Moose Cree
times three

Joseph Boyden on Hurricane Gustav,
the modelling industry and his
inter-generational Bird clan trilogy

by JULIET WATERS

Joseph Boyden’s first novel, Three Day Road, is about a Cree man, Xavier Bird, who uses his hunting skills to become a sniper in World War I. It won the Rogers’ Trust Fiction Prize in 2005, and was chosen for the NBC Today show book club by Isabel Allende. Boyden’s recently released second novel, Through Black Spruce, continues the story of the Bird clan. Will Bird, son of Xavier, is a bush pilot. Will’s two nieces, Annie and Suzanne, are a new generation of Cree, caught up in a vicious urban life of drugs, organized crime and fashion modelling.

Boyden grew up in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale, the son of a doctor who was also a war hero. As a teenager, he spent a summer homeless in Toronto. In early adulthood, he taught in the Moose Cree community along the west coast of James Bay. Today, he lives in New Orleans with his wife, the novelist Amanda Boyden. He has, however, come close to living in Montreal, as he explained last week, here as part of his book tour.

Joseph Boyden: Yeah, we’ve thought about moving here, especially after Katrina, when we didn’t know what was going to happen in New Orleans. But we’ve settled now. We bought a house, an old corner grocery store that’s been converted. It’s good for us. It’s a nice quiet escape from the world. