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David Troyer's book, The Heartbeat of Wounded Me, has been nominated for a National Book Award.

When I spoke with him in 2008, he was in the midst of a fascinating project with his brother,

the linguist Anton Troyer, to compile the first practical grammar of the Ojibwe people.

This conversation speaks gently and beautifully to why the recovery of tribal languages and names

is part of a fuller recovery of our national story and the human story.

And it holds unexpected observations all together about language and meaning that most of us express

unselfconsciously in our mother tongues. This is what Ojibwe sounds like.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

David Troyer splits his time between Los Angeles and the Leech Lake Reservation in northern

Minnesota. He grew up there, the son of an Ojibwe mother and a Jewish Austrian father.

He went away to study at Princeton and then returned to the reservation where he learned the

Ojibwe language for the first time as an adult. You know as we begin, let's just

language around this whole subject is so complicated. I will confess actually, I had not realized

until I dug into this and I didn't grow up in this part of the country but I don't know if that's

an excuse. I grew up in Oklahoma. I mean, I'm not being an excuse then.

And well, I know, but I grew up in a place called Shawnee in Potawatomi County and to come

so it was next door. But Ojibwe, I don't remember hearing about that anyway, that Ojibwe and

...