BookBrowse Reviews Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis

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When Abe Jacobs cannot find answers to why his body is deteriorating, he returns to his family and the Mohawk reservation where he was raised for healing.

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Old School Indian is an engrossing debut novel about a middle-aged bookseller returning to the home that raised him. Abe Jacobs eagerly left the Ahkwesáhsne reservation at the age of eighteen, but twenty-five years later, his marriage and health are deteriorating rapidly. When the story begins, Abe suffers from rotting skin, open wounds, consistent pain, numbness, and lesions. It is a puzzle for his rheumatologist and pathologist, who treat him with steroids while they search for a diagnosis. Frustrated by a canceled appointment, Abe returns to the reservation and his great uncle Budge, a recovered alcoholic and healer.

Uncle Budge is the brother of Abe's Tóta (grandmother), a cheerful man who lives in a barely clean trailer but whose hands are poetry. He kneads and massages Abe's flesh and asks Abe what he wants. Abe answers that he doesn't want to lose his mind. While Uncle Budge reassures Abe he can be fixed, Abe is soon awoken from sleep. His stomach feels cracked open, his groin throbs, and he cannot escape the pain. Shortly thereafter, Abe is given a diagnosis by his pathologist of a rare autoimmune disease that causes tissue damage and inflammation, and can disrupt blood flow, resulting in organ death. Abe explains to his wife, Alex, "Based on when the lesions started, I should be experiencing vascular dementia right around my forty-fifth birthday."

Hardship isn't unfamiliar to Abe, a child of the reservation with an alcoholic father. When Abe was seven, he tried to kill himself by jumping out the window, but the snow broke his fall. Later that night and in the ensuing days, his family never spoke of what happened. As he grew older, he idolized his Uncle Asher, the richest person he knew, who owned a bar not far from the rez. Uncle Asher also owned a boat and took Abe and his cousins and siblings for rides on the St. Lawrence River. Asher eventually moved to a shack in the New Mexico desert and lived an artistic life. It was his freedom that Abe romanticized. Instinctively, Abe knew if he didn't leave the rez, he'd become an unmarried father with a job he hated who binged on alcohol. Abe wanted more than the rez offered, a desire which Dominick Deer Woods, the story's narrator, quietly mocks.

We are introduced to Dominick Deer Woods with this passage: "Allow me to introduce myself. Hello, I'm Dominick Deer Woods. I wonder what you've made of my occasional intrusions, or if you've even noticed them." He goes on to imply that he is Abe's alter ego. His silent self. The way Abe distances himself from a lifetime of anxiety and trauma.

In interviews about his partly autobiographical debut novel, Aaron John Curtis, a member of the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe, admits to crafting Deer Woods as a more authentically Mohawk voice than Abe. Deer Woods' presence begins when Abe is at Syracuse. He recalls Abe's fellow classmates saying things like, "My taxes paid for your tuition, not that you'd know anything about paying taxes. Go clean my fucking dorm room. Reparations, bitch." While Abe laughs these comments off in hopes of decentering overt racism, he is doing more harm than good with his passivity. Deer Woods notes, "I don't have to tell some of you that being surrounded by white folks for the first time — going from human to something people wanted to catalog — was an experience for him."

College-aged Abe was sexually liberal and known to hit the party drug circuit with future-wife Alex. While the sex scenes are graphic, they lack the objectification of pornography, and there is a point to be made about the passage of time. Young Abe sought pleasure. Middle-aged Abe seeks healing.

There were a lot of things I loved about this story. Particularly the language. The Mohawk people speak Kanienʼkéha. Because there is no specific word in Kanienʼkéha for "love," sentences conveying love must be both allegorical and poetic, such as, "Time without you scatters my mind over the ground." Or, "The blood that flows in me belongs to you." The Mohawk word "Aronhiakeh:te" means "he is carrying the sky on his back." It is a perfect description of Abe Jacobs and his failing marriage and his deteriorating body and the art of being uncomfortable in middle age because everything is disappearing.

For the most part, this is a story about men and because it is a story about men it is also a story about the sort of inadequacy that follows around men who lack the power to control their lives and therefore suffer from a loss of confidence. There is Uncle Budge, who was broken by the sexual abuse of his sister. And Abe's father, who is blind in one eye because of an abusive incident with his father. And Abe himself. Doubted about his Native ancestry being real, he internalized the oppression of those who discredited him.

For decades, the literary community has mulled over Thomas Wolfe's posthumously published novel You Can't Go Home Again and its theme that the place of our childhood has reinvented itself. And while there is some truth that even the smallest communities adapt and evolve, there is also something to gain by returning to your origin story. With his medical crises and his body in pain and his life in flux, Abe needs to be nurtured and comforted by his parents and siblings and memories of his Tóta. He needs to face what he suppressed. If only to acknowledge that secrets and oppression make you sick.

Aaron John Curtis has written a sentimental novel that is also profound. His characters are finely tuned human vessels enduring pain, love, hope, and marginalization, but like shards of broken glass in the sun, they catch a ray of light. This is Abe's quest back on the reservation: Unearth who you used to be. And love him.

This review first ran in the May 7, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.