Can America move past hate? David Treuer says it must first grieve the harm it caused

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Set us as preferred On the Shelf The Savage Mind By David Treuer Little Brown and Company: 272 pages, $29If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.David Treuer’s “The Savage Mind: An American Legacy” — his eighth book and fourth work of nonfiction — features an epigraph from James Baldwin’s “Nothing Personal”: “It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.” What Baldwin is lamenting is our tendency to fall back on binaries — right and wrong, good and evil — rather than to struggle with complexity.The dichotomy compels Treuer, as well.

“I’m an admirer of Baldwin’s writing,” he tells me via Zoom from the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota, where he was raised as an enrolled member of the Ojibwe Nation.“But even more, I’m an admirer of his thinking, and of how he carried himself in the world.”That quality of admiration (or better: lineage) helps position “The Savage Mind.” Constructed as a letter to the author’s offspring — “My children,” it opens, “I don’t think I’ve told you this story before — but who knows? We’re always talking, and my memory has gotten away from me” — the book gives a nod to what may be Baldwin’s best known work, “The Fire Next Time,” which begins with a letter to his nephew.

The effect, in both cases, is an unlikely intimacy.Intimate because there may be no form of writing quite so unguarded as the letter.Unlikely because “The Savage Mind” seeks its own form: interweaving personal, family and collective histories.

“I worked on this book for nearly 10 years,” Treuer says.“It was largely a matter of trying to find the right structu...