Originally broadcast at 3:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, August 20, 2020.
Book available online at the Chautauqua Bookstore: https://www.chautauquabookstore.com/book/9780399573194
In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer melds history with reportage and memoir. Tracing the tribes' distinctive cultures from first contact, he explores how the depredations of each era spawned new modes of survival. The devastating seizures of land gave rise to increasingly sophisticated legal and political maneuvering that put the lie to the myth that Indians don't know or care about property. The forced assimilation of their children at government-run boarding schools incubated a unifying Native identity. Conscription in the US military and the pull of urban life brought Indians into the mainstream and modern times, even as it steered the emerging shape of self-rule and spawned a new generation of resistance. is the essential, intimate story of a resilient people in a transformative era.
David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of four previous novels and two books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate, and The Washington Post, among others. He has a Ph.D. in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
About Chautauqua Institution: Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. As a community, we celebrate, encourage and study the arts and treat them as integral to all of learning, and we convene the critical conversations of the day to advance understanding through civil dialogue. CHQ Assembly is the online expression of Chautauqua Institution's mission.
Originally broadcast at 3:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, August 6, 2020.
Bruce Holsinger presents his book The Gifted School, a fiction novel set in Crystal, Colorado centered around drama within a community.
Holsinger is a novelist and literary scholar based in Charlottesville, Va., and the recipient ...
Originally broadcast at 3:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, July 9, 2020.
Monica Sok details her debut poetry collection 'A Nail the Evening Hangs On.'
Sok, a Cambodian American poet, is joined in conversation by Sony Ton-Aime, Chautauqua’s director of literary arts, to discuss her new work, which examines...
Originally broadcast at 3:30 p.m. EDT Thursday, August 13, 2020.
Maurice Carlos Ruffin on his book We Cast a Shadow, a keen satire of surviving racism in America.
A profoundly moving family story, the center of the book is a father who just wants his son to thrive in a broken world. Ruffin wa...