Old School Indian, Aaron John Curtis’ audacious first novel, is poised to grab readers’ full attention. The release has been highly anticipated, and there’s an intriguing breathlessness to the early reviews. But on Zoom, Curtis appears unperturbed, his expression, at first, unreadable.
Curtis’ demeanor might convey the grateful exhaustion that follows an ultimately successful 10-year creative effort. This novel began as a short story, then, with feedback from his writing groups, grew into a novella and then blew up into drafts twice the book’s ultimate length.
“I’m an easy edit,” Curtis says with a laugh. Like the novel’s central character, 43-year-old Abe Jacobs, Curtis is an enrolled member of the Kanien’kehá:ka—specifically, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, whose land lies between Ontario, Quebec and New York, though he now lives in DeBary, Florida, with his partner, Michi. It was advice from a woman in his writing group that turned the page on his struggles with his roman a clef novella and opened the path to this revelatory novel. “I still had it in my mind that fiction had to be 100% fiction, or it didn’t count. So instead of Abe living in Miami, he lived in Tampa. Instead of being a bookseller, he worked in insurance. Everything was just a little different. She said just go full autofiction with it, just hit the gas! . . . It became the easiest thing to use my life as the template.”
Curtis seems to be a born and bred storyteller. “Last trip up north,” he says, “my niece complained, ‘Ask anyone in your family a question and you don’t get an answer, you get a story.’” And how the stories do flow, in both book and conversation!
“The characters sort of pop up and start talking to you. There’s magic in those moments. You feel like a conduit.”
In Old School Indian, it is 2016, and Abe has left Miami and returned to his family home in Ahkwesáhsne, along the Saint Lawrence River. He has been diagnosed with a fatal autoimmune disorder called Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis (SNiP), which bodies forth as suppurating skin sores and loss of sensation.
SNiP is an invention, but a similar disorder, Polyarteritis Nodosa, is real, rare, nasty but not fatal and, in Curtis’ case, now in remission. As Curtis tells it, some years ago he and his ex-wife went to visit her aunt in northern California. She lived in a geodesic dome on a steep piece of land, used solar power and connected her plumbing to a spring. She grew pot. “We were there 10 days. The plants had already been harvested and bag-dried, so we spent the time removing stems and leaves and re-bagging. I think we noticed the first lesion on day three.”
Writing about his illness was its own kind of pain, and in early drafts, written in the first person, “there was a lot of anger coming out.”
“I guess the picture in my head was a white reader,” Curtis says. “I don’t know if I was worried about that or if I was worried that I was going to die, and I would have all of these thoughts that never got to be expressed or acknowledged or listened to. So . . . it was very hostile to the reader. The people in my writing group, except for one, were all white. And they were saying, ‘Oh we don’t think like that! That’s not what’s going on when we read.’ One of them suggested I change it to third person to see what it unlocked.” But when a different, younger group of readers saw the change, they missed the “anger or passion” that the first person provided. Curtis found a way to have both: He created a new character to narrate in first person, a man named Dominick Deer Woods who is an alter ego for Abe, and possibly for Curtis himself.
“Dominick just popped out,” Curtis says. “I needed some distance. Abe has been in Miami so long he’s kind of lost his way. Dom is the voice of the rez.” In his telling, Dominick references depictions of and by Indigenous people in books, films and history, providing context for Abe’s experiences and challenging the reader on their assumptions.
Curtis’ character Abe works in a bookstore in Miami, and like so many booksellers, baristas and bartenders, he has artistic aspirations. Likewise, Curtis has worked at Books & Books in Miami since 2004, though he’s now on leave to focus on his novel. His job title is Quartermaster, and he explains, “There was a time when any book you touched at Books & Books was a book I bought. My friend JC said, ‘You’re like the guy in the Army every soldier goes to when they want to requisition something, the quartermaster.’ In indie bookstores, we all wear a lot of different hats. Anytime someone takes on a new project, they add it to their business card and they end up with these little paragraphs on their cards that are just kind of silly. And it still doesn’t encompass everything you do. So, Quartermaster. It just stuck.”
