Dec. 29 – David Treuer – The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee [Advent Calendar]

more than two hundred Lakota who survived Wounded Knee . . . lived on—to experience the pain of loss, yes, but much more as well. They survived to live and grow, to get married and have babies. They survived to hold on to their Lakota ways or to convert to Christianity and let those ways recede. They survived to settle on the reservation and, later, to move to cities. They survived to go to school and to college and to work. They survived to make mistakes and recover from them. They survived to make history, to make meaning, to make life.­­­­­

The result is the best account I’ve seen of Native America at this moment—selective, highly so, as any such report must be, but vivid, pungent, agreeably opinionated, resisting received opinion on all sides. Treuer himself embodies the complexity of his subject. His father was a Jewish Holocaust survivor; his mother is Ojibwe. He is a novelist who also has a PhD in anthropology, and he has written a very good book titled Rez Life: An Indian Journey Through Reservation Life, which draws both on his narrative gifts and his training as a student of culture and cultures.
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