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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. There's a familiar line in writer David Troyer's new book
that sounds almost like a warning. The call is coming from inside the house. He's talking
about America, and this belief that the violence we associate with our country's past isn't simply
behind us. It's something we've learned to carry within ourselves. Troyer is Ojibwe and grew up
on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He spent much of his career challenging the idea
that Native American history is a story of defeat and disappearance. His acclaimed book, The Heartbeat
of Wounded Knee, challenged that narrative. Now in his new book, The Savage Mine, an American legacy,
Troyer turns his attention to the country itself. He traces America's relationship with violence
back to the frontier, where the taking of Native land and the subjugation of people were justified
in the name of civilization. His argument is that the frontier didn't disappear when Westport
expansion ended. Its violence has become part of American life through our institution, our stories,
and the ways we think and act. And he argues that even the people who recognize that history
aren't necessarily free from it. Troyer has written this book as a letter to his three children.
It's also a deeply personal reckoning with his own fears, the contradictions within his family,
and the stories he inherited. Troyer's mother was a jibway and saw America as a country that it
tried to destroy her people. His father was a Jewish refugee who escaped the Nazis and saw America
as the country that saved his life. And David Troyer, welcome back to Fresh Air.
Thanks for having me back. It's a pleasure.
Yes, it was a pleasure to read this book. And I actually want to start our conversation
with the way that you started the book. You take us to the reservation. You are a young man.
You're with your cousins and your other relatives, your brother. And you guys
are at home by yourselves and you get this very weird phone call. And then you see down the street
that there's a fire at a house and you guys are scared. You're so scared that you grab a gun
and you sit on the couch prepared to defend yourself. And I'd love for you to read what happened next.
Deprived of everything including our imaginations, which are the only thing that will save anyone,
we instead did something very American. We found a gun. A single shot break action 20 gauge.
We loaded it and gave it to my brother and sat on the couch facing the door. The hammer drawn back.
The barrel resting on my brother's bony knees. And we waited.
The only thing that occurred to us was to kill whoever came through the door by blowing their brains out.
I don't know how long I sat on that couch with your uncle and our cousin. I don't know if I've stopped.
I think some essential part of me is still there. And here's the thing about terror, although it may
well be true of grief too. It robs you of so much. It steals your sense of yourself and your place
in the world and it murders time. I am here now writing this to you and I am there on that couch
still. I am there then hoping I will be around now to write about it. I'm 55. I'm nine years old.
I'm too old to have old fears and I'm too young to be able to quiet them myself.
Thank you for reading that. Eventually your uncle arrives and he snatches the gun before you
guys get hurt anyone. But as we heard you say, you write that some part of you is still sitting on
that couch. What is it about that night that has never left you? You know, I mean, we were just
just another night in the village. And then as you mentioned, you know, we got this call,
stranger called to the house and said, we're going to come burn down your house with you in it.
And we're terrified, right? And there were so many things we could have done.
We could have run across the road to our other uncle. We could have called someone, could have
called someone, could have gone to my grandparents house, could have gone to my other, I mean, the
village, they're all relatives. None of that occurred to us. And I think that's a part of me that's
stay stuck. You know, I wanted to write about that and about how my imagination failed me,
how I almost hurt my uncle and how we almost did something unforgivable.
Right. Because if your uncle had walked through that door, if he'd walked through the door,
you might have shot him. We would have. You know, my brother paused. And that little pause,
you know, my brother saved both my uncle's life because my brother had the gun. And he saved our
emotional lives by not doing that thing. You know, so I've a lot of love for my brother. But
you know, I wanted to write about all that stuff because for me writing is the way through it,
is the way to restore imagination. And to sort of eradicate the emotional loop that would send
me back there all the time. You know, one of the things that strikes me though is yes, you were in
a state of fight or flight. And so when you say that you're in many ways that young boy sitting on
that couch still, what do you mean by that? It means that so I mean, I can talk about my father a
little bit as a Holocaust survivor. And you know, he fled Austria and started in 1938 and he didn't
make it to the States till 1940. Much of his flight was on his own. And my dad was a really great dad.
