That will be speaking with us throughout the next month so i encourage everyone to stop by the questions desk and grab an event calendar. Before we get started, i like to remind everyone to silence your devices. We prefer not to have any interruptions. Make sure to use the microphone located there by the pillar. We dont use on microphone, your question will not be picked up on the recording. If you have not purchased the book, they are available at the register. Hold up your chairs at the end of the event. We have an extinguished event with us. The jewish holocaust survivor. He grew up on the reservation in northern minnesota. He teaches literature currently at the university of socal. His writings have appeared in publishing such as the new york times, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post among others. In addition, hes previously written four novels, one of which is named best book for 2006 by the Washington Post. He discusses his newest book. Im not going to spoil it for you but the book is a fundamental challenge for the widely accepted idea that native american resistance to u. S. Imperialism ended at the devastating massacre. Instead, he highlights the incredible resilience. You are obviously very excited and honored to have them here with us tonight. Give us a warm welcome for them. [applause] thank you all for coming on this beautiful warm. [laughter] d. C. Evening. Microphone close. Doesnt need to be closer . I can. I have to eat the mic. All right. Is a good . Okay. You know these things. Anyway, thank you for coming out on this beautiful day. Feels like spring. Im sure there are a lot of daffodils poking their way out. They are already coming up . There you go. Im very happy to be in this city of my birth. I was born in d. C. , i spent my first few years here. A lot of important things happen to me in this town i was born. Lots of good things happening. I was hit by a lunch lady. As if the school lunch wasnt bad enough. [laughter] we had to top it off with getting run over. But im really happy to be back and to have family here and have classmates from college here, to have friends from childhood here in all of you lovely people i dont know yet so thank you so much. Colby most fun for us, i think, would for me to talk a little bit about how the book came to be. Then read, not terribly long so we have lots of time to have a conversation. Frankly, thats the best part of these things. A chance to come together over some ideas and a legitimate conversation. Thats where i would like to spend most of our time. As a disclaimer, i never had the ambition to be a nonfiction writer. I always wanted to be on novelist. Thats all i ever wanted to do. I thought falsely that novels, thats where the action was. Why the presidency is where the tower is. I felt similarly about fiction and novels in particular. Have no ambition beyond being a novelist. I was content for many years doing what novelist do which is just making it up. In the laboratory of my office are whatever cafe i found myself in. I was content doing that but for something that happened close to home in 2005. Im from a reservation in northern minnesota and just up the road is a reservation. There was a School Shooting at the red light reservation. This kid from red lake, same time as mine, by the way. Lots of family the, lots of friends there. I worked for the school where the shooting took place. Her father worked for the scho school. This kid killed his grandfather, he was a tribal policeman and killed his grandfathers girlfriend. I had been in new york visiting friends at the time and my brother called me and gave me the news and he said, he told me what happens. So i turned on the tv and cap flipping channels and the more i flipped, the angrier i got. They couldnt figure out why i was so upset beyond the fact that 11 people died. A place that was important to me, i felt connected to the place. I started to curse the stations, the television and he said well, whats the problem . I said they are not reporting the news. Thats the problem. On every station and subsequently, all the media thereafter and the weeks after. They just told the same story. I said they are not reporting the news. But they were reporting on a pork remote innovation, tragedy strikes. Thats what they said. Thats not the news. Thats not what happened. Thats not what happened to or how it happened. This is the same old sad story about reservations that everybody already thinks they know. This is storytelling. This is not news. I want to know what happens. Who died . How . Whos hurt . Where are they . I was really upset. In the days after, i had meetings about unrelated things. I was telling them, when columbine went down, nobody said a fairly affluent suburb, they just told you where it was. They didnt remark about race or class. I thought that was interesting. He said, i cap think this is not the story of reservations. Its awful. I dont love it because it suc sucks. There are real reasons i care about this place. There are things that happened here that are important beyond the sad stories that people tell over and over again. I said i dont know but its more than that. Then he said well, ive always wanted to publish a book about reservation life and what reservations are and what they mean and where they are going and visits career advice. Life through your teeth. [laughter] he said ive always wanted to publish a book but what makes them right nonfiction . And i said sadly, im the only one. [laughter] i have never written nonfiction in my life. I had never attempted this ever. I saddled with this misconception but the big kids wrote novels. I thought, how hard could it be to right nonfiction . Really, i just had to talk people and read some stuff and get facts and i would be good and put together. So i agreed to write this book for him. I spent a few years on it and i handed it in and i didnt hear from him. For some months, he finally got back to me and said i want to have time for everyone to read the manuscript. I said thats generous of you. He said yeah, we decided you should start over. [laughter] i said yeah right. I should go back to some parts that need some work and i could really focus on some details and rework certain sections. He said thats what i said and if you were listening, he would have heard me say we are not going to publish this and cancel your contract unless you write us a good book. And that really hurts. [laughter] no one had ever said that to me before. He was right though. I knew the kind of story i did not want to tell but i have no idea how to tell the story i wanted to because i didnt know what it was. Some other life events intruded of a painful nature and actually unlocked the book, my own thinking. About where i was from and who i was. What our lives mean. What happens is, a couple of years later after the shooting, my mothers father committed suicide. 