Treuer sees The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee as an antidote to the sort of modern-day writing on indigenous America that he argues relies on pitiful “poverty porn” or romanticized stereotypes of Native Americans. I recently spoke with Treuer about harmful depictions of indigenous people, the legacy of the Civilization Fund Act 200 years later, and 21st-century Native America. An edited and condensed transcript of that conversation follows.

Alia Wong: You write about how Native Americans have often been dismissed as an afterthought in conceptions of the United States’ identity. But you also point to the recent uptick in mainstream attention on and advocacy for their causes, much of which highlights the efforts, over the years, to force assimilation. Against this backdrop, what does it mean to you to be a citizen of the United States—an “American,” if you will—today?

David Treuer: Well, that very question is under assault, and [these debates] are evocative of American Indian history, I think. People tend to read American Indian history as a sideshow to American history; it’s treated, at least in schools today, as a breakout unit that one trots out around Thanksgiving, in November.

But American Indian history is part and parcel of American history: In what became known as America’s first revolutionary act, colonists dressed up as Mohawk Indians and then dumped tea in the Boston Harbor. America has since understood itself as being on the frontier, the advancing edge of global civilization, largely by experimenting and leveraging its unique set of resources. That experiment was conducted in the laboratory of the American landscape, which included us [Native people].

While America has always been engaged in a kind of civil war with itself over the fundamental nature of our country, [this dissonance] is perhaps most clearly seen in relation to the American Indian populations. Are we going to be a country where a person goes to get rich, or are we going to be a country that empowers and emboldens and supports its more vulnerable citizens? What kind of force in the world do we want to be?

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Wong: What vestiges of the Civilization Fund Act are still apparent today, and what lessons do you hope the present-day United States takes away from that policy?

Treuer: Education was something that was done to us, not something that was provided for us. And the boarding schools are a great example of that: They were a means by which the government was trying to destroy tribes by destroying families. This is partly why education is such a tricky thing for Native people today. How are you supposed to go to school and learn about Mount Rushmore yet know that each person promoted the killing of Indian people? How are you supposed to say the Pledge of Allegiance to a country that was trying to kill and dispossess you and caused the horrible suffering of your parents and grandparents? How are you supposed to learn in an education system of which your ancestors grew deeply distrustful, and then be told we have to work hard at school to get ahead?