CRAZY DAVE

The author looks back on the history of his family, members of an Ojibway tribe driven out of Wisconsin in the 1850s to settle on an Ontario reserve.

Except for a lesser tendency to commit wholesale massacres, Canada’s treatment of indigenous people was no more enlightened than that of the US. Until very recently, both governments worked hard to wipe out the tribes’ languages and cultures. Ojibway ethnologist and writer Johnston (The Manitous, 1995, etc.) realizes the motives behind this were often well-intentioned; Indian advocates believed adopting white culture was the only way to raise them from poverty. While the policy largely succeeded in alienating indigenous people from their roots, the author points out, the poverty remains. Yet he has not written a polemic but rather a gritty saga of his family’s struggle through the first half of the 20th century. The matriarch was his grandmother Rosa, who raised five sons with only modest help from two husbands. The last of her sons, David, was born with Down Syndrome, called “mongolism” at the time. Unable to care for himself, he was nevertheless strong, curious, and anxious to be part of the world around him. Pragmatically, his older brother John taught him to saw and chop wood. (Readers will be surprised at the immense amount every family required.) When Dave wandered off or created a minor disaster, the community made allowances. No one except the reserve’s white establishment—Indian agent, priest, and doctor, all portrayed unsparingly—suggested sending him to an institution. The author considers his Uncle Dave a symbol of his tribe’s stubborn struggle to preserve their way of life in the face of an intrusive white society. Their success, like Dave’s, was spotty. As the century progressed, the increasingly sophisticated Indians wrested control of their affairs from the government, but they also abandoned the reserve for the city in growing numbers.

Not a happy ending, but nonetheless a lively and appealing memoir.