There are a num­ber of things about my new, mid­dle grade nov­el, Rez Dogs that make it dif­fer­ent from any book I’ve done before. In fact, before I go any fur­ther, I should point out that, even though I am list­ed as the author, I did not write it. 

Nope — I dic­tat­ed it into my cell phone. 

At this point, let me back up about five years. That’s when we got a new pup­py, a rather large minia­ture poo­dle, we named Kiki, (By the way, that’s not a French name. Ki means earth in the Abena­ki lan­guage.) The Kik­er is an enthu­si­as­tic high-octane baby, and if she doesn’t get her morn­ing walk, she’s about to burst. Those morn­ing walks come at the time when I was usu­al­ly writ­ing before she came along. But I fig­ured out how to do two things at once. With her leash in my left hand and my cell phone in my right hand, I could talk into that lit­tle word-catch­ing device any­thing I might oth­er­wise be tap­ping into my com­put­er. Then send it to myself in an email. Which email I would paste into a file and revise as needed.

At first, what I was dic­tat­ing were haiku. I have been com­pos­ing at least one every day for the last five years. (Over 1800 at last count.) Then I began to talk about things I was remem­ber­ing and things I was see­ing as we watched the change of sea­sons on our morn­ing strolls. Much of that end­ed up in a new non­fic­tion book of mine called A Year of Moons.

And then came Covid. It inter­rupt­ed a lot of things for me, espe­cial­ly trav­el and see­ing oth­er folks. But it did not total­ly change the life that my wife Nico­la and I were liv­ing in our cab­in on a nature pre­serve in the Adiron­dack foothills. We still had plen­ty of room to go out­side, and I could take my long morn­ing walks on the desert­ed log­ging road that runs past our property. 

Because of Covid, my thoughts often turned to what young peo­ple were expe­ri­enc­ing as a result of the enforced lock­downs all around the world. Then I began to think more specif­i­cal­ly about how it was affect­ing Reser­va­tion com­mu­ni­ties. I have been to many of them over the last half cen­tu­ry and have a lot of friends there. In my mind’s eye, I began to see a young woman on one of those com­mu­ni­ties — such as Indi­an Island or Pleas­ant Point in Maine. Then I saw a dog by her side. Not a poo­dle like my part­ner Kiki but one of the old reser­va­tion dogs that looks at least half wolf. And that is when I knew I had to tell their sto­ry, and the title for the book came to me.

That title, I should point out, was cho­sen before my favorite new TV series appeared — the one named Reser­va­tion Dogs that focus­es on sev­er­al mod­ern-day Native teenagers and an Okla­homa reser­va­tion. (Quite a few folks I know have been in that show and I even have pic­tures in my phone of some of them pos­ing in past years with me.)