My Indian

Author Misel Joe
Publisher St. John’s: Breakwater Books

My Indian is a brilliant flip on the usual settler take in historical fiction, which has too often used the genocide of the Beothuk as dramatic backdrop to stories of settler in-fighting, thematically focused on the “discovery” of the “New World” and creation of Canada by brave men. Mi’sel Joe and Sheila O’Neill use William Epps Cormack’s diary of 1822, in which he calls his guide “my Indian,” to reclaim Sylvester Joe’s Mi’kmaw take on things.