Ben Robe is a retired political science professor who has returned to his reserve at Moccasin Lake, Saskatchewan, to live out his life in relative peace and solitude. But the complications of a sudden and intense US annexation of Canada change his plans. Cued into a Canadian resistance movement by his former student and lover, Monica, Ben soon learns that the layers of political and military activity go far beyond his careful social conscience in this dystopian world. Radical young women like Monica, Betsy Chance, and Joan Lightning post one face of the resistance, while farmers like Abe Friesen, and Mennonite Mary Wiens post another. Paralleled with characters like these are the reserve’s citizens who remain sheltered from the immediate troubles down south, but must accept that they cannot remain passive forever. The novel accents Ben’s struggles with his own desire for independence, love, and forgiveness, but at its core it remains a telling and passionate portrait of First Nations community life, the value and safety of family, and the need for friendship. It achieves an understanding of what an individual’s responsibilities are when civil liberty, order and stability are jeopardized by an occupying power, but shows that solitary acts of defiance that champion family trust and the individual’s capacity to love are their own agents of resistance.
The Cast Stone
ISBN: 9781927068137 Categories: Fiction, Literary
About the Author
HAROLD R. JOHNSON was the author of six works of fiction and five works of non-fiction. Born in northern Saskatchewan to a Swedish father and a Cree mother, Harold was a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation. He enlisted in the Canadian Navy and worked as a logger, trapper, and minter before going to university as an adult, eventually graduating from Harvard Law School. It was there where, in addition to his studies, he wrote his first novel, Billy Tinker, which was published by Thistledown Press in 2001. His novel Corvus (2011) won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Fiction and was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2019. Harold managed a private practice for several years before becoming a Crown prosecutor, but had retired from the practice of law to write full time.
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