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JUDIT ÁGNES KÁDÁR
of racism, discrimination, identity turmoil, acculturation challenges,
identity negotiation and authenticity. I explore how the widespread pattern
of return to Indigeneity is actually tackled in the view of different personal
transformation processes. Two powerful novels published the same year seem
to have had a major impact on Boyden’s Three Day Road: the US Southwestern
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and the Canadian Timothy Findley’s
The Wars (1977).
A series of Boyden’s novels explore the challenges of identity construction:
Three Days Road (2005), Through Black Spruce (2008) and The Orenda (2013).
Here I will focus on the first in this series, which uses a historic incident to
draw parallels with some contemporary concerns and explores how certain
“broken taboos and uncomfortable truths” related to mixed ethno-cultural
heritage in North America perpetuate in a broader sense the problems of ethnic
pride, shame and stigma, and which Paula Gunn Allen has called “conflicting
blood strains.”? As for Canadian mixed blood writers, what Tomson Highway
(Cree), Drew Hayden Taylor and Richard Wagamese (Ojibwe), Thomas King
(Cherokee) and Richard Van Camp (Dogrib) share is their Indigenous and
Caucasian ancestry and their sensibility for embodying conflicting ethno¬
cultural heritages of aboriginal and Anglo-American nature. Similarly, in
the US Southwest, Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna/ Scottish/ Lebanese) and Silko
(Laguna Pueblo/ Mexican/ Anglo-American), have paved the literary way for
writing about previously stigmatized mixed blood identities, while Wilma
Mankiller (Cherokee/ Irish/ Dutch), Louis Owens (Cherokee/ Choctaw/
Irish) and the by now nationally aclaimed Joy Harjo of Muskogee, (Cherokee/
French /Irish) focuses on the so called “hybrid potential,” that replaces the
earlier stigmatized identity of their protagonists. 1 am aware of the mixed
critical reception of any approach to an author’s ethnocultural affiliation, the
Authenticity Debate, the colonial blood quantum ideology, and I respect the
authors’ self-identification and the occasional refusal to discuss mixed heritage
and the Anglo-American part of one’s ancestry respectively. Nevertheless,
I am convinced that beyond measuring how much one is considered
Indigenous, increased ethno-cultural awareness and knowledge does matter
and play a significant role in our understanding of diverse archives of cultural
knowledge and our ability to narrate, edit and recreate identity.
3 In Gunn Allen’s “Dear World” the author shares her dilemmas, frustrations and emotional
load that derives from her mixed Euro-American and Pueblo heritage and refers to the
historical conflicts between the colonizer and the colonized that mixed blood persons
internalize and take as a lifetime psychological challenge.
4 Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixed Blood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians,
in Monika Kamp - D. J. Rosenthal (eds.), Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American
Literary Dialogues. Austin, Texas University, 2002, 227-239.
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