Treuer, the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, is an anthropologist and a member of the Ojibwe tribe from northern Minnesota. His family originated in the town of Bena. Treuer’s personal experiences as an Indigenous person influenced his decision to write the book, as he mentions in the Prologue. Those experiences, especially with those of family members like his grandfather, Eugene W. Seelye, a disillusioned World War II veteran, are interspersed throughout the book’s broader historical narrative. Treuer’s relationship with his grandfather was especially poignant, as they finally bonded after a lifetime of distance over the latter’s war stories. Seelye, who had long suffered from depression, shot himself in the head in 2007, shortly after his 83rd birthday.

Treuer was born in 1970 on the Leech Lake Reservation in north-central Minnesota, where generations of his family had lived. Treuer’s father, Robert, was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, World War II veteran, labor union organizer, Bureau of Indian Affairs employee, and, in the 1960s, coordinator for a Community Action Program managed by the Office of Economic Opportunity. While teaching at Cass Lake High School, he met David’s future mother—a young Indigenous woman from the reservation who had just graduated from nursing school—and married her.