Wolves, Forest Fires, Romance, and the Ojibway
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| Book cover from first printing in 1952. |
“Particularly in the second half of the book we wish that he would forego the easy work of telling us about the evil spirits known as wendigos, philosophical French Canadians, remittance men, and similar stock characters of the fake bush, and given us more of the keen observation and sensitivity which he shows in his earlier descriptions.”
- Robertson Davies, “A Bushman by Choice,” review of Crazy White Man for the New York Times, October 26, 1952.
Richard Morenus filled dozens of pocket-sized notebooks with stories he had heard about life in the northern Ontario bush. Once he ran out of material about his own adventures, he turned to those notebooks to fill approximately half of his book, Crazy White Man (1952).
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| Illustration by William Lackey |
Richard writes some disturbingly exaggerated things about wolves which he calls “the bush’s most cunningly treacherous killers” that will kill “solely to satisfy their lust for murder.” He tells the story of the brave Anna Olsen who, in the 1920s or 1930s, saved herself and her two babies from certain death in a forest fire while her husband Ed was away working. “Her one chance was the lake. But Ed had taken the canoe, their sole craft. Again she looked at the axe in her hands and then at the pile of logs by the shore. The logs. The lake. The axe.” He tells the story of a romance between trapper Charlie Blaine, “one of the lonesomest men I have ever seen,” and Pearl, a Winnipeg bakery worker who, on the “wildest impulse,” had inserted her name and address into a box of saltine crackers that ended up at the trapper’s shack. And, he wrote in a condescending and racist manner about the region’s Indigenous peoples.
About a week after Richard and Nan arrived at their island home, Richard wrote a long letter to his former boss Lewis Titterton, manager of NBC’s Script Division. In that letter he describes his first impressions of the Ojibway people of northern Ontario:
Canoes filled with Indians are passing the island every day. They are busy now trading in their furs for their supplies for the summer. When these give out (the supplies) they’ll go hungry until the next fur season. I went up the other day to one of the little trading posts some miles up the river and watched the Indians do their buying. They are utterly shiftless and thoroughly impractical. They were buying great quantities of cheap candy, bright colored cloth, and things they would never possibly use. The candy they’d eat before they got back to their camp, and the other goods would be kicked around in the filth of their teepees until it is past all usage. Thus is the sturdy race of the aborigine. – Letter from Richard Morenus to Lewis Titterton, May 15, 1941. (Source: Wisconsin Historical Society, National Broadcasting Company Records, 1921-1976: Central Files, 1921-1976, Subseries: Correspondence, 1921-1942, Box 85, Folder 35, Richard Morenus, script writer.)
Over the course of the next six years, during which he spent a great deal of time among the Ojibway, trading with them, learning their language, Richard’s opinion of the Indigenous people evolved. Throughout his book Crazy White Man he leaves no doubt that, while he continued to believe that Indigenous peoples were inferior to white men, his understanding of them had grown.
Richard was initially uncomfortable around the Ojibway. When he was a child he had read stories in which, he recalls, “the villainous red man was portrayed as a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a killer.” The people paddling by the island in their canoes, however, did not look particularly bloodthirsty. Still, he found himself imagining that the Ojibway people he encountered on his trips to Sioux Lookout were staring at him and talking about him in “uncomplimentary terms.” He decided to overcome his paranoia by learning more about the Indians themselves, including their language.
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| Illustration by William Lackey |
In Crazy White Man, Richard uses terminology commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s that is jarring to today’s readers – words like “squaw” and “buck” and “savage.” One can, however, discern a softening of Morenus’ views of his Indigenous neighbours. His relationship with the old Ojibway chief Wa-she-ga or Jim Chief, the man who Nan wrote about in her article for Maclean’s [Click HERE], likely facilitated his change of attitude. He (and Nan) eventually befriended the old chief and his wife, visiting them in their wigwam on at least one occasion. “Over the years that I knew them I became very fond of the old Wa-she-ga and his tiny squaw,” Morenus writes in his book. “I hoped I might be able to express [in his writing] the sincerity of my respect for this fascinating yet pitiful old reprobate and his indestructible wife.”
Morenus’ portrayal of the Ojibway people remains racist and patronizing throughout the book. On intermarriage he writes, “No, the lone white man living on an equal basis will not raise the squaw to his level, but the squaw, with passive aboriginal certainty, will inevitably reduce him to hers.” He did research into the traditions of the Ojibway which he called superstitions, saying these were being combated through the “process of evangelizing” in residential schools under the joint control of church and government. He attempted to acquire some understanding of their language which he called a “confusing collection of grunts, groans, wails, and hisses.”
Richard concludes: “In a sense it is the utter simplicity of the Indian that makes him difficult for the white man to understand. The white man, dealing with his own kind, looks for complexities in thought and reasoning. I found none of this existing in the Indian. He is of single thought and purpose. There is nothing involved about his mental processes. Whatever has been acquired by him of this nature he has certainly learned from the white man. On his own, deep in the bush, the Indian is simplicity itself.”
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