Joseph Boyden's trilogy for the Birds
If a writer's outed as a "pretendian," does this cancel his craft?
When I began this Canadian novelist’s series on the Bird family (Cree/ ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯ Anishinaabe), I didn’t know about the controversy over his claims of indigeneity. The book blurbs acknowledged his ancestry as Irish-Scots-First Nation/Métís (that last marker in itself’s a contested realm as the descendants of French-native relationships themselves have qualified in the Dominion as their own recognized ethnicity lately).
As I’ve mulled over on this blog briefly, the concept of who’s “native” intrigues me, given my own roots pull upon for lack of a better term “Celtic as in the O’s and Macs” and within that, the island’s long-despised, long-romanticized “internal exile” Traveller/ fka Tinker-Irish gypsy [sic] community. Wikipedia demonstrates its own terms carry their own parsed nuances. (Irish: an lucht siúil, meaning “the walking people”), also known as Pavees or Mincéirs[3] (Shelta: Mincéirí),[4] are a traditionally peripatetic indigenous[5] ethno-cultural group originating in Ireland.[6][7][8] Why does identity matter so little to many I know, but weigh so heavily on my psyche? A few of you out there know my own “origin story” and doubtless, as Deasy rationalized to Stephen early in Ulysses, “history is to blame.” Never doubt the Force that be with you.
Back to the Great White, in more ways than one, North: I confess I speak out of sun-smogged ignorance, born and bred about as far south of the 49th Parallel as a clueless ‘Murican can get. {As an aside, I wonder how many Latin Americans have enrolled themselves post-facto into “tribal membership” compared to Northerners? I consider in Ecuador how its greatest artist of the past century revelled in his maternally mestiza, paternally indigenous, bonafides. Oswaldo Guayasamin’s pride of the nation. His work appeals little to me, but it’s undeniably on the egotistical level of Picasso, the ideological harmony with Diego Rivera-Frida Kahlo/ Siquieros/ Orozco, and the concerted push a century ago for the indigenista reassertion of the aesthetic as politic which swept across the continent. Let’s just say that the standard novel canonized in the Republic’s consciousness and its curriculum continues to be Jorge Icaza’s 1934 Huasapingo. A tough go for me as his Spanish is peppered with bilingual renderings: “que fue traducido a una gran cantidad de idiomas” much true to a proto-Steinbeck/ Jack Londonish ‘social[ist] realism'“ of that red-blooded decade of Uncle Joe, but I haven’t come across in my admittedly limited study any castigations of Icaza’s own “blanco” birth deployed to diminish the impact of his work upon raising awareness of the hardships heaped upon the Kichwa-speakers of the nation. But nobody would’ve expected him to pass for “native,” compared to his fellow-traveler Guayasamin…)
Manos de protesta (Hands of Protest), 1968, Fundación Guayasamín.
Yet, these debates over who’s what keep me mulling over why, as with the “racialized” framework within which these skirmishes flare, we’re so caught up in the dichotomy of 1) hey, race and ethnicity (the two often confused) aren’t but skin-deep. Anyone claiming other than we’re 99.99% identical beneath our epidermis doesn’t trust the science. 2) Uh, that “social construct” you’re weaponizing isn’t one to mess with, stranger. Given millennia of exclusion, genocide, assimilation, slavery, emigration, conversion, deportation, elimination, every manner of abuse, outrage, shame, and all sorts of triple negatives strung together as a stranglehold. Rather than rights of people to claim their heritage, affirm bloodlines, assert beliefs, work their land, prosper amidst their natural legacy, name their landscapes, raise their children, teach them in ancestral ways, live in peace, tell their lore, insist upon the veracity of “lived experience,” flourish among their stored bounty, and speak their truest tongues.
“Canadian Indigenous Children being seized by the RCMP”(Kent Monkman)
I lack pat platitudes, as a wapiskiwiyas ᐊᐧᐱᐢᑭᐃᐧᔭᐢ. I’ll post my reviews from Goodreads after finishing the past week or so the Boyden series. And I integrate an intelligent article from the Australian Quillette site, as that in turn under Jonathan Kay and his fellow citizens enriches their investigations into Canada’s deployment, accelerating under Trudeau fils’ regime, of restrictive terms, coercive power, concerted censorship, state surveillance, lucrative gigs for self-credentialed grifters dealing out guilt for CD$//seminar; judicial overreach, irresponsible journalism, academic cloud-cuckoo-land acknowledgements, and posses of well-funded scolding shunters. Tellingly, Margaret Atwood’s been taken aback at her nation’s overreach.