While visiting his family on the reservation, Abe gets terrible news from his doctors back in Miami. His family urges him to go see his great uncle. Uncle Budge is an earthy recovered alcoholic, a bit of a reprobate, a bit of a jokester, and a healer. He has a deadpan sense of humor, and his relationship with Abe deepens as the healing progresses. Maybe Uncle Budge is the titular old school Indian? Maybe, Curtis says.
“The idea of a healer wasn’t in my first draft. Someone in my writer’s group said, what if there’s a healer, and I thought my God, that’s such a trope. Then I remembered that we have a healer in the family, and I thought I’d try to upend that stereotype of the mystic shaman sitting there burning sage by a fire. My Great Uncle Louis Burning Sky ‘Butch’ Conners was a healer. I’ve seen him in action twice but have never availed myself of his services. Since talking about Medicine dilutes it, I couldn’t depict healing as it actually happens, so Abe’s Uncle Budge had to have his own way of doing things. I will say Medicine is almost mundane.”
Abe and Uncle Budge have three exquisitely described healing sessions. In each there is an exchange, a kind of spiritual payment, the final one being a poem by Abe that encapsulates the trauma of Uncle Budge’s life.
“I wanted people to get the idea that the richest Mohawk is the one who gives the most away, that you take the same herb to treat constipation or diarrhea, the same herb because it’s just treating your intestines. I hoped to get the smells, the sounds, the inner thrum of the heartbeat. As you’re tooling along writing, the characters sort of pop up and start talking to you. If I were only writing about my life, I’d just be taking dictation. But there’s magic in those moments. You feel like a conduit.”
“Sometimes you’re saving your emotions even if you’re not doing it on purpose. You need to dig deeper and find the truth.”
His autoimmune disease isn’t the only threat to Abe’s well-being. His marriage to his wife, Alex, is faltering. We learn about the ups and downs of their long relationship, beginning when they were students at Syracuse University, through funny, poignant flashbacks, including scenes of polyamorous sex—of which, Curtis says, “A lot of that was cut out in the editing!”
“It’s funny, I got a message on Instagram,” he adds. “I guess that happens. I would never go ‘Oh, John Irving has a new book out,’ and email him and be like, ‘Hey!’ but it happens now. The person wanted to recommend the book to her reading group at work and wondered if it had graphic sex in it. And I was like, 10 years of putting your life and soul into it, and the question is about graphic sex? First of all, my version of graphic might not be the same as yours. And when you don’t portray the sex life of a character, you risk not portraying them as fully human. . . . My God, there is suicide [in the book], there’s childhood sexual assault, there’s involuntary sterilization! Awful, awful, awful stuff! To boil it down to a question of explicit sex just blew my mind.”
And here’s the nub of Old School Indian. For all its humor and drama, for all the powerful storytelling, for all the wonderful scenes of love, sex, healing and a brilliant depiction of the Jacobs family’s Thanksgiving, beneath the novel’s shimmering surface flows the anger and sorrow of a history of cultural trauma and erasure.
These emotions are felt the strongest in poems by the narrator, Dominick, which are inserted between the chapters, and tell very hard truths about oppression and white supremacy. The effect is electric, but Curtis says they were “the most difficult thing to write.”
“The desperation, the anger, the [fear] that my family stories would die with me just came out. It was my reckoning. I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to get the white supremacists.’ But I learned that sometimes a poem that arrives fully formed is a lie. It’s a roadblock sitting in front of the real poem. I had a poem that everyone liked. I thought it was good. I thought it was strong. At the last edit, it just didn’t feel right. Sometimes you’re saving your emotions even if you’re not doing it on purpose. You need to dig deeper and find the truth. I rewrote the entire thing and just sat there bawling.”
Read our starred review of Old School Indian.
Photo of Aaron John Curtis by Cacá Santoro.
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