MinnPost: Jim Northrup is once again walking the 'Rez Road'

The 70-year-old Anishinaabe writer and Vietnam War veteran is pretty much a Northland fixture, and his picture has appeared with his syndicated column “The Fond du Lac Follies” (it runs in “The Circle,” “The Native American Press,” “News from Indian Country,” and “Pine Journal”) for nearly 25 years. He’s traveled widely across the U.S. and beyond, talking about his writing and the native way of life; he’s been the subject of a film documentary, “Jim Northrup: With Reservations”; and his book “Walking the Rez Road” has just been reissued in an expanded 20th anniversary edition by Fulcrum Books.

“I think it’s aged pretty well,” he says, and it has. In the book, Northrup’s main character (and admitted alter-ego of sorts) Luke Warmwater has come home from Vietnam and is trying to make sense of a world that is the mostly same although he has been vastly changed by war. Sounds pretty contemporary, doesn’t it? Except that PTSD hadn’t been named or treated yet, and Vietnam veterans were shunned. Warmwater eventually seeks help for his PTSD, and puts himself together again in part by pursuing traditional activities that sustained his family for generations — even though his connection to the Ojibwe language and ways had been damaged by years spent in forced assimilation boarding school program.

When Northrup came back to the reservation, he lived for several years in a teepee on the side of a lake, where he began to write stories and poems about his experiences. Today, he’s glad to see veterans come home to a stronger support system and a more understanding society.