A Season in Chezgh’un
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A subversive novel by acclaimed Cree author Darrel J. McLeod, infused with the contradictory triumph and pain of finding conventional success in a world that feels alien.
James, a talented and conflicted Cree man from a tiny settlement in Northern Alberta, has settled into a comfortable middle-class life in Kitsilano, a trendy neighbourhood of Vancouver. He is living the life he had once dreamed of—travel, a charming circle of sophisticated friends, a promising career and a loving relationship with a caring man—but he chafes at being assimilated into mainstream society, removed from his people and culture.
The untimely death of James’s mother, his only link to his extended family and community, propels him into a quest to reconnect with his roots. He secures a job as a principal in a remote northern Dakelh community but quickly learns that life there isn’t the fix he’d hoped it would be: His encounters with poverty, cultural disruption and abuse conjure ghosts from his past that drive him toward self-destruction. During the single year he spends in northern BC, James takes solace in the richness of the Dakelh culture—the indomitable spirit of the people, and the splendour of nature—all the while fighting to keep his dark side from destroying his life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Memoirist McLeod (Mamaskatch) makes his fiction debut with a sublime foray into the complexities of Indigenous life in northern Canada. James, a gay Cree man from northern Alberta, has assimilated in Vancouver and works as a schoolteacher. He lives with a loving partner, with whom he has an open relationship, and has found cultured friends. Still, he still feels out of place after his traditional Cree childhood, even though he lived then in poverty and was beaten and sexually abused by his brother-in-law. When he's offered the job of principal at an underfunded school on a Dakelh reservation in northern British Columbia, he takes up the challenge to reacclimate yet again (thinking of the salmon who run through rivers into the Pacific and back, he reasons, "If they could migrate and transform themselves like that, with such purpose, why couldn't he?"). On the reservation, he blends Indigenous skills and language with the standard curriculum. James loves his work, and lives in fear that his anonymous sexual encounters in public places will result in him getting arrested, beaten, or fired. The novel is full of unsparing accounts of the generational trauma inflicted on the Dakelh by Canada's Catholic-run residential schools, which created a legacy of victims becoming abusers. Despite the adversity faced by James and the Dakelh, however, McLeod writes with great love for the natural world and the strength of its Indigenous people. This is transcendent.