When you were a little kid and when you were an adult, but he was a horrible father when you
were an adolescent, like around the time I was sitting on that couch, although that was a little bit
before. And I've thought about this a lot because my dad, now we get very angry at him, of course,
when I was a kid, like, oh, dad doesn't understand me. But it was only much later, I realized, well,
he was probably a terrible parent when I was an adolescent because he didn't have an adolescence.
Because he was fleeing a Holocaust. He was fleeing the Holocaust. He left at age 12.
He stopped being a kid at around the time, you know, most of us start being a young adult. And he
became, he went from childhood to adulthood with no buffer. And so of course, he was going to be a
bad father, you know, to adolescent children, you know. And so I thought about that a lot in relation
to sort of my, my little journeys of the mind on the couch there or my lack of them, you know.
I mean, I think a lot about terror, fear, grief, and those are some of the big elements of this,
this letter, this book. And one thing that those intense emotions do is they,
I mean, like I read, they rob your sense of yourself and they rob your sense of time.
I'm super fascinated by this story as a way to get into the book, to set the stage for where
you are mentally this idea that when you're up against the wall, fear has taken over and this
propensity for violence. And I want to fast forward to one night in 2015 during the San Bernardino
shootings after those had happened. And San Bernardino, California, your children are young.
They are asleep and you're standing over them and you're watching them and you describe
feeling overwhelmed by fear. Here's where fear comes back, but it wasn't only fear of what might
happen to them, that inclination as a parent that we all have. What were you afraid of?
You know, I'm watching them sleep and I was afraid for them, you know, as sort of Indians in a country
that really has been hard on us. And I was, I'm afraid for them as Americans, like this is the
world that they're going to inherit, where these things happen. And I was afraid for myself
as the person who was supposed to protect them, but how can I? And all of those were just wrapped
up together. It was, it was just a potent moment. You grew up, um,
around, surround it by family on the reservation. Take us to, to each lake,
describe what it was like. You know, it's, I mean a lot of people have, you
know, a lot of native people live in and then in their work promote a kind of
historical nostalgia, you know, that native life was so great long ago, but the
man's got us down and now it's terrible, right? That's kind of the most common
story of native people told by native people too. In past tense, too. In past tense,
basically that once we were great and we are great no longer, that we may come
from beautiful cultures, but those cultures have been destroyed. And that's the
dominant narrative. And it's not really my narrative. You know, the, the
reservation of my youth is a lot like the reservation now, right? I mean, of course
there are always changes, but leech lake was a place I wanted to leave when I was
a kid. And immediately upon leaving, it became a place that I've always tried to
return to and have. And I'm there about half the year every year all now. And I
love it there. I absolutely love it there. I get a sense you resist the question
of what is leech lake like. And in part, and I can in many ways understand this as a
native person going out into the world, because the reservation is such a
mystery to so many people. And we have these notions of natives as the past. You've
spent a lifetime trying to assert who you are, but not wanting to have to explain it
every time. Right, right, right. That's very true. And it's, it's like, there's a
very narrow path. But like I did write a book about reservations called ResLife
that came out some years ago. And you know, one of the discoveries and really
writing that book was noticing in myself how easy it is to fall into telling a
tragic story about sad native lives as be as really the only option. And so I
discovered that that impulse when I was trying to write that book. And and then
I had to write against that impulse, you know. And then what I end up finding is
is when we don't reduce people to the sum of their suffering, when we just
really listen to them, what emerges are really complicated people living in a
really vibrant, modern, complicated place. And it's in those complications is
and it's in those contradictions that at least I found beauty, art, meaning, and
even a way forward. And that said, my reservation is, you know, 40 by 40 miles
roughly, it's we have maybe, I don't know, 10 or 12,000 enrollees, but about half
that live there. You have wildly successful people and and also wildly
unsuccessful people. You know, it's to me as a landscape even indescribably
beautiful, it's a very modest landscape in my opinion, we don't have mountains
or buttes or you know, and we have lakes, rivers, swamps, pine trees, you know, I
think it's beautiful, I think it's perfect. You tell this story in the book of
this painting on your great grandmother's wall. And I think it was called the
end of the trail. Yep. Yep. Yep. It shows a native man kind of slumped over a
horse and he's defeated. And you hated this picture growing up. What did it tell
you about what it meant to be a native person? Oh yeah, yeah. So everyone in
every native household, you know, it felt, I mean, of course, there's some
diversity, but everyone you were in. Everyone I was in seemed to have that thing.
