A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year
A Quill & Quire Book of the Year
A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Macleanâs 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter
âAn instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family, identity and love.â âCherie Dimaline
In this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but creates a new future
The son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A. Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His father, Dulasâor Don, as he became knownâlived on the trapline in the bush in Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where he couldnât speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless in secret. Davidâs mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town that had no Indigenous people until Don arrived as the new United Church minister. They married and had three sons, whom they raised unconnected to their Indigenous history.
David grew up without his fatherâs teachings or any knowledge of his early experiences. All he had was âblood memoryâ: the pieces of his identity ingrained in the fabric of his DNA, pieces that he has spent a lifetime putting together. It has been the journey of a young man becoming closer to who he is, who his father is and who they are together, culminating in a trip back to the trapline to reclaim their connection to the land.
Black Water is a memoir about intergenerational trauma and healing, about connection and about how Donâs life informed Davidâs own. Facing up to a story nearly erased by the designs of history, father and son journey together back to the trapline at Black Water and through the past to create a new future.