Firewater. Harold R. Johnson. 2016. 4 hours, 18 minutes. (On Libby)

A friend suggested a book by this title, but I am not sure this is the one she intended, as there is another book with the same title by David Williams in his Wilderness series. And yet another book that she may have been referring to is titled Fireweather. (I probably wrote the wrong name down.) In any case, I downloaded this one which is a short confusing narrative by a native Saskatchewan Cree lawyer about the devastation of native people and culture by the white man’s introduction of liquor. He has worked as both a prosecuting attorney and a defence lawyer on the reserves and describes the revolving door appearances of poor, often abused and poorly educated fellow natives in legal trouble, almost always for violent crimes while drunk. He notes the hypocrisy of the judges and prosecutors who condemn all alcohol use in the hearings on the reserves and then have several stiff drinks on the plane back to the city. There is a distinction made between real alcoholics who seldom commit violent crimes and the young binge drinkers who do. While noting the evils of residential schools, displacement of natives from their lands etc. he rejects both the victim explanations, and the medical model which sees alcoholism as a disease and asks his his fellow natives to take responsibility for their own actions and to revive the native customs and culture. That includes their reverence for the land, their old fanciful creation stories and their unity with their deceased ancestors, the land and all of nature. The documentation is intertwined with these native creation stories and the stories that we all tell ourselves about the nature of the world and our place in it. Some of these stories seem to emphasize the bleak insignificance of all life in the grand scheme of nature.

He is very critical of native leaders and white leaders alike: “… the politician looks at the polls and figures out which direction the people are headed and then runs out in front and pretends to be leading.”

While not providing any major lasting solution to the problems created by alcohol abuse in his fellow natives, this author gives readers, whether native or white, an interesting and thoughtful perspective on it.

3/5

Thanks, Jackie.