The end of the trail, it was usually not a painting, it was usually like put
like a polyester blanket or a like a velvet Elvis type thing. I know this, I know
it. Yeah, right. And everywhere. And it's, you know, just like this defeated
native dude on a horse with a spear and facing west into the setting sun and
it's emblematic, you know, it's meant to be poignant, but the poignancy of that
painting is in is in defeat. When you were a young boy looking at it, what did it
mean for you? What did you see? Oh, just that. I'm like, that's not me, you know,
that's not me. And that's not going to be my story. As I think about you as a
writer and how you evolved the time that you've spent over the course of your
writing career and bringing language to your experience. And this one being the
latest. I also think about some of the fears you had and as you were even writing
this book, it took you several years to write it as a letter to your children.
And why do you think that it was so difficult? I think you tried to begin it
four times before you could finally write it. What was so difficult to say to
them? Well, this book is I'm not all books are like this, but this book is the
shape of an idea. You know, and in the idea is that the frontier and frontier
violence are not of the past, but they are still with us. And that America's
original sin is, in fact, violence. And it undergirds all of America's
ongoing cruelties, racial cruelties, economic cruelties. And until we grapple
with that, we don't have a shot. And so that's the underlying idea that
frontier violence was America's original sin. So the American Frontiers
started as a colonial enterprise to push West, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish,
English, French, they mentioned French. But then it became an American
project once America came to be. And then it kept going. And so frontier
violence, as I see it has a really easy definition, it is the theft of native
land and the theft of black and brown bodies. And subsequent to that, the
theft of immigrant labor, the violent theft of all of those things, that's the
frontier. And that sort of enabled all of these subsequent cruelties that I
talked about earlier. And I think about it. So you described it as writing,
you're writing to your three children. And you describe before we start it,
it's like we're all over your shoulder as you are writing these, these
passages to your children. And there's so much history and historical context in
that as well. What was the urgency of writing this at this moment for you?
Well, I feel stuck. And I think we all might be stuck in a certain way. I mean,
it feels like the world's falling apart. And I think part of the reason why the
world's falling apart, whether it's climate or Palestine or George Floyd,
what happened there in 2020 among many such things, is that we've abdicated our
responsibility to imagine both the connection between things and some alternate
future. You know, you work so hard to give your children a very different
childhood from your own. And there's this moment that you write about in the
book where one of your children tells you that they had a very great childhood.
And that's exactly what you'd hope to give them. But you describe feeling
something almost like resentment. We were driving me in my eldest and I don't
know an errand or something. We're just talking. And he said, yeah, you know,
my childhood is really good. And then I said, oh, no. I said, I should have been
harder on you.
I should have made it.
That's what every parent wants to hear, though.
I should have made it suck, you know?
And he's looking at me, and he's just like, what?
And I said, yeah, but, like, how will we
ever understand each other?
That's the fear, how will he understand you?
Yeah, maybe so, maybe so.
And I don't know.
All that said, I think he's got my number.
Our guest today is writer David Troyer.
We'll be right back after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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At 17, you left.
You left leech lake, determined.
You weren't going to go back.
Yeah, that lasted about three weeks.
You left for Princeton, and what did you
believe leaving for Princeton, what free you have?
Oh, just that narrative of diminishing returns.
In a different context, Leo Tolstoy
called the Eternal Mistake.
What does that mean?
Well, for Tolstoy, the Eternal Mistake
was always trying to find happiness in success
and in external things.
But this error that I'm talking about
is the Native equivalent, which is always
thinking that we have a glorious past and no future.
And so I was like, I'm getting out of here.
And I'm going to go do something.
One of the things that I've heard you talk about
is this term, narrative scarcity.
And I'm bringing this up because you bring it up
to describe the limited stories about Native people
that aren't out there.
And then I'm also just thinking about you as a young person
that you grew up hearing and knowing.