83yearold veteran, dodged thousands of bullets and then shot himself in the head and died on his bedroom floor. My grandmother asked me to do two things. She asked me if i would write a eulogy to meet at the service. Ive never written a eulogy but i said i would do that. She said, would you go up to his house where he did it . Your uncles cant handle that. I dont know why she thought i the fact. I think she sought in comparison to other members of the family, he and i hadnt been close. I dont know what she thought i said okay. Im not going to refuse that request so i spent the day she didnt mean cleanup, she meant stripped down to the floor boards, rip up the carpet. Anything with blood on it. She didnt want anyone to know about it. I dont know why so i spent the day doing that. I kept thinking about what i want to do say about him. It would have been so easy and i was so wrong when i finally sat down to write the eulogy. To wallow in or sort of embrace my rage, my disappointment, my sadness over his suicide. It would be so easy to go up there. I wanted to go there. I was thinking as i was feeling all the things, i was wondering what the purpose of eulogy is. It seemed to me that ike eulogy has two purposes. One, you have to Say Something true about the deceased. Theres nothing worse than going to a funeral for somebody you love and hearing terms that have no bearing. The sweetest soul, always had a kind word and you think to yourself, charming . He was an hole. [laughter] cant say that, it wasnt true. You have to Say Something true. Even if its uncomfortable. You have to do that. The second thing a eulogy has to do, it has to be used to the living because ultimately, thats who its for. It doesnt matter to them too much. It does for us. For those of us would have to carry on, we have to get used to it. I was thinking about that and my grandfather and i knew in my heart, it would have been so easy to just tell the story of his life as a story of loss and poverty and hardship. It wouldnt have been an accurate exactly but that wasnt the full picture. Eightythree years and the only place in the world that matter to him which was the small village in minnesota on the reservation, he didnt care about anyone else. He did not care. That was it. He got to spend 80 of his 83 years and the only place that mattered to him. Thats not hardship. Eighty of his 83 years surrounded by the only people in the world that mattered to him. His parents, his siblings, his kids, grandkids, cousins. His neighbors and he did not spend a day except for the days he was in the army fighting. When he didnt see someone he loved. I thought thats not poverty, thats surplus. Thats plenty. I thought whats all that measured against a split second the bullet was in his head . Actually outweighs the 83 years, outweighs a fraction of a second the bullet was in his head. Why he put it there, i couldnt begin to know. Those years had to count for something more. Thats what i talk about in the eulogy. And that, i realized i was the framework i was missing in my thinking about my reservation and community more broadly. You seem thinking of innovations as places where theres less of everything. Tragic places, places hope goes to die. Thats the story we know. But what if i could turn that around and wean myself from my own reliance on tragic telling . What if i could see my community as a place, not where theres less of everything but more . Maybe more suffering but i think thats fair. More humor and creativity as well. Maybe more poverty but more hostile. Maybe more crime but also more laws. We have a lot of laws. We have tribal laws, more constitutions than you have. We have our tribal constitution and u. S. Constitution. More law enforcement, more of everything. If i could see that place that way, then i could see some new way to tell the story of that place. Part of the problem is, a big problem i think is a week make people suffer from scarcity. Theres lots of stories told about us but there are not that many different kinds of stories. We suffer from scarcity. The dominant way we have of understanding our past is through the tragic. Aristotle reminds us that tragedy is a story of intense emotion between feelings of pity and fear which results in emotional unburdening. Thats always the mode for telling stories about native people. People can then get into our history as a kind of liberal community service. We took all of his land. Read a book about it. Ive done my part. Kind of. I dont want the status quo. Im going to change that. So this tragic mode is the one in which we are stuck and have been stuck for so long. After my grandfathers death with this idea of surplus, i was able to write the book my publisher wanted and it worked out. That led me into writing nonfiction. Thats my first book of nonfiction. I thought or probably thought there was problems with the way people saw reservations but theres also problems with the way we see the past. We see American Indian history as a sideshow to American History. We see American Indian people as being in america but not of it. We see native community as suffering and native people as victims of history and not the makers of it. I was thinking about all of that and it was all around my memory of reading classic which was published in the year of my birth in 1970. He primed it that way. [laughter] on the very first page, the best selling book published. Translated into 17 languages. Its a bestseller. The very first pages, he said im focusing on the American West in the years of the planes were. I ended the massacre in 1890, the culture and