Indigenous author who dropped out of junior high school releases second novel

National Post

4 days ago

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Brian Thomas Isaac's voice is quietly matter of fact when he talks about growing up poor in a home without electricity in British Columbia's Okanagan Indian Reserve. 'That was simply how it was,' he remembers.
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Many years later, the minutiae of those childhood years would inform his late-flowering success as an acclaimed Canadian novelist whose latest work, Bones of a Giant has just been published. But at the moment he simply needs to emphasize how important it was when hydro finally did arrive.
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'It would be a step into the future for us,' Isaac says on the phone from his home in Kelowna. 'You don't realize at the time how bad you've had it until there's a change for the better.''
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Isaac's early memories, inextricably intertwined with his creative being, become more intense when he explains why he quit school in Grade 8. The racism he experienced as an Indigenous youth was more than he could bear. 'It was just horrible. I couldn't take it,' he says.
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Isaac needs to evoke the past in order to provide context for his emergence at the age of 71 — after decades of working as a bricklayer and in the Alberta oilpatch — as an award-winning Canadian writer. It took this junior-high dropout 17 years to complete his debut novel, All the Quiet Places, a coming-of-age story about life on a First Nations reserve back in the 1960s. Published four years ago, it won an Indigenous Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
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Now its successor, Bones of a Giant, has arrived on a wave of advance praise from the likes of veteran journalist Carol Off and award-winning novelist Thomas Wharton. Meanwhile, for Isaac, writing remains an ongoing learning process that's gradually getting easier.
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'This second novel, Bones of a Giant, took me two years. I'm now working on the third book of my trilogy — it will probably be finished within a month.'
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Isaac writes about courage, resilience and survival in the face of racism, poverty and the antiquated tentacles of the 19th Century Indian act. But one also encounters warmth, humanity and humour in his pages — and, perhaps most significantly, a celebration of family.
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'When I first started writing these books, I just wanted readers to know that First Nations people are people first,' Isaac says. 'This book is not about hate — more than anything else it's about how a family survives together and what they learn. My first thought was to write in a way that would allow the reader to know more about First Nations people, by walking with them and seeing the highs and lows, and in this way give readers a sense of what it was like.'