Rez Dog Blues & The Haiku: A Savage Life in Bits and Pieces
by William George Lindsay
Winner of : Best Indie Book Award for Native American Fiction.2023
And finalist for six other awards.
Review by Greg Bourgeois
I will begin review this by quoting the author directly:
“Publishers want to sell books and they are all looking to what they think is just the right book
on reconciliation and decolonization, soft enough to go into high school rooms and book clubs.
They would have torn my book to shreds to make that happen.”
This is an apt caution for would be readers of this autobiographical novel. There is a liberal
amount of humour, love, and friendship, juxtaposed with scenes of violence and exploitation.
The main character Liam, is inducted, at an early age, to a lifestyle of intense partying with
alcohol and soft drugs.
Liam had a cruel stepmother, and later on, a selfish, arrogant stepfather. However, the antidote
to these characters are sensitive uncles , aunts , cousins and friends. These appear regularly in
the novel and he obviously loves them.
A streak of humour runs throughout the book, suppressed only briefly during the darkest
passages. The lighter subjects are , among others : bingo , reservation soup, and Elvis .
(described as “ the subject of a thousand black velvet paintings hung somewhere on every
Indian reserve”) . We are also introduced to the ins and outs of working in a car wash, fighting
forest fires, and being a junior forest warden. More seriously though,Liam is sustained by his
lifelong love of literature and he struggles to complete his formal education. Obviously, he is
also a fan of punk rock , but I am not going to comment because I am just a Broadway loving
queen myself. This book is so rich in content that the reader is drawn in and swept along for
chapter after chapter.
A portion of the novel is devoted to the archetypal road trip. Liam – and three reservation wise
guys cross America in the Rez Rocket. They are thrown off the tourist bus at Little Big Horn,
they skip Mount Rushmore ( dead white colonizers ) and they are not fond of the St Louis
Arch. ( monument of the colonization of the West -“ kiss my arch “) More popular were the
Canyon de Chelly , and the Navajo Cliff Houses, and the mounds of Cahokia.
I most admire the author’s prose style – consistently energetic and slangy , yet never forced or
inauthentic. ( at least to my uneducated ear ) I sincerely hope to see more of his writing in the
future. A monthly column perhaps?
