A Conversation with David Treuer

David Treuer is the author of three novels, Little, The Hiawatha, and most recently The Translation of Dr. Apelles. He has also authored a provocative book of critical essays entitled Native American Fiction: A User's Manual. Treuer won a Washington Post Critics Choice Award in 2006, and in 2007, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on a nonfiction book on reservation life.

In November 2004, provoked by his essay, "Reading Culture," an essay that would be expanded to become a part of User's Manual, I wrote to David Treuer, and so began a three-year conversation that spanned numerous e-mail letters, phone calls, and a meeting for lunch not quite halfway between Minnesota and Pennsylvania at a little eatery interestingly called "Native," on the Upper West Side of New York City. What follows is the fruit of our wide-ranging exchange between the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2007, edited in order to organize our dialogue into a coherent readable format.

Virginia Kennedy (VK): I'm bothered by your essay, "Reading Culture." Silko's Ceremony and Erdrich's The Antelope Wife are resistance novels. They are a mirror. They make me look at belief systems of European/Euroamerican culture and what these belief systems have wrought; to see a different reality or the possibility that other realities exist on equal footing with the one I had always been taught was the only and best. Am I attributing the job of "savior" to these literatures in the "romanticizing Indian culture" way?

David Treuer (DT): I am glad you're "bothered" by the essay, and I hope you're bothered in a good way. I see your point and let me be clear: Ceremony and, to a lesser degree, The Antelope Wife are protest novels. You're right. However, "protest" is clearly thematized in the action of the story, in the characters' struggle and forces in their lives. Protest (against hegemony, against, colonialism, and so forth) is clearly wrapped up in the plots of these novels. And you can teach that point that way.

VK: I think you say in your essay that the use of language by Silko and Erdrich is caught in a form that makes the language exotic, but not useful or accurate in its ability to communicate specific indigenous cultures to nonindigenous readers who don't know these cultures. Are you saying Silko and Erdrich have made it too easy for non-Indian readers?

DT: My point was simple, I think: if Native American literature is taught as culture, the culture and the literature are cheapened, prone to manipulation, misunderstood, and the process is dishonest. Culture is a theme in Native American novels, but it is not a building block. I took great pains to show how these novels are not constructed out of cultural material, that culture is a wrapper, lauded by many, misunderstood by many, in which fairly traditional, mainstream, and conventional novels are wrapped. This is not to say that these novels are bad; on the contrary, they are amazing, beautiful, wonderful works of the imagination. They are as vital and vibrant as all literature. My point is that the wrapper is being mistaken for the contents.

If you want to teach your students this lesson I suggest making them read The Education of Little Tree without telling them that it is fiction and was written by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Tell them that afterward. You will see how much they want to read it as cultural truth, and then you can unpack that desire in class. I think it is amazing that Little Tree was considered central to Native American literature until the identity of the author was discovered, and then, magically, the literature was no longer Indian. It proves that the literature itself is not very long or very seriously under the microscope.

VK: Novels like Ceremony or Fools Crow illuminate for me the nature of oppression and resistance as a narrative of America, America defined as the geographic space on which my feet and my children's feet...