What begins with the intent no sane mind can oppose, protecting children online, slides the slippery slope into an avalanche obliterating any attempt to express content the least bit iffy. I encourage you to watch the video, part of Andy Larney’s deft critique. Boyden’s asserting, as Atwood, the creator’s liberty to imagine, to invent. And in a country where the plaintive Rupi Kaur (she eschews capitaliz/sation) tops the bestseller list at Indigo with waifish, internet-friendly milk and honey, all they need are emojis, sub-Rod McKuen versifying, Canada and its southern neighbo/ur’s audiences (and I hope the Maple Leaf’d land continues to elevate the written word as evident in my last visit, admittedly 2009, in Toronto where bookstores seemed to me, raised on strip malls, as secular cathedrals, packed as stadiums, stocked as if Wal-Mart) deserve discrimination of the aesthetic kind. Does anyone even use that term positively today?
“Joseph Boyden isn't indigenous. But his historical fiction is still worth reading.”
Two-star review of Through Black Spruce (#2 in trilogy, but latest chronologically)
I wanted to really read The Orenda and Three Day Road, but I figured I'd start with this other book in the Bird Trilogy. I liked the parts narrated by Uncle Will. The vividness of living off the land, the harshness of the North, and the scenes of hunting, action, and contemplation work effectively.
There's beautiful writing by Boyden, but not too much. He keeps the tone aligned more with what Will would've have phrased, and this keeps the style consistent, more convincing, and less stagy.
However, the other plot with Annie "down south" in the big cities never captured me. Boyden's handling of the few lively confrontations finds Annie's narration at its strongest. But I never got the sense that she was living the life of her sister, Suzanne, and the modelling world and the nightclubs, the DJ Butterfoot, the PPG posse of gal pals: none of this drew me in. As Annie herself admits late on, the experience of living large in Manhattan feels hermetic, cut off from the reality of the streets. This may be Boyden's way of detaching her from her surroundings, but it doesn't keep you turning the pages with a "can't wait" feeling to find out what comes next. The pace does move more sprightly towards the end as the two plots converge, but it's slow going for too long before.
There's loose ends not tidied up. I wonder if these are evident in the other two books, but given they happen respectively about eight decades earlier, and about four centuries before, I have my doubts. But I think plots that lack entirely resolved strands often seem more true to life, and less artificial.
I hope the other two volumes in the series catch fire more, and I am guessing given their plot-lines with the initial incursions of Jesuit missionaries and WWI respectively that there'll be quicker pacing, violent struggles, and deeper explorations of the masculine drive to survive amidst chaos. And how the feminine counterpart exerts its own energies, within a conflict against arrayed forces.
P.S. I append this as not until I was already reading this novel did I, curious about a vague rumor I recalled about "pretendian" charges against this author, learn about the controversy in Canada a few years ago. Suffice to say I tried to critique his creative endeavor on its own intrinsic merit, separate from the charges levelled against its storyteller. There's an awful lot of folks cancelling an artist's oeuvre once there's been the proof of "inauthenticity" marshalled against any past trace of its reception upon its publication when said creator was lauded for what later results in backlash. I understand the complexity of identification, imagination, and fidelity, as these forces ebb, flow, and contend with another. Posturing condemnation, firm defenses, truth for a teller of fiction: totalling an elusive expression of mystery, of how one's inner, inchoate powers contend with sly "reality."
Two-star review of Three Day Road (#1 in trilogy, second chronologically)
I'd finished Through Black Spruce with a letdown by its lack of momentum. Surely, I thought, as I wrote that review, this WWI second installment would not suffer from that flaw. But it did, fatally, unbelievably. Boyden's a creative writing prof, or was when he created this trilogy. The result feels like it's the culmination of homework, from a series of workshops. The pieces are in place, and neatly arranged as they were in the first book, going back and forth between different periods, alternating settings. It's crafted, but it lacks the inner dynamic that not only beckons you in, but keeps you going. Instead, it's a respectable effort, but not one I'd expect to garner the awards and praise it did. I reckoned this would be not only a vivid (and it is in its evidently researched detail) but an engrossing look at the contrasts of Cree life and that of a sniper team hunting in trenches.
