Professor nominated for National Book Award

Growing up in the Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota, David Treuer was taught to see his home as a place of sorrow and pain and to see his people, the Ojibwe Nation, as a broken community. Treuer confronted these negative emotions by starting to write a book in 2016 that became a nonfiction finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. 

“The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee,” the USC English professor’s seventh book, discusses Native American lives and culture from 1890 until now. It is one of five books in the United States shortlisted for the award. A committee will review the finalists and announce the winner in November. 

The book began as a pitch to his literary agent and editor as a part of his two-book deal, which included his 2015 novel “Prudence.” Treuer published his latest nonfiction book in January 2019.

“The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee” provides a counternarrative to Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” which chronicles Native American life up until 1890. Treuer said he saw the need to tell stories of Native American life in the present day.

“[Brown] thinks … ‘The culture and civilization of the American Indian [were] destroyed,’ and I’m refuting that thesis and substituting a counternarrative,” Treuer said. “The narrative of the regrettable but necessary death and disappearance of native people [and] native cultures is the dominant narrative that attends the people’s thinking about us.” 

Treuer said Brown helped establish the longstanding belief that Native American tribes and cultures have faded from existence since the Wounded Knee Massacre, a conflict in 1890 that left 150 Native Americans dead. 

“Dee Brown announced our collective death in the opening pages of his book,” Treuer said. “I grew up … vulnerable to that myth. I couldn’t help but see the place that I was from as a place where good ideas go to die, a place that sucked, that was painful and violent and chaotic. In part, I think I was trained to see the place that I was from that way because of stories like Dee Brown’s.”

Treuer was also inspired to create a new narrative around Native American life, so that his children would grow up to have pride in their heritage and not face the same internal conflict he did. 

“You can’t understand this country unless you understand Native American history,” he said. “People think that slavery is the defining American characteristic, but those slaves would have had no plantations to work on if that land hadn’t been stolen from Indian tribes. There wouldn’t be an America to settle if there had not been a contentious and destructive relationship between first colonizers, and then the American government and native tribes.” 

Treuer’s literary agent Adam Eaglin said the book adds a necessary voice to American history. He hopes its designation as a finalist will lead to a wider audience for the book. 

“It’s an opportunity for greater recognition of the book,” Eaglin said. “What this does is it allows a greater number of people to be aware of the book because of the stature of the award, and it also allows us to celebrate the incredible work that David has done on the book.”

When presented with the fully fleshed-out proposal for the book, Eaglin said he recognized the lack of representation for Native Americans in the modern-era. 

Rebecca Saletan, editorial director at Riverhead Books, worked closely with Treuer on “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.” Saletan and Treuer had conversations before drafting on the shape and form of the narrative. 

“When he had it drafted, we did a lot of very detailed work … on tightening up the prose so that the book flowed well [and] so that the structure would sound so that the questions that I imagine a reader might have were answered adequately,” she said. 

Treuer said he is grateful for the award nomination and for the opportunity to be able to share his work with a wide audience who continues to support it. 

“I’ve had to work in what felt like the shadows for longer than I anticipated, and so I know what it feels like to devote yourself for five years to a book, and books are really strange — they’re physical objects but they don’t have any real existence unless there’s a reader on the other side,” he said. “Writers and readers, we come together through the books we write.”