David Treuer, son of Judge Margaret Seelye Treuer, brother of Anton Treuer, and grandson of Eugene William Seelye, is the author of Rez Life and an anthropologist who studied at Princeton University. His father is Jewish and left Austria with his family in 1938 to escape the Holocaust. He settled in Leech Lake in the 1950s and devoted himself to Indigenous American rights. Before working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), the elder Treuer worked at Red Lake Reservation for the Community Action Program (CAP), which was set up as part of the President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. Through both of his parents, Treuer likely inherited pride in his tribe and a commitment to its social advancement, which includes telling the complex story of reservation life.

Through his mother, Treuer is a member of the Ojibwe tribe who grew up on Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. He comes from a large extended family. Many of his relatives struggle with the poverty and criminal records that are common among Indigenous peoples on reservations. He is the book’s narrator and the chronicler of the histories of those presented in the book, as well as of the broader histories of his tribe and other tribes located throughout the United States.