Crazy Dave an accessible but challenging story

Review

Page 18

Crazy Dave

By Basil Johnston

Key Porter

334 pages

$24.95

Basil Johnston says he's apolitical, but don't believe him for a second.

The Cape Croker, Ont. Ojibway writer and academic has listened to the Elders and recorded a living history of his people in the Georgian Bay region. Along the way, he has created a very useful guide to the sometimes forgotten - or misunderstood - history behind the unseen social forces at work within and around reserve communities. All this is accomplished within a thoroughly enjoyable, easy to read novel that is packed with the harsh realities, as well as the joyful good humor, of everyday life on the rez.

The characters in Crazy Dave include an Indian agent, a priest and a community of Native people who are under their influence, if not their control. The book begins in the years immediately before the First World War. All of the characters are actual people in the author's family. Telling stories about the central character allows Johnston to construct a parable about the realities of life under the Indian Act.

"Crazy Dave is about my uncle and my grandmother, my uncle, who was born with Down's Syndrome, and his misadventures in trying be part of the larger community, to blend in. But because he is disabled, he can't. People won't let him because he'll just spoil things; he's too stupid and he doesn't know how to do that; he'll just hurt himself; he might hurt others; he doesn't know his own strength," Johnston told Windspeaker during a promotional stop in Calgary. "And as I was working, I guess on the first draft, it occurred to me that my uncle was kind of a symbol of Native people in relation to the larger Canadian society, particularly in their quest for self government."

Because Native people have a different way of looking at the world than that of people of European ancestry, Johnston believes Native people are treated much as his uncle was treated.

They're backward. They don't have any experience in all this. They might spoil things, the author said mainstream society tells his people.

"So long as we stay where the hell we are, don't create any waves, we're OK. The only good Indian is a quiet one. That is what David reminded me of and so I see him as a symbol of us," he added.

His uncle created his own language because he just couldn't pronounce certain sounds. He also struggled in his own distinct and, at times, surprising way against limits imposed on him and against the intolerance he met from others who didn't quite know how to relate to him. In situations such as the one his uncle found himself in and the allegorical equivalent involving Native and non-Native people, Johnston said he believes both sides must examine themselves and their biases in order for a just relationship to be established.

"The writing business is a matter of refining the ideas that are there and bringing them out through my Uncle David and my grandmother and Mary-Jane, the village gossip - a gossip who is not malicious - you use all these characters, the priest, the agent. They all represent something in life, something in society that prevents us from being. But part of it's our ruddy character. You know Natives are jealous as hell. A lot of Natives admit that's what we're like. That's the way we are. The idea of equality is so ingrained in all of us. We share everything. Nobody can have more than anybody else and if somebody has more he must have got it illegally or he formed a close friendship with the Indian agent. And we have to deal with it," he said.

Johnston believes the story of his Uncle David has revealed a basic, natural lesson about human behavior - that ignorance or misunderstanding creates fear and an impulse to reject or even attack that which is different.

By making this comparison, he may have provided a blueprint for recovery for those who suffer from this normal, if less than admirable, human impulse.