Response to Leo, Part II

Leo, my sincere apologies for my extended 'absence'--we took a 10-day family vacation, unplanned and impromptu, and all the more refreshing for it.

I really appreciate the levels on which you compared Three Day Road and its treatment of history and minority with Chinese-Canadian history, especially the 'head tax' and the granting of citizenship post-WWII. When I teach Three Day Road, I teach it alongside another Canadian historical novel (which you might have read--if not, I highly recommend it), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe, set in Vancouver, and which deals in part with the repercussions of the head tax, Chinese-Canadian work on the CPR, and federal immigration policies that had a marked impact on everyday family life.

You are right, that Boyden's treatment of characters' responses to 'ostracism', as you put it so well, is very interesting. In Three Day Road, we've got the range of responses you've identified: Elijah attempts to 'pass' as mainstream, and does an admirable, even enviable, job of mimicking the English speakers in their dialect and mannerisms, without their truly picking up on the fact that he is mimicking them. Niska, in turn, remains grounded in her aboriginal customs, and invokes them in the sweat-lodge passage, as well as in others, as not only a means of regaining solid ground beneath her feet, but as a means of gaining agency in a largely white world. I love the way that Boyden portrays the Native culture as, literally, occupying the peripheries of mainstream, white culture, and both the marginalization and agency that derive from this. I think that what I appreciate most about the many wonderful things in his novel is how Boyden ends up sustaining aboriginal myth-systems, customs, and ways of being in the world in the very fabric of everyday life that he portrays. In other words, the Native myths and 'magic' (you might call it) never disappear, they're never 'explained away' as somehow unreal or part of a merely discursive myth system, they continue, up to the very end, to remain active in the threadwork of the very world the characters inhabit, and even enable the two key characters, Niska and her nephew, to start over again in the world.

On that note, it is very poignant that Boyden also allows the Windigo/cannibalism theme to become a substantial part of the WWI scenes that take place on the front. In this way, WWI ceases to remain the 'Euro-Canadian' narrative it has largely been historically, and itself becomes subsumed within a larger aboriginal discursive and cultural aesthetic/epistemology. This is a remarkable and precedent-setting novel in these ways, as no other historical novel does this in quite the same way.