by Rosemary Brown
Richard Van Camp is a born storyteller as is evidenced in his collection of short stories, Moccasin Square Gardens. Van Camp is a member of the Dogrib First Nation from Fort Simpson in the NWT. His passion and love for the North and the people who live there permeates his stories.
The stories in this collection were written over the years and cover a wide range of themes often laced with humour. Whether set in the future or the present, his stories are framed by the environment, the impact of colonization, band office politics and the corruption of some leaders, community and family relationships, and friendships. Some of the stories are disturbing and others are heartwarming. My favourite stories were “Super Indians”, “Man Babies”, and “Ehtsee/Grandpa”. Other members of the Settlers Book Club had different favourites, but everyone appreciated the collection as a whole.
Another very enjoyable read from the Settlers Book Club is Dawn Dumont’s novel Rose’s Run, which won the 2015 Saskatchewan Book award for fiction.
Dumont is Cree and a member of the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan.
Rose’s Run is an engaging interplay of relationships between spouses and partners, parents and children and friends, a commentary on life in a small, impoverished reserve, band office doings, and the supernatural.
Rose is the single mother of two daughters, one a troublesome teen. She is overweight, smokes, and loses her job on the pig farm, and then somehow is inveigled into declaring that she is going to run in a marathon. While she trains for this, she navigates unemployment, her prickly relationship with her teen daughter, friendships, a new relationship, sightings of her mother’s ghost, and the appearance of a reawakened demon.
The female demon brings most of the women in the community under her control in order to punish the men for their transgressions against women. Rose’s Run refers not only to the marathon but also to the run she made in an attempt to escape the clutch of the demon. I’ll leave it up in the air as to how that turned out, much like how Dumont ends the novel with the beginning of the marathon but not its conclusion.
As well as being a writer, Dawn Dumont is an accomplished comic, and as a result the novel is full of many humorous incidents and very clever and witty interchanges among the characters.
I was surprised by the supernatural elements of the story until I heard a radio interview with Trevor Solway, a filmmaker from Siksika. He had just released a film called Tales from the Rez based on the ghost stories he had been told by his grandparents while growing up. A quick search of the internet informed me that ghost stories were told by different Indigenous nations to “protect sacred spaces and burial grounds, to keep children safe while they were on the land, and to connect with the ancestors”.
NB: Since 2022, Dawn Dumont (pen name for Dawn Marie Walker) has been facing a variety of charges related to her faked disappearance and death made in an effort to protect herself and her seven-year-old son from a former partner whom she and others called abusive.
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