Out to Lunch: Anton Treuer has found healing in learning to love all parts of his identity

On Minnesota Now, we get to hear from so many different people in Minnesota over the phone and in the studio. But we don’t often meet them in the community, where news — and life — happens. In our series Out to Lunch, we sit down for a meal with people from Minnesota news and culture to get to know them better.

Our lunch guest: Anton Treuer

The location: Cafe Minnesota at the Minnesota History Center

Anton Treuer is a professor of Ojibwe language, history and culture at Bemidji State University. His most recent book, “Where Wolves Don't Die,” won the 2025 Minnesota Book Award for young adult literature.

The following has been edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above for the full conversation.

So much of your life’s work has been preserving Ojibwe culture. I know you do the Ojibwe Word of the Day with one of your daughters. Is part of your reasoning for that mission in life wanting your kids and other kids to have that?

I probably stumbled into all of that by accident. In my family there had been a break — as is probably the case with a lot of Native families in Minnesota — in the intergenerational transmission of our language. My mom was on a relearning, reconnecting journey of her own, and I was along for the ride for some of that. But when I finished college, I was like, I'm going to hang out with my elders. I'm going to walk the earth. I'm not even going to take a job or go to school. And my parents said, “Oh, that sounds beautiful. Good luck paying for that.”

I ended up going to see this guy. His name was Archie Mosay and he was a blast from the past. Born in 1901. When I met him, he was in a little modern house watching “WWF SmackDown!” on a TV and laughing really loud. And I kind of became his gofer, like, go for this, go for that. He could hardly speak English. So what I got was an immersive experience in our language and culture. And eventually I did have to take a job and eventually I did go to graduate school and thought, how do I apply myself to these things?

Your father was a Holocaust survivor and Jewish and through your mother you were wanting to learn about your Ojibwe roots. What advice do you have around people who have grown up between cultures?

I believe — and I've always tried to tell my children — it's good to know all the parts of you. And it's good to love all the parts of you. I've come to realize too that we are the embodiment of so many stories.

My father had a very long life. He passed away in 2016, but I went with him on his first trip back to Europe after World War II, which he did in 1986. He had all these trauma experiences. I was a teenager, and I was mainly mad. I'd look around and think, “Germans and Austrians equals bad people.”

I didn't go back again until 2022 and I brought my kids. We had some friends, Austrian academics, husband and wife, and they said, “Oh, come to our house. We'll take you hiking in the Alps.” And so we did; we're having great time with them and one night, they said, “you know, pretty much everyone in Austria has at least one grandparent who's a Nazi. For us, all our grandparents were Nazis.” But at that point in time, it was kind of hard to look at them and think “Germans and Austrians equals bad people.”

It’s a little easier to see the beauty of the place and the people and the language and the culture and everything they did to our family and so many others. And it was helpful to apply that lens to my mom's experience. America is a complex place and means a lot of things to a lot of people. It saved my dad's life. It tried to kill my mom. It’s a little easier, as I've learned to love myself and all the parts of me, to love my country and all the parts of it.

A lot of your work is rooted in history and in nonfiction, but I want to talk about your first novel, ‘Where Wolves Don’t Die.’ What led to this adventure?

It's really a young adult thriller. A teenage boy starts in northeast Minneapolis. He's looking for clues to a murder. His father sends him to go run a trapline with his grandfather in the Canadian wilderness. So he stumbles into this journey of self-discovery and connecting with his family and his roots and culture.

I wanted to do a couple things. One, I wanted to give people a window in to the living, beautiful, vibrant culture that's there. I also think we’ve started to identify unhealthy messaging for boys about what it means to be a man. But we haven't done a lot of saying, “here's what healthy masculinity would look like.”

But I also thought, I gotta make sure it lands. So I I read the book out loud to my youngest three children. And I thought, I'll know in five minutes if I failed, because they'll be digging in their phones or going for a snack. But they were in and it was so exciting!

For our Last Bite, what are the ingredients to embracing your identity?

I don't have a perfect formula for this. We often tell ourselves a story about our lives or our culture, and oftentimes the story is riddled with shame or judgment or things that might serve to disconnect us from who we are.

I think also, sometimes we put a culture or identity on a pedestal. It's objectified somehow. I see this happening in the Native space all the time, where we think of it as what was going on in 1491. It's okay if cultures shift and change over time. At the same time, “how much can a people change and still be the same people?” is a fair question. We become what we do and we become who we hang out with. I tell people this stuff at ceremonies: If you want a spiritual life, come to ceremonies, hang out with the spirits, and the other humans — imperfect though we all are — who are seeking the same.

We don't always get to choose all the things about everyone in our environment and there probably is a crap sandwich with every choice we make in life. But if you think about culture as like water rushing down a mountain, most of us just follow the flow. We tend to do what other people have done. But once in a while, somebody stands in the middle of the rushing torrent and tries to shape the flow into a different trajectory. To me, that's what we're doing when we build an Ojibwe language immersion school or any number of other critical initiatives. I think it's a healthy exercise because it helps generate self-love and healing.