Angie Elita Newell does not write easy books.
Her novel, All I See Is Violence, is not a fantasy escape, which she joked about after finding herself surrounded by “sexy fairy” books at BookCon. It is a historical novel built from trauma, archival research, Indigenous memory, and the long shadow of state violence.
Newell is a member of the Liidlii Kue Nation, part of the Dene linguistic group. Her mother was an Air Force pilot. Newell became a historian. Those facts sit close together in her life, but none of them came easily.
On Keep Going, she talked about the residential school system, the Sixties Scoop, and the Canadian government’s removal of Indigenous children from their families. Her mother attended one of those schools, and Newell was later placed in a non-Indigenous household through the assimilationist child welfare system that followed. She described the damage from these policies as “monumental,” and said the goal was to either “annihilate or assimilate.”
That is not abstract history to her. It is family history. It is community history. It is also the ground from which her work grows.
Newell said she became “a very sad child” and then “a very angry teenager.” She dropped out of high school, travelled to Europe, became absorbed in Tolkien and Impressionist art, and eventually made her way to university in the UK after writing short stories for admission. She did not enter academia through the normal door. She found another way in.
That route matters because her work is built around questions most institutions would rather avoid. Why were Indigenous children sent to residential schools? Why were reservations created? Why were treaties broken? Why are some histories documented and others buried? Newell said archival research kept pushing her back to the same question: “Why?”
The answer, for her, is not just to expose trauma. It is to transform it.
When I asked how someone turns pain into art, Newell said the first step is being able to digest it. Trauma can crush a person, she said, but when it can be integrated, it can be “transmute[d] to wisdom.” In its highest form, that wisdom can become art.
That line is the whole interview.
There is pain that breaks people, and there is pain that becomes a kind of knowledge. The difference is not neat. It is not easy. It is not a motivational poster. Newell worked with residential school survivors and Holocaust survivors, and she saw how survival required a capacity to integrate what had happened without being destroyed by it.
Her influences reflect that. She talked about Primo Levi, Hemingway, Picasso’s Guernica, Monet’s darker paintings, and the way art can carry suffering without turning away from it. Great art, in her telling, does not decorate pain. It gives pain a structure strong enough to hold it.
That is what she is doing in All I See Is Violence. The book moves through the Battle of Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, the 1970s, the Vietnam War, Indigenous warriors, intergenerational trauma, and the violence that repeats itself across time. She said the novel is about 70% factual and that she spent two to three years doing archival research before another historian reviewed it.
The history itself is full of things we are not usually taught. Newell became especially interested after a Cheyenne elder asked her whether she knew there were female warriors. She did not, and that question sent her into the archives. She found evidence that women fought at Little Bighorn and that they fought differently to make up for differences in size and strength.
That is one of the gifts of the conversation. Newell is not interested in flattening history into heroes and villains. She is trained in archival research, but she is also a novelist, so she understands that history is not just dates and documents. It is motive, contradiction, greed, fear, faith, betrayal, survival, and the stories people tell afterward to make themselves feel clean.
She said she tries to approach history neutrally, not by declaring what is good or bad, but by presenting what happened. That does not mean the work is emotionally neutral. It means she respects the reader enough to let the facts carry weight.
What keeps her grounded is not social media or noise. She said she did not have Instagram until her book came out in 2024, and she had not really engaged with YouTube either. Instead, she reads, researches, walks in the woods, eats close to the earth, and stays connected to nature. Her daily life is built around attention.
That matters because attention is a form of survival. Newell’s life could have pushed her toward distraction, bitterness, or collapse. Instead, she built a practice around reading, research, art, elders, history, and language. She followed the thing that kept calling her.
“For me, it’s following your passion,” she said. “Everybody’s gonna have something that you’re really passionate about. And that’s probably a clue that that’s your life’s purpose.”
That may sound simple, but her version is not soft. Following your passion, for Newell, meant walking into some of the darkest archives in North American history and staying there long enough to make something true. It meant looking at the violence directly without letting it define the whole story.
Her next project is about Geronimo, Lozen, Nana, and the Apache resistance. Again, she is drawn to the places where official history has left people out, especially women, medicine people, warriors, and spiritual leaders whose lives were made smaller by the record.
There is a lot of talk now about storytelling, usually in the corporate sense. Tell your story. Own your story. Build your brand.
Newell is doing something older and harder. She is recovering stories that were damaged, hidden, misread, or ignored. She is taking inherited pain and turning it into art, not because art fixes the pain, but because art can keep it from disappearing.
The bottom line?
You take the thing that almost crushed you.
You digest it.
You transmute it.
Then you write.
