Aaron John Curtis, whose debut novel, Old School Indian, was published by Hillman Grad Books in May, introduced by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, author of seven books, most recently the nonfiction book Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings, published by Harper in June. (Credit: Curtis: Cacá Santoro, Jeffers: Sydney A. Foster)
When I first saw the title of Aaron John Curtis’s novel, Old School Indian, I suspected I’d be delighted, that he would offer something entirely unexpected and wholly fresh. I was not disappointed. Curtis explores so much in this one book—a heck of a great contemporary story, but more than that, a journey.
Old School Indian narrates the trials of Abe Jacobs, a Kanien’kehá:ka man living in Miami, Florida, who suffers from a disease that none of his white, Western doctors can figure out. He’s been poked and prodded and given tests, which yield no answers. In pain and desperate for an alleviation of his unknown sickness, Abe travels back to his family’s home in Ahkwesáhsne—what non-Indigenous people would call Mohawk territory, the region that straddles Canada and New York. There Abe engages his Uncle Budge to heal him with traditional Kanien’kehá:ka medicine.
Uncle Budge doesn’t look like anybody’s sage elder—in the first scene of the novel he is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with “four flaccid penises”—but as we travel deeper through the novel, the old man engages not only Abe’s body, but his spirit and heart. As readers we experience Abe’s story while also being allowed access to familial, cultural, and national histories. In presenting Old School Indian in such a way, Curtis crafts a narrative that is deeply affecting—a narrative that recalls trickster tales of old, those which distract the listener/reader with a present dilemma while teaching something needed—something wise.
Initially your novel started as a short story. What made you want to expand the story into this current, longer form? And how did the vision change from story to the first novel draft to the finished, published version?
The short story was basically an exercise, working through my fear of death and anger at [the possibility of] dying young—I was dealing with health issues much like what Abe experiences in the novel. Support and encouragement from a writers group I’d been in for a couple of years helped me expand it into a novel. The first draft jumped back and forth between timelines, a past one with Abe in college through leaving Miami for a healing, and a “present” 2016 one on the Rez, with poems in between. My editor wanted to raise the stakes at the beginning, so I had the idea to send Abe back home to Ahkwesáhsne before his diagnosis, rather than the diagnosis being the catalyst for going back, as I’d originally written it. I was so excited about the idea that I shared it with my agent and editor before I understood how much work it would entail. I thought it would be a matter of losing a bunch of Miami stuff and shifting scenes up, but it was nearly a complete rewrite. Unfortunately for me, they loved the idea. After that I was locked into this huge edit. I changed everything in the 2016 timeline and trimmed nearly half the book. Ultimately it worked wonders. In the first draft, the scene with Abe’s family on the porch was my favorite. It was largely comedic. In the final version the porch scene happens right after Abe’s diagnosis. The tone got a lot heavier, and the humor became a defense mechanism. It gave the whole interaction so much depth, and it was nothing I could have predicted, nothing I could have accomplished in the first draft.
Your novel explores the story of Abe while weaving in stories of his family members as well. How did this storytelling device affect the novel’s plot—and how did you make sure Abe remained at the center of the novel while simultaneously honoring what Indigenous scholar Gerald Vizenor calls narrative wisps?
Making the family stories part of his enlightenment was key. Everyone who tells a story does it to teach Abe something. In that sense it was easy to keep him centered. Originally the beginning of the novel was a bunch of different stories, but only the beginnings. Like, you’re at a bus stop and this guy sits down next to you and starts talking. It seems like a lot of nonsense, but really it’s a test—are you patient enough and willing to listen long enough to earn hearing the actual story? I had a lot of love for that first version. Picturing how it would frustrate the reader—switching gears just as the momentum got going—gave me joy, but my agent wisely pointed out that starting a story over and over for fifty pages probably wasn’t a good way to shop a book around. I’d like to think that style was a tribute to Mohawk’s circular storytelling, but it was really a symptom of growing up listening to my family. I heard the same story about my aunts buying overbright white sneakers a dozen times, but I only heard about how my great uncle Levi swindled Tóta out of half her land once. Some of that loopy version still remains, in the way Abe’s Tóta keeps coming back to life, depending on what timeline we’re in.
Cultural awareness and learning really underpin this story of the search for physical healing. In exploring the concept of traditional medicine, did you encounter unexpected revelations?
The story Uncle Budge tells about settlers getting angry with the Kanien’kehá:ka for prescribing the same plant for diarrhea and constipation is true. As it was explained to me, it’s because the plant knows why it’s there. When you introduce it to your intestinal tract, regardless of what ails you, the plant knows what your body needs. Humans don’t know why we’re here. We’ve created the climate crisis because we’ve forgotten we’re stewards of the planet, not owners. Medicine reveals itself to many people, but only those with respect for the plants will have new, stronger Medicines open to them. Abe downplays the healing he learns about because there’s no proof, but I know of healings with before-and-after testing that can’t be refuted. I won’t be discussing those healings on tour, because I also learned that talking about certain Medicine dilutes it. So we’ll have to be content with the cinematic version.
I absolutely love the narration of this novel, which allows the protagonist to evolve without the added burden of providing backstory. The fabulous first-person narrator, Dominick Deer Woods, communicates directly with the reader, providing historical and cultural information, while Abe inhabits the novel’s main action. How did you decide on this approach to narration—and then, how did you begin to craft the narrator’s voice?
