Black Water Family, legacy, and blood memory

David Robertson, 1977-

Book - 2020

The son of a Cree father and a non-Indigenous mother, Robertson was raised with virtually no knowledge or understanding of his family's Indigenous roots. His father, Don, spent his early childhood on a trapline in the bush northeast of Norway House, Manitoba, where his first teacher was the land. When his family was moved permanently to a nearby reserve, Don was not permitted to speak Cree at school unless in secret with his friends and lost the knowledge he had been gifted. His mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town with not a single Indigenous family in it. Then Don arrived, and they fell in love. Structured around a father-son journey to the northern trapline where Robertson and his father will reclaim their connection t...o the land, this is the story of another journey: a young man seeking to understand his father's story, to come to terms with his lifelong experience with anxiety, and to finally piece together his own blood memory. more