civilization on the American Indian was destroyed. He goes on the next page. If you happen to travel to a contemporary indian reservation and noticed the poverty and hopelessness, perhaps by reading my book, you will understand why. I read that book on the 100 and the bursary in 1990. I had contrasting feelings. On one hand, i felt really happy that someone of browns energy, enthusiasm and compassion devoted considerable effort thinking about us and bringing our history into the light. We shouldnt forget that. That was a noble thing he did. I felt lifted up on one hand and pushed in my grave with the other. Death and disappearance in 1890. I began thinking in the last few years, we needed to followup in counter narrative. Other facts, other dates, thats not enough. I wanted a counter narrative. This tragic narrative on which we rely so much, turns our lives into statistics and conditions. It erases the fact that native people have been making our own history all along. Karl marx has a great quote, im sure its on everyones reading list, one of the greatest hits. He says Something Like all men make history but they dont always make it as they please. They dont always make it with tools out there to zinc but they make it nonetheless. That seemed really apt to me. Native people, we always have the luxury of making our history as we please. But we have made it nonetheless and continue to make it. Continue to evolve as modern people. Its very hard to accept. A smart person interviewed me recently and he was very concerned about assimilation. That was the beat in his bonnet. He said so, speak english and youve been to princeton, how do you feel about your own assimilation . I was like you want to know something funny . Youve heard of them, you know they were once a with contrived . Didnt always live on the plane. Hes like i didnt know that. Yeah, its true. They lived around the great lakes and they did traveling and hunting and things like that. We displaced them, my tribes did. It was a tough life to live on the planes. After the results, one of the side effects in which the horse escaped and they were keen on making sure they did not escape. They wanted to be mounted against tribes who werent. All these horses spread across the plains and said they adopted the horse. He became a horse culture. Its nuts. They adopted the gun and became to what we know now in the group. Isnt that cool . Yeah, princeton is my horse. English is my gun. Why is that so hard for you to understand . Why is that so hard . But scarcity. Problem with that narrative, to, too much about professor to peel otherwise. The way we tell stories, the stories we tell shape our reality and shape that. So if we rely on much reduced version of who we are and what we mean and what we have done, future will be bleak. We need a different way of thinking. So i gave it a shot. Ill read a little bit if thats okay. From the very end of the book, spoiler alert we are still here. Ive ruined the ending. [laughter] someone asked me recently, maybe not crazy to them but somebody asked me, do you think the election in kansas is a sign of hope . Im not interested in stories of hope, by the way. Thats not the opposite of tragedy. She understands the structural inequality as a native person growing up where she did. She understands these things and what it feels like to live at the pointy end of policy. She understands what it means to have a lack of access to capital and credit. She understands those things in between you and me and you heard it here first that is where america is headed. That is where Middle America is headed. It is increasingly difficult for Middle Americans in places like kansas and nebraska and wisconsin, south dakota to have access to healthcare, education, capital. Was is it just good news for native people for 150 years wasnt just happy for native people but anyway i will read a little bit and then we will talk. There were a few skirmishes and Wounded Knee New mexico minnesota nevada and most of the famous chief sitting bull crazy horse drawn amo red cloud, most are either dead or in prison or in retirement. At the time and populations have been according to sober estimate is a 5 million is a sober estimate. The tribe spread over the entire continent from the florida keys to the Aleutian Islands the desert of the american southwest is the advanced social groups and if anyone asks you the oldest continually inhabited city is pueblo. Not saint augustine. Im here to correct the record. At the confluence of the missouri and mississippi were st. Louis stands with 20000, along the resource rich eastern seaboard from florida to newfoundland slowly free and starvation took its toll 237,000 indians in the United States in 1800. The story of the land parallels that of the population United States comprises 234 billion acres by 1900 they control only 78 million acres or 3 percent it wasnt the outcome of a single regime or episode or factor in it didnt happen overnight but wounded knee came to stand for all of that a. To a long sentence. Wounded knee was not only as the end of indian life but also american life. The front tier made america what it was but it was closed and the memory was already turned into novels and westerns indians were put out for golf but not so fast. Trying to show in the preceding pages native people lived on as more than the relics of a once happy people increasingly invested in to do our best to change the american character it pains me to think about wounded knee it also pains me to read about it in books what hurts is not just 150 people were truly and viciously killed along Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 but and our sense of their lives we know next to nothing about them or who among them was funny where they unfaithful or vain or fond of sweets those details are what make us who we are and again and again when we paint over them with the tragedy of as an indian in this sentence the victims died twice once at the end of again and again at the end of ipad. We in our own minds this is the saddest death of all we are so used to telling the stories of our lives in the tribe and the tragedy to necessarily diminish once we were great once we ruled everything now we rule nothing now just a ghost th