Joseph Boyden
Joseph Boyden
Joseph Boyden CMis a Canadian novelist and short story writer. His first novel, Three Day Road won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His second novel, Through Black Spruce, won the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and his third book, The Orenda was named the winner of the 2014 edition of Canada Reads...
thinking play want
I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.
ideas greek tragedy
I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.
earth masters servant
We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.
powerful people focus
The beliefs of Native people are no less powerful or important just because they focus on a different "form of magic."
hate ideas people
There's a few scholars that object to how the italicized sections suggest that Native people are to take some part in the blame for how colonization occurred. But I say, "Yes they are." Not nearly as much blame as the colonizers, of course. But we are not just victims. I hate this idea that we are all just victimized and oppressed and etcetera etcetera. It's dehumanizing in its own way.
spring war people
The world is a different place in this new century, [...]. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. [...] War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.
survival world earth
I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it. but there is nothing in the world that needs us for its survival. We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.
country past two
America seems to celebrate its more violent past, but Canada doesn't like to recognize those things. The willingness to accept the existence of violence separates our two countries.
america talking people
People will say that Canada, unlike America, was not birthed from violence. But I want to say, "What are you talking about?" It's just not true.
blood stories sides
Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.
dream reality shadow
There's the concept that dreams are as important - if not more important - than reality. The attention that one pays to those things in the shadows is very much a part of the Indian experience.
needs stories
The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.