-large for Pantheon Books. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC.

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David Treuer

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author and editor David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, three Minnesota Book Awards, and fellowships from the NEH, Bush Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a Fellow at the American Academy Berlin. His most recent book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, a Minnesota Book Prize winner, a California Book Prize winner, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and is an editor-at-large for Pantheon Books. He divides his time between his home on the Leech Lake Reservation and Los Angeles, where he is a professor of English at USC.

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