Harold R. Johnson

Harold R. Johnson (c. 1957– February 9, 2022) was a Canadian indigenous lawyer and writer, whose book Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (And Yours) was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English-language non-fiction at the 2016 Governor General's Awards.^[1] The book, an examination of the problem with alcohol consumption among Canadian First Nations, draws on Johnson's work as a Crown prosecutor in northern Saskatchewan.^[2]

Johnson told CBC Radio interviewer Shelagh Rogers in 2016 that his father was a Swedish immigrant and his mother a Cree woman in Saskatchewan, where he was born. He enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy and worked as a logger, trapper and miner before going to university as an adult, completing his education in law with an MA at Harvard.^[3] He was a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation.^[4]

After being diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, Johnson died on February 9, 2022, at the age of 64.^[4] His twelfth and final book, The Power of Story was released posthumously in October of the same year.

Bibliography

Fiction

• Billy Tinker (2001)
• Back Track (2005)
• Charlie Muskrat (2008)
• The Cast Stone (2011)
• Corvus (2015)
• The Björkan Sagas (2021)

Nonfiction

• Two Families: Treaties and Government (2007)
• Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (and Yours) (2016)
• Clifford (2018)
• Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada (2019)
• Cry Wolf: (2020)^[5]
• The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era

References

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