In the 2006 book “Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual,” by David Treuer, the novelist and academic describes an assignment that he gave to students in a Native American-fiction class. They read a short story by Sherman Alexie, in which a character is described shedding “Indian tears.” What, he asked his students, might “Indian tears” signify? The students responded with confidence, “as if unearthing whole mastodons from the soil of their imaginative backyards.” One wrote, “They show what it feels like to be dispossessed of everything”; another, “Indian tears are for pain and suffering at the hands of the white man—just like the tears of the African American man in the ghetto.”

In his book, Treuer recalls these answers with sarcastic amazement. He laments “the legendary mist of Indian misery” that his students found in Alexie’s story (and their quickness to group together experiences of historic oppression). “How does one escape this all-pervading thing, exoticized foreknowledge?” he writes. “User’s Manual” was in part a provocation—a younger writer’s critique of established Native American writers like Alexie, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko. His claim that Native American writing was read more for its cultural authenticity than as literature—he calls Alexie’s “Reservation Blues” “a curriculum designed for an outsider”—at times came off as hubristic takedown. As Alexie once protested in the Times, “What he’s saying is that the identity of the writer doesn’t count.”

Now, in a new book, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present,” Treuer hopes to counter the narrative of tragedy from a historical perspective. With a dose of his old contrarianism tempered by a more magnanimous mission, he offers a rebuttal to Dee Brown’s statement, in his landmark 1970 history, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” that between 1860 and 1890 “the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed.” Treuer’s latest work, he writes, emerged from “the simple, fierce conviction that our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed.”

Treuer’s book arrives at a time when tribal sovereignty is a factor in some of the country’s most contentious political battles: the Tohono O’odham tribe’s resistance to a proposed border wall along the southern U.S. border; the intertribal coalition that is protesting against the shrinking of Bears Ears National Monument; the involvement of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes in the movements against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Lost in the social-media storm about a video of mostly white high-school boys in MAGA hats who confronted Nathan Phillips, a member of the Omaha tribe and a former Marine, at the March for Life, last month, was that the first Indigenous People’s March was held in Washington, D.C., on the same day. Marchers carried signs that read “We’re still here.” In an echo of Treuer’s frustration, I saw a photo of a man whose sweatshirt read “Stop romanticizing genocide.” The speakers at the march included Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids, the first two Native American women elected to Congress, who won their seats in the 2018 midterms.

David Treuer was raised on the Leech Lake reservation, in northern Minnesota, where his mother, a member of the Ojibwe tribe, served as a judge and his father, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, taught high school. Both sides of the family had histories of family separation: his maternal grandmother was sent at a young age to a government-run boarding school; his paternal grandparents found refuge in the United States, but nearly everyone in their extended family was murdered. “My dad felt at home on the reservation,” Treuer told me when we met last month. “He felt like he understood the people, and what my mother’s people and what my people have endured and suffered and survived.”

Treuer published his first novel, “Little,” in 1994, when he was twenty-four and had recently graduated from Princeton, where he studied anthropology. (He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.) Three more novels followed. “I never aspired to be a nonfiction writer, or even a short-story writer or a memoirist,” he told me. His plans changed, in 2005, when there was a school shooting at the Red Lake reservation, in northern Minnesota, not far from Leech Lake. The coverage of the event seemed cursory to Treuer, folded into a familiar narrative about poverty and a lack of opportunity on reservations. He responded with the reported memoir “Rez Life,” which was published in 2012. “I was trying to tell the story, well, if reservations aren’t simply places of suffering, what are they? Being from Leech Lake, I knew I loved my reservation, not because it was awful but because there was something real and good and powerful vested there.”

Treuer’s new book opens with the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, when United States troops opened fire on a group of Lakota Sioux camped by a creek, most of them unarmed. The troops killed more than a hundred and fifty people, including women and children, some of whom were shot in the back while fleeing the violence. The massacre is often depicted as an end point. As Treuer summarizes it, “There had been an Indian past, and overnight, there lay ahead only an American future.”

Treuer’s counter-narrative documents the roots of the resistance that continued long after Wounded Knee, despite the U.S. government’s strategy to control Native Americans via “debt, dependency, threats, and force.” In 1871, the government ended the treaty process, which until that point had been the primary means of negotiation. Under the treaty system, Native American tribes had been considered foreign nations. After 1871, tribes were considered neither sovereign nations nor United States citizens but wards of the state. As military strategies failed and tribes surrendered to the government, they tried other avenues to secure their rights. In 1879, Chief Standing Bear, of the Ponca, made history by filing a petition of habeas corpus after being imprisoned for trying to return the bones of his son to their ancestral land, a lawsuit that earned Native Americans recognition as “persons” under the law. But until 1924 Native Americans were not granted citizenship by birth, and certain states denied Native people the right to vote until after the Second World War.

Tribes that had refused to sign treaties were often subjected to them anyway, and Native American leaders tried to draw attention to the inequity.“If we ever owned the land we own it still, for we never sold it,” Chief Joseph, a Nez Perce leader, said in a speech made in Washington, D.C., in 1879, which Treuer quotes in full. Chief Joseph surrendered to the government, in 1877, after resisting removal from the tribe’s ancestral lands in Wallowa, Oregon: “Suppose a white man should come to me and say, ‘Joseph, I like your horses, and I want to buy them.’ I say to him, ‘No, my horses suit me, I will not sell them.’ Then he goes to my neighbor, and says to him, ‘Joseph has some good horses. I want to buy them, but he refuses to sell.’ My neighbor answers, ‘Pay me the money, and I will sell you Joseph’s horses.’ The white man returns to me, and says, ‘Joseph, I have bought your horses, and you must let me have them.’ If we sold our lands to the government, this is the way we were bought. On account of the treaty made by the other bands of the Nez Perces, the white men claimed my lands.”

The several decades of Native American history that followed Wounded Knee are marked by a series of botched land policies and programs of forced assimilation that Treuer characterizes as “purgatory.” Among the worst of these was the Dawes Act, which privatized land on reservations and meted it out to individual tribe members, with the “surplus” often ending up in the hands of non-natives. As the bill’s opponents wrote at the time, the “real aim of this bill is to get at the Indian lands and open them up for settlement.” Treuer writes that between the passage of the Dawes Act, in 1887, and the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which restored the right to self-governance, an estimated ninety-five per cent of land allotted to native people ended up under white ownership. Equally destructive were the federally run boarding schools, where Native children were separated from their families and denied their culture. Treuer quotes Luther Standing Bear, who attended one of the boarding schools in the late nineteenth century. “Our accustomed dress was taken and replaced with clothing that felt cumbersome and awkward,” he wrote. “Of course, our hair was cut, and then there was much disapproval. But that was part of the transformation process and in some mysterious way long hair stood in the path of our development.”