Description
🏆 2022 BIBA® Native American Fiction Winner!
Rez Dog Blues & The Haiku: A Savage Life in Bits and Pieces is the story of the generation beyond Indian residential school. Part bildungsroman, part roman-à-clef, this searing tale is based on the reflections and experiences of a book-obsessed, poetry-loving, music-fixated Cree youth whose life was impacted by residential school, post-colonial education, reservation life, experience as a teenage runaway, and contact with the foster care system. His Dickensian tale does not forget, however, the love, hope, humor, and courage that Indigenous people at the time exhibited, cultivated, and passed on as a way to survive and even thrive. Readers are taken on a phantasmagorical journey as the protagonist goes from an angry member of the punk generation to a possible redemptive and reconciliatory future. But will he and his cohorts survive to make it that far? A brutal, hard, yet ultimately uplifting read, Rez Dog Blues & The Haiku: A Savage Life in Bits and Pieces evokes prose, poetry, and music, telling a nuanced philosophical tale of life, death, and dignity amidst the chaos and carnage of the times.
