Detroit Public Library Main Branch, 5201 Woodward Ave., Detroit, MI
The Author Series Committee welcomes New York Times bestselling writer and academic David Treuer. Treuer will be discussing his highly anticipated new book, The Savage Mind (Little, Brown and Company, 2026). David will be joined by public historian, decolonial education consultant, and published author Heather Bruegl.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the January 6 insurrection, as America seemed to be falling apart, David Treuer decided to hold himself and his family together the only way he knew how: he sat down to write a letter. What resulted isThe Savage Mind, the most personal and powerful work of his storied literary career.
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.