Like many readers, I have been following the discussion resulting from the findings of the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network (APTN) that literary superstar Joseph Boyden has no verifiable indigenous ancestry.
Any person whose ancestors have lived here for a century or more likely has at least some aboriginal blood. Of course all human blood is the same colour, and what we are really talking about here is ancestry. Identity and ancestry are related. The former is flexible, the latter is fixed.
The news about Joseph Boyden seems to have upset non-aboriginals much less than aboriginals. This is understandable because of our colonial past, and because indigenous people are working to free themselves from a history of oppression. They don’t want someone to benefit from falsely claiming to be one of the oppressed.
As a fair-skinned blue-eyed middle class woman, I belong to a privileged class. However, I will never be as privileged as middle or upper class white males, and as an aging woman I have had some encounters with discrimination. I am sure, however, that these have been nothing compared with the prejudice non-whites experience.
The concept of status is, of course, government imposed. The correct status grants all sorts of rights and privileges; the lack of it may exile one to a shack on a road allowance.
In my years at the public library when I was issuing library cards, I saw Status Indian cards from people who “looked” no more Indian than I do. This fact reinforced the arbitrariness of status and the extent to which it may determine the course of our lives.
Aboriginals have suffered the worst of this arbitrariness, but it has by no means been confined to them. Immigration officials blithely changed the spellings of names to anglicize them—or even assigned entirely new names, both first and last. Many Ukrainians who came from the Austro-Hungarian empire were classified as Austrian, and as such were interned as enemy aliens during the First World War. Many of these “enemy aliens” and their descendants were so confused—or so embarrassed—by their identity they kept on describing themselves as “Austrian” for generations. Who was going to question the authority of someone who could change your destiny with the stroke of a pen?
When I was a much younger person, say 12 or 13, I subscribed to the idea that immigrants should simply become Canadian. That meant speak only English, give up their stinky food, and become as bland and polite as most of the people born here.
I went to school with a few Japanese kids whose families had been relocated to southern Alberta from the coast, and their quietness and light skin colour made them seem inoffensively Canadian. At the time I had only a vague sense of the trauma they and their parents and grandparents had endured.
As for any people with aboriginal ancestry in our midst, they usually did their best to pass for white. It was seldom mentioned in the family setting that three of my mother’s uncles had married native women (one had in fact married a full-blooded Cree and he and his wife both died of TB on what used to be the Hobbema reserve when I was a young child). When we encountered the stereotypical drunk Indians passed out on the grass on our rare visits to Lethbridge, we walked around them on the sidewalk.
At the same time that I at least loosely held to the prejudices of the day, I was fascinated by foreignness and began to see that people different from myself had something to teach me. Over time I made tentative steps to understand what these people unlike myself had to offer. I had no idea then how much my own life could be enriched by adopting some of these “foreign” ways and of how psychically damaging it could be to be forced to give up most of one’s essential self.
When my dad started school, he was beaten for speaking Norwegian—the only language he knew—and had his hand tied behind his back to cure him of left-handedness. On the paternal side, I am clearly 100 percent Norwegian, if it is possible to be 100 percent anything. On my mother’s side, things are more confused. They claim their origin as British, although a friend born in Norway says their surname is typically Norwegian. I wonder if the family decided to be British to avoid being classified as Other.
When I was younger I had no interest in anything Norwegian. Partly this was because my mother was so scornful of the foreignness of my father’s family. As I get older I am more attracted to this peaceable and safe northern country. I doubt I will ever have the money or time to travel there extensively but a fjord tour seems more and more appealing. I would love to experience the midnight sun at least once—either in Canada or in the land of my ancestors.
As the youngest of eleven children, born when his father was an old man, Joseph Boyden must have felt constrained by his Roman Catholic Celtic background. He must have felt the need of something more or something different, which he seems to have found in the aboriginal community. His claim to be partially aboriginal may have been an attempt to escape loneliness by finding a different community.
It is a truism of modern literary life that any writer who wants to make it must stay in the public gaze with constant self-promotion. His supposed aboriginal roots have been central to Joseph Boyden’s self-promotion. Since the APTN report he has wisely kept out of the spotlight, giving only one interview that I know of, with his friend Candy Palmater. In this interview he said that he has received only one prize specifically intended for indigenous writers.
The Italian writer Elena Ferrante has been the opposite of Boyden in the way she has purposely made a mystery of her identity. In taking her insistence that her writing speak for itself to such an extreme, she may, ironically, only have increased her appeal in some circles. (And by being such a good and best-selling writer, she has led some to suggest she is actually a man!)
Boyden’s talent is so immense that he did not really need much else to draw the reader in, although he or his agent may have felt he did. I am saddened by this whole brouhaha, which seems so indicative of how reputations are made and then ruined in the age of social media.
At the same time, nothing can take away from me the excitement of reading Three Day Road for the first time. Native snipers in the First World War had never been of much interest to me until I read this book. Through this book a world I hadn’t thought about before opened up to me.