Hunting identity: Duncan McCue’s trapline memoirs
CBC reporter and host Duncan McCue was in the midst of a 10-month fellowship for leading journalists when one of his instructors challenged him to write about a teacher who had changed his life.
McCue thought about it, and then chose a Cree man – Chisasibi’s Robbie Matthew Sr. “I’ve been telling these stories forever,” said McCue by telephone. “Writing the book has been an exploration – of trying to figure out how he has influenced me in my adult life.”
The Shoe Boy: A Trapline Memoir recounts a season McCue spent as a 17-year-old on Matthew’s trapline. Bright and hard working, he had just graduated from a prestigious Ontario boarding school when his father, who was serving as the Cree School Board Director of Education Services, suggested the excursion.
For McCue, it was a no-brainer. As a half-Ojibwe, half-Caucasian self-described “nerd” who felt disillusioned with “white” measures of success, McCue longed for a deeper connection to his Indigenous heritage. He had excelled at school. But his frequent trips to Chisasibi – where he clumsily shooting ptarmigan for the first time – demonstrated the limits of his schooling. Yes, he could read and write with the best of them. But when it came to hunting, the Cree kids put him to shame.
“They possessed a knowledge and confidence I did not,” writes McCue, “to shoot a goose, set a snare, build a tent – to survive on the land. I wanted that. I wanted to be able to read the land as assuredly as I could delve into Shakespeare’s sonnets.”
Matthew’s connection and devotion to his trapline is a major theme of the book. McCue marvels at how thousands of years of Cree knowledge lives through Matthew’s actions. After a kill, Matthew sings to the animal. At one point, he shoots a bear and tracks it through the snow-covered forest. After harvesting its meat, he bundles up the bones and without explanation hands them to McCue to hang around the cabin. “He doesn’t explain why,” writes McCue. “But I get the point: Bears are strong medicine.”
McCue was not the first teenager Matthew and his family hosted. He was, however, the first non-Cree. Matthew’s son Bruce, who slept next to McCue, and taught him basic Cree vocabulary. By the end, everyone seemed impressed with McCue’s progress. “I could converse fluently with a three-year-old,” McCue jokes.
McCue was a good student who was “searching for something,” said Bruce Matthew, who still lives in Chisasibi. “He was respectful and really interested in Cree ways.” The two remain friends, having reconnected several years ago through Facebook.
The Shoe Boy gives a candid account of McCue’s struggles with identity and self-worth, tying his personal narrative into a broader conversation on youth suicide in Indigenous communities. First Nations youth are 5-6 times more likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to take their own lives.
McCue sees cultural camps – which connect youth to Elders and teach traditional skills like hunting – as a powerful tool in the fight against suicide. The camps, he said, “give powerful lessons in terms of self-esteem. They take Aboriginal rights out of the abstract and turns them into something real.”
While much of the book is a meditation on McCue’s own healing journey, it weaves in a surprising amount of Cree history and thoughtful reflections on Cree culture. McCue’s observations range from the cerebral – as when he argues “hunting values continue to define contemporary Cree culture” – to the amusing, noting how CB radios keep hunting families apprised on the most important Cree affairs: “births, deaths, fur prices and, not least, bingo and hockey scores.”
The James Bay hydroelectric project is a mixed legacy, he also observes. On one hand, it altered river flows, displaced Cree and flooded traplines. On the other, it led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, which increased levels of self-determination and gave rise to important new initiatives such the Income Security Program, which provides a living allowances for Cree hunters and their families.
That program, writes McCue, “acted as a parachute for Cree traditional knowledge, helping avert the catastrophic crash experienced by so many Indigenous peoples thrust into contact with contemporary Western society.”
When Robbie Matthew Sr. was reached for this story, he had just returned from two weeks on his trapline. He said that the traditional teachings he shared with McCue are the “most important education” and that he can relate to feeling dislocated one’s culture. He spent 10 years in residential school.
“I wanted Duncan to know who we are and where we come from,” said Matthew. “These are two important issues I have had to learn myself. I had to go out on the land and ask questions. I’m 82, and I’m still learning from nature.”