When CBC journalist Duncan McCue was asked to write about an influential teacher in his life, his thoughts turned to a five-month trip in the bush with a man named Robbie Matthew Sr. McCue had recently graduated high school with top marks, a 17-year-old half-Ojibwe, half-white teenager, completely confused about his identity. When his father asked if he'd like to take a year off school to hunt, trap and fish in the wilds of James Bay, McCue jumped at the chance.

In The Shoe Boy, McCue revisits this challenging and rewarding period of his life in vibrant detail. Below, McCue describes re-living his time on the trapline and the startling memories he unearthed.

"It was difficult to remember details at first. I have some very vivid memories of the time and so I started with those. I found that the process of writing brought out incredible amount of detail — almost as if it was submerged in my memory. I was surprised at the end of a writing day how much stuff was buried down deep in there that I hadn't thought about for a really long time. But once I started writing about the taste of blueberries, or recalling one particular hunting incident, where we were going after a ptarmigan on a hill, or something like that, it would start to evoke a number of other memories. It seemed to dislodge all those memories that had been there latent."

"Being out with Robbie really was like being out with an encyclopedia for that portion of land. He had so much knowledge about the land itself, the animals and their patterns, the lakes the rivers, where the plants were growing. He'd grown up living in that territory, he had been passed on his authority from his father and grandfather. He taught me a great deal about the land and animals that we were pursuing.

"Probably in larger lessons that he shared were about teaching itself. He wasn't the kind of guy that would sit there and lecture me for hours at a time. He very much, in a Cree way, taught experientially. He would put me in situations where he would know I'd learn something. So if I wasn't dressed warm enough, he would never sit down and lecture me about it. He would just send me out on a short trip to get water and I would realize pretty quickly that I wasn't dressed properly. That quiet lesson ended up teaching me more than sitting and being lectured me for three hours. It was a lot of learning by doing, and he would put me in situations where I had really visceral learning experiences."

"Seventeen is a tough age for any young man or woman but it was particularly tough for me as a Native teen, trying to find my place and understand my culture — my dual culture, as I'm half Native. It was a journey of cultural identity for me and I think there are lots of young Indigenous teenagers these days who are probably going through similar journeys of looking into their cultural heritage and trying to figure out where they fit in the 21st century in Canada.

"It's not unusual for a teenager to question their cultural identity. I think with Indigenous teens there's a couple things going on to make it more difficult. One thing is mainstream, stereotypical notions of what Indians look like and how Indians act. That can be very difficult when you're trying to sort that out in your own head. The other reality is that a lot of Indigenous families in the 21st century are having to go through a period of de-colonization and cultural revitalization. There has been a deliberate act of successive governments in Canada to take Indigenous people away from their land and cultural identity. It's a real credit to so many knowledge keepers that we still have a vibrant connection to our lands and identity. But it does mean that for a lot of urban Indigenous kids and a lot of kids on the reservation as well, it's almost a renaissance or re-learning that you need to go through in your teens to understand your roots and to really unpack what it means to be Indigenous in this day and age."

"It was a really hard learning experience, those five months I spent in the bush. There was one particularly bleak day where I was feeling especially down because I had failed to kill a beaver. I think because of the loneliness and the sense of failure I was feeling, and also because of the immensity of the bush, I found myself suicidal. That is not something that I have talked with anyone about. It isn't even something that I quite remembered. I had just put it away. I think they would call it suicide ideation. I was certainly not — I didn't come close to committing the act, I didn't even think about committing the act, but I did for a couple of hours think about suicide. That was extremely startling to me, to have that memory come back to me in my mid-40s quite viscerally.

"I had a strong childhood. I had loving parents. Suicide is not something that has ever occurred to me ever since. Of course, I think most people know that suicide is a big issue in Indigenous communities, has been for years and continues on today. We hear, unfortunately fairly frequently in the news about communities that are going through a suicide epidemic and I've reported on those stories myself, standing in front of yet another First Nation community that's lost several of its youth by suicide. It was a bit difficult for me to start to unpack what was a personal experience. I did conclude that that desperation, that sadness that youth sometimes feel, I did feel it myself at that time. The good news is that you can get through those tough periods in your life and hopefully people will take that away from what I've been able to say."