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THE SHIFTING SITES OF IDENTITY NEGOTIATION IN BOYDEN’S THREE Day ROAD
Boyden scrutinizes ethnic stereotypes and discrimination, shame and
victimhood with regard to First Nations identity in general and Cree identity
in intercultural encounters and the First World War, respectively. Three Day
Road works at multiple narrative levels as a war novel, a buildungsroman and
a postcolonial counter-narrative. As for identity negotiation and the shifting
sites of identity formulation, i.e., the physical and spiritual “journey,” Boyden’s
novel presents us with a contrastive pair of personality developments depicted
within a concentric circle of sites. Three Day Road is a story of two Cree
friends and hunters from Ontario, Xavier Bird and Elijah Weesegeechak/
Whiskeyjack. Xavier was raised by his aunt Niska in the bush, while Elijah ran
away from a residential school and was raised with Xavier. The friends join
the Canadian army and fight in the Firat World War actually fighting their
own “wars” on different fronts, those of military, racial, physical, mental and
spiritual nature. Xavier, the quiet one, clings to his Cree identity and finds the
war an alien environment. Elijah, on the other hand, is more adaptive to white
Canadian lifestyle and war mentality even at the loss of a sense of self. The
friends become emotionally separated and their spirits drift into in different
worlds. For Xavier, returning home means reconnection with his heritage and
also healing the unbearable wounds of his heart.
Three Day Road is narrated in a vague, shifting time and has a special
storyline. The narrative is cyclic, starting from the return from war and
reconnecting with Indigeneity. To understand the latter, Boyden takes us back
to the childhood of the protagonists, with references to Niska’s birth before
that, when the wmistikoshiw (whites) still depended on the Natives. Storytelling
is in fact part of the identity negotiation process, especially when it makes
references to the gaps between narrator, listener and the archaic tradition: it is
a virtual umbilical cord per se. However, there are numerous indications of the
challenges such a reconnection with Indigeneity might entail, and of the slight
chance of success any naive claim to complete recovery and full reintegration
to a tribal community might have. The ending of the narrative, the sweat
lodge scene, the ritual purification and reference to Xaviers future sons?
reconnects the cyclic storyline to the beginning of the novel, while giving a
future dimension to it as well. In addition to the organic pattern of storytelling
(Niska and Xavier) with its rolling, embracing and cyclic nature serves as a
source of wisdom and healing therapy, too. Laura Groningen and Neta Gordon
agree that, within the “healing aesthetics” of Boyden’s novel, the author’s aim
is to devictimize, commemorate and destigmatize the Aboriginal soldiers and
to “recover marginalized histories.”° In addition, the windigo story provides
Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, Toronto, Penguin Canada, 2005, 379.
Neta Gordon, Time Structures and the Healing Aesthetic of Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road,
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/11212/11952 (accessed 4 April 2017).
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