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WINDIGO KILLING JOSEPH BOYDEN’S THREE DAY ROAD HERB WYILE In Dubious Glory: The Two World Wars and the Canadian Novel, Dagmar Novak examines the profound influence the two world wars have had on twentieth-century Canadian fiction. Despite a brief reference to “an important few [works] that have appeared more recently” (Novak 2000, 2), Novak’s survey, published in 2000, ends with a detailed discussion of The Wars, Timothy Findley’s 1977 classic treatment of “the Great War.” A decade into the twenty-first century, however, that“important few”has grown to be a considerable corpus within what is undeniably one of the most important genres in contemporary Canadian literature, the historical novel. Novels focusing on the First World War published since the appearance of The Wars include Heather Robertson’s Willie: A Romance (1983), Jane Urquhart’s The Underpainter (1997) and The Stone Carvers (2001), Jack Hodgins’s Broken Ground (1998), and Frances Itani’s Deafening (2003), and the war plays a considerable role in other novels such as Thomas Wharton’s Icefields (1995), Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees (1996), and Allan Donaldson’s Maclean (2006). A particularly significant recent addition to Canadian fiction about the First World War is Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005), which was nominated for the Governor General’s Award and won the 2005 Writers’Trust Prize for Fiction. A novel about two young Cree men who leave the bush near Moose Factory to go off to fight with the Canadian Second Division in France and Belgium, Three Day Road revisits the familiar terrain of the Western front, but revitalizes the themes and conventions of literature about the Great War by framing them through particular Aboriginal cultural motifs. In the process, Boyden’s novel suggests the potential of writers of Aboriginal heritage to extend the borders of the historical novel in Canada in exciting new directions by revising the prevailing Eurocentric accounts of Canadian history, by bringing the formal innovation of contemporary Aboriginal writing to the genre of 83 84 U N C O N V E N T I O N A L V O I C E S : F I C T I O N V E R S U S R E C O R D E D H I S TO R Y the historical novel, and by raising important questions about the very nature of history and historical time. Originally written in chronological form, chronicling the main characters’ apprenticeship in the bush, their enlistment in the Canadian army, and their horrific experiences as snipers at the front, Three Day Road was radically revised by Boyden to give the novel a circular, elliptical narrative structure and an oral narrative framework. Instead, the history of Xavier Bird and Elijah Whiskeyjack unfolds in a series of dreams, recollections, and stories as Xavier’s aunt Niska paddles the disabled and shell-shocked Xavier back into the bush upon his return from the war. This frame situates the war narrative within a larger conflict on the home front, where the lives of Boyden’s Cree and Ojibwe characters are being profoundly disrupted by the forcible movement from life in the bush to life in town. Moreover, what links the various layers of the narrative and makes Three Day Road an innovative variation on the well-worn subject of the Great War is the motif of the windigo, the monstrous cannibal figure that haunts the stories of the Ojibwe and the Cree. In a novel that addresses not only the much-neglected role of Aboriginal soldiers in the First World War but also the momentous transition from life in the bush to a life circumscribed by the wemistikoshiw (White) authorities, the windigo serves in Three Day Road as a complex motif for exploring the relations of power between Aboriginal peoples and the dominant society in Canada. Three Day Road paints a dramatic picture of the hallucinatory nightmare that was the First World War, with vivid and often horrific scenes that recurrently bring to mind Findley’s achievement in The Wars. Just as important to the impact of the novel, and to Boyden’s use of the motif of the windigo, though, is the role of Niska, whose life unfolds through the memories and stories she communicates to Xavier as she paddles him back home. As more and more of her people have been coaxed or coerced into moving onto the reserve at Moose Factory, Niska has retreated further into the...

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