Town Hall Seattle and The Seattle Times present
Behind the Byline: Education in Washington
How to Build a Better System
Rental Partner: Seattle Arts & Lectures presents
David Treuer
The Savage Mind
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM.
Presented by Seattle Arts & Lectures. For questions about this event, please contact boxoffice@lectures.org or call (206) 621-2230.
After George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, David Treuer sat down to write a letter to hold himself and his family together. The result is The Savage Mind — the most personal work of his storied career, and a searing exploration of the violence at the heart of America. Join us for a conversation that interweaves memoir, history, and reportage in search of a wound, and a way to heal it.
How do we understand America, ourselves, and the impulses that seem intent on destroying both? 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 the terrifying essence of our nation: frontier violence, which 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. And after the geographic frontier closed in the late 19th century, it did not vanish — quite the opposite.
Today, Treuer explains, America’s frontier — and all its violent pathologies — has migrated overseas and into our hearts and minds. The atrocities in Gaza and the school shootings in the American heartland are bound together by this invisible filament — one that Treuer makes visible in The Savage Mind, and which he offers hope for weaving, once and for all, into a better cloth.
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David Treuer is Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. 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 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.
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