Moose Meat & Wild Rice

by Basil Johnston

Basil Johnston's rollicking tales about life on a modern Indian reserve put Moose Meat & Wild Rice on the map of Canadian comedy along with Stephen Leacock's Mariposa and Charlie Farquharson's Parry Sound. Moose Meat & Wild Rice is a unique book, a comic collection by a contemporary Ojibway author, who turns his talents to a mischievous (but never malicious) depiction of present-day Indians and Indian-White relations with the gentle satire cutting both ways. Light, but nevertheless realistic, told as fiction but based in fact, the escapades undertaken by the populace of Moose Meat Point Reserve encompass havoc and hilarity, prejudice and pretence.

Genres: Fiction, Indigenous, Read For School

188 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Basil H. Johnston (13 July 1929 to 8 September 2015) was a Canadian writer, storyteller, language teacher and scholar.

For his work in preserving Ojibwa language and culture, he received the Order of Ontario and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Toronto and Laurentian University. Basil also received the Aboriginal Achievement Award for Heritage and Spirituality.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Alex Nonymous · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really mixed bag for me.

Moose Meat & Wild Rice tell a series of true stories of clashes between and the results of clashes between Indigenous people and white settlers in Canada and while quite a few of them were very well written and full of whit and humour, a lot of them also felt far longer than they had to be which really hindered any messages or humour attempted there.

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the stories in this book were amazing. My favourites actually happened to be the first and last stories in the book. The first one was just hilarious cause it was about people trying to use a moose to pull a canoe and I actually laughed out loud. The last one was deeply moving, especially when an old Ojibway woman roasts a white linguist and a white "family planner" (by the way my headcanon is that the linguist supports the double vowel system which Johnston seems to be against). There's a heavy emphasis on the theme of language in some of the stories, which makes sense because Johnston has also made an Ojibway language thesaurus. The one about the Ojibway people "praying" in a church in Ojibway to get out of jail was a banger (you'll have to read it to find out what I mean lol). That being said, there were a few in here that made me cringe rather than laugh. Humour is subjective though, and maybe you'll find those funny. Or maybe it was meant to be in-group humour that other Ojibway people would find funny. Yellow Thunder mistaking a car's headlights for maeko-bimosae (the bearwalker) was more bonkers than funny to me, so was the one about the guy who thought his potatoes fell off the face of the earth. There's also one in here about two Ojibway guys larping as Chinese.

[Garth Mailman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moose Meat & Wild Rice
Basil Johnston

The fictional Moose Meat tribe is at Moose Meat Point not far by barely passable dirt road from Blunderbay. These details set the tone for this spoof on typical tribal life. Deprived of a working knowledge of their native Ojibway by residential schools their sentence structure is typical of that I’ve read before in Thomas King novels. It’s a type of pidgin English.

Part one gently makes fun of tribal foibles; Part two describes the encounter with well-meaning missionaries who brought their brand of Christianity to the benighted heathen.

In the end no mater how much Natives assimilated: learning white man’s languages, attending their churches, joining their armies they were still no account injuns no one wanted to deal with. Those who left the reserve and adjusted to white man’s ways were acceptable in neither.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

*read this book for school*
I did enjoy getting a better glance at life living on the reserve in an era where Indigenous people were heavily ostracized to say the least. I also liked how each recount seemingly had a plot twist

[Ellen Worling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely stories told with humour and grace.

[Shahna · Rating 4 out of 5]

lol
funny stuff

[HadiDee]

I came to this eagerly but was a disappointed. The stories are a mixed bag - which is fine - but the telling of them was long winded. I skipped over many paragraphs, and was left dissatisfied.

I have heard a lot about Johnston's work though, and will try some of his later books.

[S.L.S. Oborowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Receive as a gift. It has a lot of humour, a joy to read.

[Sarah Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great collection of stories. The progression of the 'white man' figure is particularly notable throughout the novel. Johnston is a phenomenal Canadian writer that everyone should read, at least once.