The Savage Mind: An American Legacy
by David Treuer
Pete Hegseth, the embattled Secretary of Defense, recently
announced a new spectacle for Americans. While his stewardship of the largest department
in the government has been marked by firings, sharing classified information,
leaks, and presentations that border on bizarre. Yet he made the announcement
that convicted killer Nidal Malik Hasan, whose brutal murders of 13 people at
Fort Hood in 2009 rocked the country, would be executed by firing squad. Hasan’s
execution by firing squad will mark the first carried out by the military since
1945, but what is even more shocking is that Hegseth said he plans to broadcast
the execution, making the death available to watch live for Americans. Hegseth,
who purports to be a Christian and regularly invokes Jesus’s name in his
speeches, has claimed that broadcasting the execution will act as a deterrent,
despite no evidence that public executions or other forms of punishment deter
people from committing crimes. As one of the most brutal attacks committed on
an American military base, Hasan’s violence surely stands out, and its also
possible that Hegseth’s purported religious beliefs call for the kind of old
testament idea of an eye-for-an-eye type justice, not necessarily the same
turn-the-other-cheek philosophy that Jesus and early Christians espoused. Rather,
it’s a brutal and barbaric reminder of what David Treuer deems The Savage
Mind, a mindset that “is American violence” that often used violence as a
policy to remind others of America’s uniqueness, its power, and its strength. I
couldn’t help but think about Treuer’s book when Hegseth made this awful
announcement since the call to broadcast a live death follows on the heals of
countless social media videos showing militarized henchmen chasing suspected
immigrants, breaking windows, slamming people to the ground for an obvious reminder
of America’s power. It follows on the taxpayer funded spectacle of the UFC fights
at the White House, where opponents not only fought one another, but also
dehumanized one of its former residents. David Treuer’s reflective and timely
new book The Savage Mind: An American Legacy comes at an important time,
when it seems like “the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the
world…The ceremony of innocence is drowned;” In fact, Treuer quotes Yeats’ poem
to remind us that this kind of violence and upheaval is part of a cycle, and in
the words of Gil Scott Heron, it “ain’t no new thing.” Nevertheless, Treuer’s The
Savage Mind is one of those books that I’m going to start recommending to
all my friends and family. It’s an important and urgent book, and much like his
earlier book The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the
Present invites readers to reconsider their conceptions of stereotypes and
ideas from the past that persist in the present. However, unlike the hopeful and
sanguine tone of The Heartbeat, where Treuer identified stories of
resilience and survival across Indian reservations and tribal communities in
America, The Savage Mind examines the frontier and the history of
American violence that has contributed to making American what it is. As I was
reading The Savage Mind, I couldn’t help but also think about Eddie
Glaude Jr’s recent America, U.S.A. and how his tone towards the ideas have
shifted from his earlier book Begin Again, which took a hopeful tone in
reexamining racism and false myths. While violence, racism, intolerance, and
political divisiveness continue to be at the forefront of the news, Treuer’s
book reminds readers that this is part of the frontier mentality that has
helped to push not only the physical boundaries of America’s geography but also
extended the boundaries of what is acceptable to attain these advantages and
privileges. Both books call for readers to reexamine the past, but to also
consider how past myths, stereotypes, and belief systems have encouraged the
present divisions and inequalities that continue to persist. The Savage Mind,
like America, U.S.A., is also an important book to read to not only
consider what is happening today, but how we can make changes that promote more
healing and acceptance, to lessen our divisions and work towards promoting more
equality.
While it’s not always an easy book to read, I love how
Treuer frames the book as a kind of letter or dialogue with his children, interrogating
his own complicated feelings as the son of an Ojibwe mother and a Jewish
immigrant father and what America’s history of violence, slavery, stolen land, and
bad faith treaties, among other disparate practices means to him. Like Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s Between the World and Me, Treuer presents the history and his
own ideas like a dialogue with his children, framing his experiences, family,
and concerns not only as hopes and fears for his children, but also a part of
the multitudes of American life.