Being an avid reader, I know what it feels like to be in conversation with a good book. I wanted to play with that, and I originally wrote the story with Abe’s voice in first person. The problem was, I’d kept a lot of fear and anger from the short story, the months when my specialists were narrowing their possible diagnoses down to several horrible deaths. The voice was actively hostile toward an imagined white reader. I was about to die, having done nothing of merit with my talent, but I would show this reader who they were and who they’d been before that happened. Author Diana Abu-Jaber suggested I switch to third person. A second writers group, one focused on finishing a long-form piece within a year, enjoyed the new version but said the narrative had lost something. Enter Dominick [Abe’s alter ego]. Abe plodded through life; Dominick capered. Making the switch back to first person in this new voice, I found Dominick was a lot more forgiving toward Abe and understanding of his flaws. Dominick also preferred humor to hostility, which made him a lot more fun to be around. A good thing, because from short story to published novel, I’ve had to spend ten years with the guy.
An excerpt from Old School Indian
AKHTSÍ:'A (MY BIG SISTER)
by Dominick Deer Woods
When I find her to say goodbye for the twelfth time
my sister’s eyes are bleary with craft brew growlers
remember when she wants to know
remember when
and I think of the time we talked about our dreams
and I think I know what it is to be a small, scared thing
trying to be invisible in the world because I have shrunk
myself into corners while a giant raged outside
my sister described an enormous hand stretching the
doorway to cracking and my body prickled like the skin
of a raw chicken
we shared the same dream because we share the same father
remember when she wants to know
and I think of the time she drank so much Southern
Comfort her boyfriend refused to let her ride in the cab
of his truck
so we rode in the bed and I held her hair from her face
while she covered it and us with SoCo vomit and we gagged
and we giggled
and she cried and told me about the trio of pale men who
preyed on her when she was walking home from work
like she always did
how they ran her down in an orange Chevy and dragged her
back to the bed and made an ash woman of her
and I pretended not to have made sense of her words as they
spewed
out and she pretended she’d never said anything
but after that night we shared an understanding
do you remember she asks
and I think of the time she drank Fireball Cinnamon Whisky
and we laughed
hard enough to fly a false tooth from her mouth
and we laughed even harder when it flew across the room
and I chased her around the rest of the night trying
to get a picture of her gap-toothed smile
and I knew the only reason she’d have a fake tooth I didn’t
know about was
because of the man
the man who made her briefly a woman of makeup and bows
makeup to contour the lumps and cover the bruises
a bow to pull her hair tight on one side and make her eyes
look even
but if I stopped laughing and trying to capture an image
then she’ll know I know so I keep trying and we keep
laughing
remember when
and I think of how she taught me about picklebacks
a shot of Jameson with a pickle juice chaser
and we laughed until she peed herself
and I thought of her birthing her good, strong boys
so much like her handsome husband
how they broke her body on the way out
and made her something she never knew she wanted to be
so the twelfth time I say goodbye that night
and we’re toasting with strong craft beer poured from
growlers and she pulls me in and on a wave
of beer breath tells me how a basswood tree
explodes with seeds before it dies
and when you see a cluster of basswood trunks
what you don’t see is the one that died
years before to create that abundance
and she tells me she is the tree
and her house and her husband and her boys
are the abundance and I think she’s finally
too sloppy to remember and I think of later how
this memory will glitter in my mind like a treasure
Four
AHKWESÁHSNE, 2016
Abe and Sis sit in Adirondack chairs on their parents’ back porch, the evening air sweet with blackberry from a patch of bushes near the shed and the faint traces of the ham Mom baked for dinner.
“What is it, again?” Sis asks.
“Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis.” Abe tries not to sound annoyed; she’s asked him to name his autoimmune diagnosis half a dozen times since he got home from The Good Road. Abe started out picking his way over each syllable like a novice hiker working a mountain, but now he’s almost got it down. Systemic Necrotizing Periarteritis, acronym: SNiP.
“SNiP” puts him in mind of Greek myths—the three Fates who spun mortal’s lives, allotted their length, and cut them accordingly. Clotho weaved this disorder into Abe’s life, Lachesis is spooling out his final months, and Atropos is getting ready to cut. Only it won’t be shears for Abe, nothing so clean and quick. No, SNiP will saw at the thread of him like a rusty nail file.
He has browser tabs open to Johns Hopkins’ and the National Organization for Rare Disorders’ pages for SNiP, along with a tab from the Alzheimer’s Association. Vascular dementia is going to hit him in a matter of months. Soon his brain will start to rot, giving him strange moods and stranger habits, stealing days at first, and then years, erasing his friends, his family, Alex, everyone he’s ever known.
Since the rheumatologist gave him the diagnosis Abe has been praying. Not to avoid his fate—they don’t know what causes SNiP, and there is no cure—but to be happy, not mean or violent. He imagines himself opening his arms to everyone for a hug, calling out, “Hey, stranger”—either a warm greeting for a new friend (or nurse, more likely) or a clever “joke” if the person turns out to be family. It’s me, Abe—your sister, Cass will say. I know, he’ll laugh, knowing nothing of the sort. Picturing his future is like mourning himself, like he’s already gone.
Excerpted from Old School Indian by Aaron John Curtis. © 2025 by Aaron John Curtis. Used with permission of the publisher, Hillman Grad Books, an imprint of Zando, LLC.