As I mentioned in my previous review, I didn't know of the controversy about the author's claims of indigenous ancestry when I began the Bird family saga. I don't think that having learned of it, that this subsequent 'cancelling' detracts from the story itself. Many may disagree. Boyden's defended the right to create what he's impelled to do. And who knows what lies beyond the reach of DNA testing (which cannot truly pinpoint Native 'blood'), and which persists in family lore, and the relationships that a family tree may not reveal. We all know of the secrets that a bureaucratic, formulaic system cannot today verify, and I'm content to let Boyden's imagination unfold as it has.
I regularly keep a slip of paper in what I read to keep track of memorable passages or quotes. The fact that while Through Black Spruce had but three notations says something. And that for Three Day Road, I made none. Outside of a well-told assault that leads to hand-to-hand combat with 'Fritz,' I didn't find any scene improving (not the best verb) on what I'd read about the horrors of the Great War elsewhere. I will be reporting on the final part, The Orenda, as its topic of Jesuit-First Nations contact and conflict attracts me more than that of the other two volumes, so I hope that Boyden's talent 'redeems' itself in its retelling of this dramatic clash and mesh of two nations.
Four-star review of The Orenda (#3 in trilogy, first chronologically)
I've reviewed the other two parts from the Bird family trilogy recently. There, I've shared my thoughts regarding the controversy which, after The Orenda completed the series a decade ago, ensued about Joseph Boyden's claims of indigenous/Métís heritage. Suffice to say you can check the pair of previous reviews as I don't need to repeat them thrice. But let's just say I found The Orenda easily the most assured in its telling and the least sluggish in its rendering of the earliest generation of the Bird family as they established contact with the Iron People, the French traders and the Jesuits.
I've always been intrigued by the complexities of this shattering encounter, having read Brian Moore's novel Black Robe, taught the film based on it, and studied the less accessible but typically ambitious Fathers and Crows as part of another narrative cycle, the Seven Nations by William T. Vollmann. In his afterward, Boyden credits sources such as Alan Greer's anthology from the Jesuit Relations, Bruce Trigger's massive anthropology of the Huron/ Wendat, and Emma Anderson's work on the North American Martyrs. Visiting the Canadian historic site where the settlement of the "charcoal" clerics housed the converts, I could visualize clearly Boyden's deftly told depictions of the assault by the Haudenosaunee/ Iroquois upon the Catholic fortress compound which powerfully reverberates here.
It takes about a third before the action really picks up, although like Three Day Road during WWI, the setting naturally isn't far from threats of violence. And around halfway, as the conflict between those willing to convert and those resistant to abandoning tradition deepens among the Huron as they're surrounded by their enemies, the pace quickens. Although I'd say The Orenda finds its surer footing thanks to the real-life testimonies upon which it's basing its plots, it, like Through Black Spruce, stumbles into the shamanic Magick Indian realms which feel rather taken from secondhand accounts, and which perhaps unavoidably veer into well-worn tropes familiar to readers of indigenous tales retold. Maybe it's difficult to keep these kinds of imaginative re-creations fresh after centuries of over-familiarity?
Still, this saga succeeded far more nimbly than the other two installments. It's first in chronology but last in publication, and Boyden's sharpened his skills. So that it feels more lived with than its predecessors, less a.product of an MFA program (which was his profession throughout the period spanning the production of the trilogy). I found the culminating scenes with Père Christophe “Crow” quite moving, and Boyden's adaptation of Sts Isaac Jogues and Kateri Tekakwitha into his fictional cast of characters works well. The eponymous warrior Bird, and his adopted daughter Snows Fall, enable Boyden to.alternate each chapter effectively, and he distinguishes the three protagonists as more distinctive tellers than he had the two main ones in each of the two earlier novels. There's very faint suggestions about commonalities inherited hundreds of years later by members of the Bird clan, but you don't need to have finished the novels in a particular order. But I'm glad I persevered and began with Through, then Three, before saving Orenda for last. And I felt the same as at the end of Through, as if Boyden's chronicle hasn't yet found its denouement. I wonder if we'll ever hear more from the Birds?