THE SAVAGE MIND

An extended meditation on fear, violence, history, and other products of the unseemlier angels of our nature.

In this set of epistolary essays, addressed to his children, Treuer considers the Jekyll-and-Hyde quality of the human, and more specifically American, mind. Playing on the title, echoing the classic ethnography by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Treuer looks into the history of his Ojibwe ancestors, writing of Indians—his term—that “our social utility is, quite simply, to be America’s sufferers.” Then again, with ancestors who also include a European Jewish grandfather who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, the suffering is broadly distributed. Therein lies the key: All we children of the Frontier—his capitalization—“are the aggrieved and the aggressors, the hurters and the hurt, the savage and the civilized.” Just so, the nation exhibits the same “untidy binaries,” and to tragic effect: “The country is weak, its voice is shrill and exhausted, and it lives on without the power to wash our tears and, in turn, to wash its own.” It lives on as well without resolution of what the author deems its original sin, namely the violent appropriation of land from its original inhabitants, an ongoing conquest whose innate violence is the fundamental expression of that savage mind, with all its ganglia: race and racism, inequality, enslavement, subjugation—the list goes on. Just as there is beauty in all that terror, there are moments of relief in Treuer’s narrative: his account of studying writing with Toni Morrison (who clearly did a very good job), his love of family, and his wish for a better country than the one we live in, the one that daily “make[s] us grief sick.”

An often grim, always provocative study of the contradictions that shape our lives—for better, but more often for worse.