And scarcity is a word that's very interesting to me,
because when I think about it, I think about scarcity
in terms of resources, like food and water,
that things that we need to survive.
And I wonder how you're thinking about it.
What happens to a person's sense of what's possible
when there is scarcity around story?
Right.
I think stories are a resource and a valuable, important,
sort of life-saving resource, not on the level of food
and clothing and shelter, of course, but up there.
And so to experience, you know, to be in a story desert,
as well as a food desert, I think can be really limiting.
And I should state for the record, too,
that this idea of narrative scarcity is not my idea.
My colleague and friend, yet, he came up with that one.
And he was talking about it in relation
to Asian-American narrative.
But you see it in your own mind.
Absolutely.
I see it in my life.
I see it in sort of the native context, too.
And it's another one of these bridges, you know?
And I am really fond of yet.
And I'm really grateful for that, you know, that idea.
I'm thinking about how you came into understanding
that you would experience narrative scarcity
once you're at Princeton.
And because you're exposed to a world
that you had not experienced prior,
and you're with people and you're seeing things
and having conversations, and there's a surprising connection
in this book, this story you tell.
While you were there, you learned that the parents
of a fellow student you knew, Lyle Menindez,
had been brutally murdered, and initially you're horrified,
just like the rest of the country.
And then you learn, like the rest of us,
that Lyle and his brother had killed his parents.
And that was not only a shock,
it was a revelation for you beyond the tragedy.
Because you began to question something
that you'd believed about Princeton and America.
Absolutely.
There's this idea that is prevalent, and it's been around
for a really long time, that there are places in this country
that are good and safe and excellent,
and there are places that are not.
And then there are corresponding values placed on,
or given to, the people who exist in the good
and interesting and safe places,
that they're good and interesting and safe people,
and that those of us from the other spaces,
whether it's leads to like reservation or Detroit,
are not good, not interesting and not safe.
But you, I mean, I felt that at Princeton,
but it all came crashing down after Lyle murdered his parents,
and Princeton is not a place where those kinds of things
don't happen.
It's exactly where those kinds of things happen.
But I thought about it a lot when I was writing this book,
and that's when some of this understanding
sort of fell into place, that for so long,
I had accepted these versions, Princeton good, reservation bad.
And so when writing this book, what did you come to
in that understanding that you started to think about that story?
That Princeton is as much a mixture of the good and bad
as any place else, and conversely,
that the place I'm from and the places like it
are much the same.
They're not the opposite.
These places aren't opposites.
They are very alike in their complexity.
In the imagination, reservations remain for most people
as places of suffering, not as places of life.
In all its complications.
They're just basins of suffering in the imagination.
I'm curious when you fully came to understand that,
because on a lot of levels, I mean, I understand
when you're from a place and you're in it,
you don't see that.
You're inside the fishbowl, so you're not necessarily
seeing what others are seeing, unless you engage with media,
and you start to see the depictions of yourself and media.
But when you became truly aware that people thought
of the reservation in this way.
I mean, it was clear to me when I stepped foot at Princeton.
People's reactions to when you're talking about it.
Oh, yeah.
People's reactions, like, who were you from?
I'm like, oh, I'm from Leech Lake Reservation.
And most people, of course, just say to me like,
you can't be, because I don't look like a wind in his hair
from Dance of the Falls, right?
They think you're white passing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then they're like, oh, that's so sad.
I'm like, is it, though, that I'm from a rez?
Like, that's sad to you?
And so that idea, the dominant narrative,
this sort of imagistic way, that sort of native people
appear, and it's difficult for a lot of Americans.
It's getting better.
It's getting a lot better.
But it's difficult for a lot of Americans
to be like, to get it, you know, like, oh,
okay, you're a complicated, modern person living
in a complicated, modern place.
Cool.
My guest today is writer David Troyer.
His new book is The Savage Mind, an American Legacy.
We'll continue our conversation after a short break.
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Help Defend it.
Can you take us into your first class with Tony Morrison?
Yeah, I was really nervous.
My first class.
On my way to class, I kept, there's this mantra I kept repeating, sometimes out loud as
I walked to class, which went something like, "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my
God."
And then the counterpoint to that melody was, "She's just a person, she's just a person
with opinions, she's just a human being," and I got to class and it didn't help, but
I was really nervous.
