Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life

Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (2012) is the fifth work by American writer, critic, and anthropologist David Treuer, and his first work of non-fiction. Treuer would follow this work, seven years later, with the publication of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (2019), an in-depth study of Indigenous history and reservation life. Many of the historical events and themes that Treuer covers in this book are explored, albeit in greater depth, in the latter text. Rez Life is a more intimate look at Indigenous people’s lives on reservations throughout the United States. Treuer focuses on Leech Lake, Mille Lacs, and Red Lake Reservations in Minnesota. Treuer grew up on Leech Lake as a member of the Ojibwe tribe.

For The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction. As with this later work, Treuer blends history, reportage, and personal memoir in Rez Life.

Summary

Rez Life uses the Ojibwe people as a microcosm to explore broader concerns within North American Indigenous communities, particularly those based in the United States. Treuer’s purpose in writing the book is to explore the complexity of life on reservations, which are often stereotyped as cauldrons of crime, addiction, and poverty. While these conditions exist on most reservations, there are also reservations that are bastions of wealth, particularly those involved with the casino business like many Seminole reservations.

Treuer chronicles the history of Indigenous tribes in the United States, particularly those based in the East and Midwest that played integral roles in the Revolutionary War and the French and Indian War. A central issue in the text is that of sovereignty rights—the acknowledgement that tribes form their own respective nations with unique rights to their natural resources—and how the United States has repeatedly reneged on its promises to leave tribes and their resources unmolested. Subsequent efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to assimilate and terminate Indigenous nations were ultimately unsuccessful. Although Treuer does not shy away from the tragedies that occur in tribal communities, including those within his own family, he underscores the ways in which tribes have both survived and thrived despite repeated efforts by early colonialists and the federal government to displace and destroy Indigenous Americans.