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JUDIT ÁGNES KÁDÁR
another dimension to comprehend and interpret the actual story of two Cree
guys going to European wars and expands its scope with an allusion to the
survival of First Nations communities and individuals in modern times.
We observe how the two kids grow up in the context of clashing cultures
and paradigms. The residential school and the urban environment are a
harsh contrast with Niska’s bush land. The binary of Western and Indigenous
paradigms appears in different settings, for instance the European war frontline
and the army, though these sites of interaction do not significantly change the
protagonists. The author specifies one aspect of those worlds that Xavier finds
challenging but Elijah seems to adjust to all too easily: violence. The windigo killer
story denotes violence, too, for the reader can understand the wisdom behind
killing the evil spirited one in the community insofar as violence is accepted
as an essential part of the world. However, in European and Anglo-Canadian
culture, racist verbal violence and actual physical violence in the modern
warfare of the First World War perpetuate countless examples of inhumanity
and the two friends react very differently to this. While Elijah becomes the chief
killer at war, Xavier says: “I will never understand this god, these people”? who
celebrate love, forgiveness and purity at Christmas and constantly act against
their faith. The violence-related allusions compare Western and Indigenous
notions of violence: “The sickness of the windigo could spread as surely as the
invisible sickness of the white man wemistikoshiw”.* The windigo killer appears
in parallel worlds: the Huns’ new weapons in the First World War resemble the
weapons of cultural genocide applied in Anglo-American and Indian relations,
like the residential schools and other racist means of conquest.
The particular communities as sites of shifting identity transformations are
the residential school, the small Canadian town community with “converted
Indians [who] look full of food", "a place of stones and glass called Toronto”!°
and the army on the French frontline, signifying the double frontline" of military
warfare and racism. All these sites of transformation are marked by initial
conflict and gradual acculturation, but obviously to various extents in the case
of the two Cree youngsters. The dichotomy between archetypical and critically
depicted civilizations versus the wilderness” seems to give rise to alienation and
conflict for them. However, other human beings, both white and Indigenous, are
what surprise or shock Elijah and Xavier, due to their attitudes which perpetuate
the problem of innate racism and their personality shortcomings.
7 Boyden, Three Day Road, 309.
8 Ibid., 263.
, Ibid.,174.
1 Tbid., 87.
1! Ibid., 327.
Laroque uses the abbreviated reference to “civ/sav” (68) in Emma Laroque, The Metis in
English Canadian literature, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. III, No. 1 (1983),
85-94, http://www3.brandonu.ca/library/CJNS/3.1/laroque.pdf (accessed 1 October 2016).
e 312"