You might recall the name Duncan McCue. In fact, if you listen to Radio One, you’ll remember him as the host of Cross-Country Checkup, among other shows. He teaches journalism at Carleton University now, but occasionally he fills in for someone on the CBC. The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir is his first book; he’s since published a textbook on decolonizing journalism. It’s a book about how, when McCue was 17 years old, he spent several months on a trapline in northern Quebec with a Cree family. He didn’t speak their language, and he had few skills as a hunter, and the experience was both difficult and life-changing. At the beginning of the book, McCue tells us that it’s been 20 years since that experience, more than half of his life, and “I’m still trying to unpack what I learned there.”

I’ve taught The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir three or four times now in an English course that considers Canadian examples of writing about place, and every time I get something new from it. This time, partly because the course focused on braided forms of creative nonfiction, I paid close attention to the book’s structure, particularly to the way that McCue shifts between his experience on the trapline, and more broadly as a young, urban Anishinaabe man, separated from his community and unable to speak his grandparents’ language, and the context of Cree history, particularly the James Bay Hydroelectric Project and its aftermath. I asked my students to read Nicole Walker’s article on braided essays, as well as Jenna Butler’s more recent expansion of Walker’s argument in an essay published in the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild’s magazine, Freelance, and I was particularly interested in the way that, as Walker and Butler argue, braided memoir structures tend to affect our understanding of the writer’s experience and of the context in which that experience is situated. In The Shoe Boy, we read McCue’s identity confusion–he writes, “I always felt, somehow, I wasn’t Native enough”–against the history of colonialism in northern Québec, and in the process we learn about cultural resistance and resurgence. Resilience, too, although some people hate that word, because both McCue and the people of Chisasibi, including the family he lives with in the bush, adapt to the things they can’t avoid without abandoning what is essential to them.

As an aside, I want to recognize the work of Margaret Orr, an artist from Chisasibi whom I met while I was working on my MFA here. Her work at that time examined the drowning of more than 10,000 caribou in 1984, when Hydro Québec released water from a reservoir into the Koksoak and Caniapiscau rivers during the animals’ annual migration. McCue mentions that event in passing, but Orr’s work taught me how deeply traumatic that mass killing was for her community. Hydro Québec, perhaps not surprisingly, refused to accept any responsibility.

The Shoe Boy is deceptively complex, though, because it’s framed by McCue’s career as a journalist, and implies that through the writing process, he comes to understand what is important to him about those months on the trapline. I’m not going to spoil the conclusion he reaches, because I hope you read this short but important book, except to say that I think that his conclusion is legitimate, and that it suggests something about the multiplicity of ways to understand what it means to be an Indigenous person–the same way that there’s more than one way to be a middle-aged môniyâw like me.