UBC adjunct professor Duncan McCue writes about discovering his Indigenous identity as a teenager in his new book, The Shoe Boy.
The book is a memoir of the time he spent on a trapline in northern Quebec.
McCue is the creator of UBC Journalism’s Reporting in Indigenous Communities course, the first of its kind in Canada.
The Shoe Boy grew out of a creative writing course he took as part of a journalism fellowship at Stanford University.
McCue chose to write about the five months after high school where he lived in the bush with a Cree family in James Bay, Quebec.
“It’s about the experiences that I had as an urban Ojibwe teen, living in the bush and what that was like for me,” said McCue. “The whole memoir is about me trying to struggle and learn about my cultural identity as an Indigenous person, as Anishinaabe.”
McCue described the book as a love letter to James Bay, a place he lived for six years.
“James Bay and the Cree people are very much a part of who I am,” he said. “It is very much a part of me even though I live thousands and thousands of kilometres away now.”
‘Rare little gem’
McCue’s first book is receiving positive reviews. Joseph Boyden, a Giller Prize-winning author, commended McCue’s unique writing.
Boyden has described McCue as “one of the most profound and sensitive writers I’ve had the pleasure of reading. The Shoe Boy is that rare little gem of a book. It’s indelible.”
The book launch is on Tuesday, June 28, at 6 p.m. at the Skwachays Lodge Aboriginal Hotel and Gallery, Vancouver, and requires an RSVP (send to tyee@nonvella.com).
The reception includes a traditional welcome, pulled bison and bannock, wine and beer from Nk’Mip Cellars, and music by Mohawk blues pianist Murray Porter.
The book is available to order from Nonvella.
