David Treuer

David Treuer is an American writer, critic, and academic. As of 2019, he had published seven books; his work published in 2006 was noted as among the best of the year by several major publications. He published a book of essays in 2006 on Native American fiction that stirred controversy by criticizing major writers of the tradition and concluding, "Native American fiction does not exist."

Treuer has published stories and essays in Esquire, TriQuarterly, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, "The New York Times," "Lucky Peach," and Slate.com.

He published his first novel, Little, in 1995, which features multiple narrators and points of view. His second, The Hiawatha, followed in 1999. It was named for a fleet of trains operated by the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Pacific Railroad (and by allusion to the epic poem The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.) The novel features a Native American family who migrated to Minneapolis in the mid-twentieth century under the federally sponsored urban relocation program. One of two brothers works on the railroad.

Treuer has a deep interest in the Ojibwe language and culture. He is working with his older brother, Anton Treuer, on grammar as a way to preserve and extend the language. His brother has been studying it since high school.

Treuer has written 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." He likens that to believing that long abandoned seeds found in caves can sprout and bear produce. He believes that Native American cultures are threatened if their writers have only English to use as a language; he contends that the tribes need their own languages to perpetuate their cultures.