Black Water : family, legacy, and blood memory

Summary: "David A. Robertson, the son of a Cree father and a white, settler mother, grew up with virtually no knowledge or understanding of his family's Indigenous roots. His father, Dulas, or Don as he became known, had grown up on the trapline in the bush only to be transplanted permanently to a house on reserve in Manitoba, where he was not permitted to speak his language--Swampy Cree--and was forced to learn and speak only English while in day school, unless in secret in the forest with his friends. Robertson's mother, Beverly Eyers, grew up in a small town in Manitoba, a town with no Indigenous families, until Don came to town as a United Church minister and fell in love with her. Robertson's parents made the decision to raise their children, in his words, "separate from his Indigenous identity." He grew up without his father's teachings or knowledge of his life or experiences. All he had left was blood memory, the pieces of who he was engrained in the fabric of his DNA. Pieces that he has spent a lifetime putting together. Black Water is a family memoir of intergenerational trauma and healing, of connection, of story, of how David Robertson's father's life--growing up in Norway House Cree Nation in Manitoba, then making the journey from Norway House to Winnipeg--informed the author's own life, and might even have saved it. Facing a story nearly erased by the designs of history, father and son journey together back to the trapline at Black Water, through the past to create a new future"--