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With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the waves of public policy that have disenfranchised and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life.
A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture, Rez Life is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, a must listen for anyone interested in the Native American story.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 29, 2012 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9781452628370
- File size: 312668 KB
- Duration: 10:51:23
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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David Treuer's part memoir, part extended essay, part history tells the story of the struggles and rise of modern Indian nations from the vantage point of his Minnesota Ojibwe reservation upbringing. Although the story begins and ends with his grandfather's funeral, it bubbles with tough-guy Indian pride. Treuer has a novelist's eye for telling detail that gives the story flavor. Peter Berkrot's emphatic, knowing tenor matches Treuer's punchy prose perfectly. Berkot's pace is well measured. Although he sometimes seems daunted by phrases in the Ojibwe language, his pronunciation is otherwise clear and accurate. This is a hopeful, informative book about an important and often ignored subject. F.C. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine -
October 10, 2011
Novelist Treuer (Little) offers an ambitious, impressionistic study of life on Native American reservations. His blending in of the history of his Ojibwe tribe and his own family results in a nuanced view of personal and tribal identity. It’s neither definitive nor a work of full personal disclosure, but it is “the story of the paradoxically least and most American place in the twenty-first century. Welcome to the Rez.” Whether he’s describing the central role of fishing walleye, the region’s signature fish; the Ojibwe’s treaty right fights; or the timeless method for harvesting wild rice, Treuer paints a picture of a vital if economically strained tribal life, deftly supplying historical context to explain how the Mille Lacs, Red Lake, and White Earth reservations came to be and survive. If the stand-alone chapters don’t always flow smoothly into one another, the vignettes—of treaty rights fishing activists; of how casinos have changed economic life on the rez; how his mother, a tribal judge, dispensed justice; how an Ojibwe language teacher ensured the viability of the tribal language for another generation; and most powerfully, how Treuer’s grandfather’s suicide left the family reeling—bring the world and personalities of the rez to vivid, heartrending life.
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