And Morrison said, "I want everyone to go around and tell us a little bit about yourself
and what you're working on."
So very diligent students, everyone was doing that, boom, boom, boom, boom, and this really
sweet boy, he was really kind as it turns out, next to me, it says in a very sort of
Princeton way, he's really floppy here.
I'm running a store that takes place on Martha's Vineyard, and my protagonist is a half-breed
Indian whose mother is the town drunk.
And I am suddenly filled with rage, and it's my turn.
And so Morrison looks at me, this is the first time we met, yeah.
And she says, "And you?"
I said, "Well, I'm going to talk about why I write as opposed to what I'm working on.
I write because that's like this, don't know what the heck they're talking about.
They've seen dance with wolves, they've read last the moheekens, but they don't know anything
about anything, and there were lots of exploits here, by the way."
And everyone's looking down at the ground, staring, they're standing next to a grave in
the grave as mine, and Morrison's got these papers in a manila folder on her lap.
She says here that you're an anthropology major, and I said, "And," and she said, "Well,
you write better than most anthropologists." And then I said, "What is that supposed to
be complement?" And then she starts laughing. And she said, "Yeah.
That is intended as a complement." And then I finally woke up to the danger I was in.
I was like, "Oh, okay, oh, Professor, thank you very much."
She told you, "Don't be ethnographic, don't explain, and you're writing."
And what was she trying to teach you about the writer that you were becoming, you think?
"Oh, the temptation is there, right? Always." I think it's especially there for native
creatives, we might say. The temptation is this, to feel like you're an emissary from a
distant and strange land, and then to lift up the corner of the Buckskin curtain, or what
I call the Buckskin curtain, so that outsiders can peer in and learn something about native
people. And the temptation is strong.
But the inclination from you has always been not to be that. I mean, that's why this guy
and what he, that story he gave triggered you so bad.
Well, it triggered me because it's just stereotype. You know, there's no life in a stereotype.
And that's what triggered me. And it also triggered me because, you know, the popular idea
that native people were just troubled drunks was more real than the real lives of native
people as lived by us, you know. And so the stereotype actually had more life in the
imagination than my life had in the imagination. And that was in raging. I couldn't articulate
it then. I was 19, right? What do I know? But that kind of became clear to me later. But,
you know, Morrison struggled in a different way too, because, you know, people interpret,
often interpret beloved as basically a window onto the ravages of race-based slavery.
And so they treat, they treat beloved and, you know, Pseulla and Song of Solomon to a
lesser extent as ethnographic, you know, with leaning toward the history, right? And that
was problematic for her. You know, she's picking up the grand themes of American literature,
place and freedom and belonging and love. She's picking up American themes, you know, even
universal themes. And she was often prevented from doing so. I mean, no one could prevent
her from anything. But the interpretations fell short of the grandness of what she was
up to. And so I don't want the grandness of my themes to suffer the same fate.
And so how do you think about that as you try to articulate your ideas while still writing
from that place that Tony told you personally to write from?
What I would say about this is like this is a letter to my children that invites people
to read over our shoulders. So I would say the same thing that Professor Morrison said.
You know, she's not writing for non-black folk, but non-black readers can gain an enormous
amount from reading her, even though it's not directed to them. I would say the same thing.
You know, and she famously is like, say, you know, I love Tolstoy. I get a lot out
of reading Tolstoy. But was he writing for a black girl from Lorraine Ohio? No. Do I
still profit enormously from reading Tolstoy? Yes. Same thing.
You know, we've only scratched the surface of your book. And maybe my last question is
since this is a book to your children, what do you hope that your children will be able
to imagine that you could it? You know, it was hard for me to feel when I was younger,
that I had anything more than a great future behind me, like a lot of Native people. And
I want them to feel very differently. I want them to not just know, but to feel that they
collectively, not just as individuals, but as members of a tribe, and as citizens of this
country, too. That's what I want them to take away, that they come from a great people
and they remain great. David Troyer, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'm so happy
to be here. David Troyer's book is called The Savage Mind, an American Legacy. After
a break, rock critic Kentucky reviews a four song EP of previously unheard Stevie Wonder
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One of Stevie Wonder's most popular and enduring releases is the 1976 double album "Songs in
the Key of Life."
