Joseph Boyden.

profile by Joe Wiebe
posted October 12, 2005

Since Three Day Road came out last spring, Joseph Boyden has spent much of his time on the road promoting the book throughout North America and even overseas. In September, he was midway across the Atlantic returning to Toronto from London when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. This was of particular interest to him because he has made his home in New Orleans for more than a decade, and more importantly, his wife Amanda was there. Luckily, she was able to evacuate to Houston before the storm hit.

Over the next few weeks, as reports of the extensive damage to New Orleans started to appear in the media, Boyden began to worry about his friends and students at the University of New Orleans where he teaches Creative Writing. Using journalist badges, he and his wife were able to re-enter New Orleans. It turns out their neighbourhood had stayed dry, and even though many tree limbs had been knocked down in the storm, their house was essentially unscathed—and untouched by looters.

When I spoke to Boyden on the telephone from Montreal a few weeks later, he said he fell in love with New Orleans as a teenager when he hitchhiked there from Ontario one summer. Later, after studying at York University in Toronto, he decided to pursue writing and applied to only one graduate school: the University of New Orleans.

After graduating, Boyden spent a couple of “life-changing” years teaching on reserves up in James Bay. Although he traces two separate Native bloodlines in his family’s past, Métis and Micmac, he’d considered himself “mostly European” growing up. He did, however, spend much of the summers of his youth visiting with relatives on and around the Parry Island reserve (Wasauksing) near Parry Sound, Ontario. And it was there that he learned of the legendary Francis “Peggy” Pegahmagabow.

Who, you may ask? Pegahmagabow was only the most highly decorated aboriginal soldier in Canadian military history. He was a prodigiously gifted sniper who was credited with having killed as many as 378 enemy soldiers himself (though no official total was recorded) and capturing 300 more. He was also one of the few Canadian soldiers who fought throughout the entire war from 1914 to 1918.

Surprised you haven’t heard of him? Don’t be. Few people outside of reserves have. That’s the problem that Boyden set out to correct when he sat down to write his first novel after publishing a book of short stories, Born With A Tooth (Cormorant, 2001).

“Some people call him one of Canada’s great heroes,” Boyden said. “I don’t know if he would have called himself that because of the job he did.”

Boyden decided early on he did not want to attempt to tell Pegahmagabow’s story specifically. “The novel is inspired by Francis but I didn’t want to tread on somebody’s toes and possibly get something wrong,” he explained. “I did want to take the spirit and the reality of the Native Canadian soldier’s role: the huge volunteer rates, the huge sacrifices they made. Oftentimes whole reserves were cleared of eligible-aged men.”

In Three Day Road, Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack, two young Cree friends from Moose Factory near Hudson Bay in northern Ontario voluntarily enlist and go overseas in 1916. Only Xavier returns; he is deaf, has lost a leg, and is addicted to morphine. His Aunt Niska takes him in her canoe on a three-day voyage back home, and along the way, as Xavier fades in and out of his morphine-hazed consciousness, we learn of his and Elijah’s experiences in Europe.

“Ultimately, my novel is just as much about family as it is about war—the healing and the importance of family,” Boyden said. He achieved this by alternating chapters between “the quiet of the bush and the loudness of the war.” The result is a powerfully moving story that works on different levels for different readers. It can be enjoyed as a military history, a study of the tragedy of First Nations people in Canada, or simply as a strong literary novel set against the backdrop of World War One.

Joe Wiebe is a Vancouver writer working on his first novel.