Picture above is of author Joseph Boyden
This novel written by Joseph Boyden really gives off a mood of anger so far in chapters 1-13. As the characters look back on their memories we see there are no happy ones yet. With Niska and Xavier (Niska’s nephew) on the canoe together after being reunited at the train station, they reflect back their childhood and time in the war, respectively. With Xavier being addicted to morphine due to losing his leg, I believe he will not make it to the end of the book, and that he will become very ill that he may even try to wean off of morphine but the withdrawal itself will kill him further because his body will not be strong enough to fight back or win. I also believe Niska may get hurt sometime along the way most likely near the middle of the book.
(What the canoe they are traveling on my look like)
It is hard to connect my life to theirs as I have never been in a war, residential school, tribe or hunting at all myself, I can only imagine the type of fear or even guilt they must carry everyday with them. I can understand the appeal of their choices to turn to drugs in the time of the war, I mean it would have been hard to get the courage to continue themselves somedays. The way the author has written this book gives the impression that they want you to be impacted. They hope to leave a mark and make you change your way of thinking about what the Indigenous people have been put through. The way they introduce topics or ideas makes it seem as if being offered morphine, killing people because if you don’t they’ll kill you, watching people die, being in a residential school when you were young is an everyday thing, that it isn’t a big deal. Just proving more how tough of a life they lived and just some of the things they were put through.
I find it easy to sympathize with Boyden’s view of the world because the world can be a terrible, unfair place a lot of the time and the way you can take what life gives you and how you handle it can say great things about you. I think the type of reader the author had in mind would be any race other than the Indigenous peoples. To show what a lot of people have been trying to ignore for a very long time, that it was real, it happened, and make you feel something. It makes me look at the world as if it is a dark place, how it can be unfair and difficult for everyone not just you as well. Reading this book, it makes me reflect on myself as a person and make me remember how privileged I am to live in a place that I will not be sent to war or given to a residential school or even to have food and clean water readily available at all times. Also through the boring parts of it I struggle to keep my mind focused to the words in the book I tend to go in and out of my mind therefor I have started to read the parts I find slow twice to ensure I have read what it is actually saying and not just been in my head the whole time.
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