David Treuer

David Treuer (born 1970) is a writer of Ojibwe and Jewish descent. He was born in Washington, D.C. and raised on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota. He attended Princeton University and was graduated in 1992 after writing two senior theses, one in the anthropology department and one in the Princeton Program in Creative Writing. While at Princeton he studied with Joanna Scott and Paul Muldoon and his thesis advisor was the Nobel Prize winning author Toni Morrison.

His first novel, Little, was published in 1995, and his second, The Hiawatha, followed in 1999. In the fall of 2006 he published a third, The Translation of Dr Apelles, and a book of essays entitled Native American Fiction: A User's Manual. This book was controversial because of it urged readers to see the genre of Native American Fiction as inextricably linked to many other literatures in English and not so much derived from "Native American cultures." He argues that Native American literature should be read as "constructed" rather than "found"; as "making" rather than "representing" meaning.

He is currently working with his brother Anton on a grammar of the Ojibwe language. The preservation of Indian languages is a key concern, and he has complained that "it's not clear why so many Indian critics and novelists suggest that stories, even great ones, in English by writers whose only language is English are somehow 'Indian stories' that store the kernels of culture."^[1]

Awards

He is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Translation of Dr Apelles was named a "Best Book for 2006" by the Washington Post, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Time Out Chicago, and City Pages.

References

1. ^ Washington Post Essay -- "If They're Lost, Who are We?"

• New York Times Profile of David Treuer
• Washington Post Review of The Translation of Dr Apelles
• Washington Post Interview with David Treuer
• Article on Little. David Stirrup, 'Life after Death in Poverty: David Treuer's Little' in American Indian Quarterly (29:4 2005).

External links

• David Treuer's Website
• Minnesota Public Radio Talking Volumes Interview
• LA Times Essay -- "A Language Too Beautiful to Lose"

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Name	Treuer, David
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Date of birth	1970
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