Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory

A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year

A Quill & Quire Book of the Year

A CBC Books Nonfiction Book of the Year

A Maclean’s 20 Books You Need to Read this Winter
“An instant classic that demands to be read with your heart open
and with a perspective widened to allow in a whole new understanding of family,
identity and love.” —Cherie Dimaline

In this bestselling memoir, a son who grew up away
from his Indigenous culture takes his Cree father on a trip to the family
trapline and finds that revisiting the past not only heals old wounds but
creates a new future

The son of a Cree father and a white mother, David A.
Robertson grew up with virtually no awareness of his Indigenous roots. His
father, Dulas—or Don, as he became known—lived on the trapline in the bush in
Manitoba, only to be transplanted permanently to a house on the reserve, where
he couldn’t speak his language, Swampy Cree, in school with his friends unless
in secret. David’s mother, Beverly, grew up in a small Manitoba town that had no
Indigenous people until Don arrived as the new United Church minister. They
married and had three sons, whom they raised unconnected to their Indigenous history.

David grew up without his father’s teachings or any knowledge
of his early experiences. All he had was “blood memory”: the pieces of his
identity ingrained in the fabric of his DNA, pieces that he has spent a lifetime
putting together. It has been the journey
of a young man becoming closer to who he is, who his father is and who they are
together, culminating in a trip back to the trapline to reclaim their
connection to the land.

Black Water is a memoir about intergenerational trauma and
healing, about connection and about how Don’s life informed David’s own. Facing
up to a story nearly erased by the designs of history, father and son journey
together back to the trapline at Black Water and through the past to create a
new future.