I loved the way this book was written, with careful
consideration for each line. I also learned that Treuer studied with Toni
Morrison (he calls her Professor Morrison) while he was an undergrad at
Princeton, and I can see that influence in each line, carefully wrought word
choices with repetition, inversions, and the kind of mirrored syntax that
creates a reflective and critical mood in readers. He also referenced one of
Morrison’s greatest quotes that I was not aware of: “If you can only feel tall
if someone else is on their knees, then you’ve got a serious problem.” This
line resonated with me, especially in how so much of the current administration’s
approach to governing requires that kind of submission. I found myself going back over lines to think
more about the history, events, and ideas that Treuer was excavating and
analyzing. Although he’s trained as an anthropologist, as he recounted on his
first day of class with Professor Morrison, she informed him that he wrote
better than most anthropologists, which was good. Although Treuer examines
history and current events throughout the book, the personal parts recounting
his memories of working with Professor Morrison or learning how to fence while
at Princeton were some of my favorite parts of the book. He even makes a
reference to his kids as his “best thing,” which I found both heartwarming and
brilliant in later learning about Morrison’s influence on his writing. Treuer
connects these experiences, feeling like an outsider, possibly experiencing a
kind of imposter syndrome, with his own desire to challenge the stereotypes of Indians.
There’s also a great story about meeting Clifford Geertz, arguably the most
significant figure in 20th century anthropology, and not allowing Geertz
to get a word in, challenging him about fencing. As these stories entertain,
Treuer eventually brings readers back to the violence, and how its not just embedded
in American culture or the frontier mindset, but possibly even a part of human
nature. From examining Geertz’s analysis of deep play in Balinese cock
fighting, where the roosters are extensions of the man, to Freud’s cynical later
work Civilization and Its Discontents, Treuer provides evidence of the
influence of the frontier on American and European conquests to expand land and
property at any cost, even if it means denying the humanity of others.
I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect with this book, and I
was amazed at how it straddles many different genres and styles- it’s part memoir,
part historical analysis, part instructions to his children, and all heart,
where Treuer helps readers understand the implications of The Savage Mind
and the legacy of American colonialism, stolen land, broken treaties, starvation,
paternalism, and the other forms of physical and symbolic violence on Indians, the
enslaved, and others denied rights, opportunities, and equality. I was amazed
at how deftly Treuer moves from the past to the present to personal
connections, whether it was through his parents’ or grandparents, his brothers
or cousins, and how these experiences all serve to represent elements of The
Savage Mind and the frontier, the purportedly unknown land and space that
allows for lawlessness, greed, and the rapacious development of the manifest
destiny. As Treuer demonstrates throughout the book, this kind of cyclical violence
is often condoned through the calls for progress and growth, and is often
justified as part of the entitlement of this progress. The Savage Mind
is a book that all Americans should read, and its an especially important book
for students to read to confront many of the myths about American
exceptionalism that often skirt the kind of systemic violence and displacement
that have bloated our land. I was aware of many of the events, but Treuer’s
analysis and revisiting these events throughout history, both American and
world history, allows readers to reconsider the consequences of colonialism and
imperialism and the calls for expansion and domination, especially from a
cultural and human perspective that we often do not confront in textbooks.
Whether it was learning about Columbus’s crimes against humanity or Andrew
Jackson’s attempts to exterminate Indians in America (and how these laws and
Jim Crow laws influenced the Nuremberg Laws in 1930s Germany), The Savage Mind
offers much for readers to consider and reconsider. Although there is a lot to
confront and wrestle with throughout the book, Treuer framing these historical
atrocities challenging situations as a letter and dialogue with his children also
brings readers into the conversation, making it feel more dialogic and inviting
them to not only consider the perspectives and experiences of others, but also
to empathize with them and our shared history of violence, even if we may not
have experienced the violence in similar ways. Furthermore, Treuer ends the
book with stories of hope and redemption, sharing how the Big Drum Ceremony
originated for his Ojibwe tribe. Interestingly, it was brought to the Ojibwe by
a Dakota Sioux woman who survived an attack by the US army and received a
vision of the ceremony during her time hiding. Part of the vision instructed
her to share the ceremony with the Ojibwe, who had fought with the Dakotas for
years. Although the Dakotas shared the ceremony, it became an Ojibwe tradition
where members who were touched by violence led the ceremony. Treuer explains it
much better, but he spends time with two Ojibwe veterans who recount how the
Big Drum Ceremony has helped them heal their trauma from war. It’s an
incredible story of healing, and especially how community like the Ojibwe tribe
can help to shoulder grief and sorrow so that individuals do not need to feel
this heavy burden. Treuer once again weaves the past, the present, and the
personal to offer insights into how we continue to feel the ramifications of
the past, but this experience is much different from the incidents of violence
that are continuously revisited on American people. Rather, it’s about healing,
peace, community, and recognizing our shared humanity. It’s a beautiful ending
to a complicated legacy of violence, stolen land, broken treaties, and
mistreatment. And while Treuer doesn’t call for forgetting and moving forward,
he does recognize the significance of community in helping to forge forward. The Savage Mind is an important and engaging read. Thank you to Little, Brown and Company and NetGalley for allowing me to preview and advanced copy of this amazing book. Highly recommended!
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