The collection debuted at number one on the Billboard pop charts and its singles "I Wish
and Sir Duke" each went to number one as well.
It later won a Grammy for album of the year, and for its 50th anniversary, Wonder has released
a four-song EP of previously unheard performances.
Rock Critic Kim Tucker has this review.
Released in 1976, "Songs in the Key of Life" was a big swing for Stevie Wonder.
His most complex work up to that point.
A double album aimed at satisfying his own increasingly ambitious music-making goals,
while also generating hit singles to keep him front and center in the culture.
It succeeded in every way.
This EP of four unreleased songs were recorded at the same sessions, and to my ears, its
lead-off number, called "It's Easier," could be a hit single right now.
"I've told them of my broken heart, and how much I've told my world I'm part of.
How I felt, I could be much better off in hell," he shook his head and just said, "Well,
it's easier to say no, bye-bye, than a new girl, all round, with a heart that knows to
cry."
It's easier has that remarkable quality Wonder has always possessed of lifting ordinary
turns of phrase out of the commonplace to become catchy pearls of wisdom.
In this case, the way Stevie sings the line, "It's Easier to say love, bye-bye, snapping
out the bye-bye with a defensive yap," tells you everything the lyric is trying to say.
Which is that it's easier to give up than it is to work hard on a relationship.
Even as the rich, jaunty music is reminding you how great, true, earned love can be.
It's a theme that's picked up by the next song, "My Life Story of Love."
It's that fantasy of love that leaves me so blue, it fills my empty soul with love that's left untold, but gives my love it's heart-feeling gold.
I'm gonna take her back.
I'm gonna put her in my garden, oh love, I'm gonna make her mine.
And let her bloom into my flower, oh love.
And with rain and sunshine every day.
"My Life Story of Love" is a perfect example of the way Wonder can take a melody that verges on
soupy sentimentality and gives it the firm spine of passion.
Again, the music illustrates what he's saying, in this case, the line about that fantasy of love that leaves me so blue.
As the song builds in intensity to reveal that the reality of love is so much more rewarding than its fantasy.
The third song, "I Can See the Sun in Late December" is another ballad, this one with a warmth meant to kindle a love in danger of growing cold.
I bet you you can't even see the sun, oh but the sun is shining right before your eyes.
I bet you you can't even see yourself cause when you're lost, sometimes yourself is hard to find.
I can see the sun in late December.
I see forgotten treasures needing to sink, tides that defeat identity, washing away the beauty that was in your mind.
I can hear the sound you don't remember, the sounds of birds and trees and homony.
Cause being gone by a temporary, making the perfect melody left behind.
Here, Wonder's vocals, his lead voice as well as his own background harmonies,
press hard against a melody that might otherwise be too modland.
And his song has been heard before, recorded by Roberta Flack in 1975, in what was indeed a florid, sappy manner.
Finally, there's "I'm Into Living", which can now be heard as a companion piece to the more familiar loves in need of love today, the tune that kicked off songs in the key of life.
"I'm Into Living" possesses a kind of debonair shipperness.
I used to be the best at party, giving calls, party news could be my name.
I used to have the finest of the women called playing, used to be my name.
Over now, I've given up all the things I used to do.
Just a spin, each moment of my life with you.
Cause I'm Into Living by your love.
I'm Into Living by your sweet, sweet love.
It's a song about living for love, and listening to it, you think, has there ever been a pop musician who's been more enthralled with the idea of committed, long term romantic love?
To listen to Stevie Wonder on these previously unheard, half century old, vitally fresh songs, is to hear a kind of zealous emotion all too rarely heard these days.
Like the man said, love is in need of love today.
That's rock critic Kintucker.
Stevie Wonder has recently begun a European and US tour in which he'll play the entire songs in the key of life album.
Tomorrow on Fresh Air, how President Trump's repeated attacks on the integrity of voting systems might affect the midterm elections.
We'll speak with Richard Hassan, Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA Law School, and Al Schmidt, Chief Elections Official for the Swing State of Pennsylvania.
I hope you can join us.
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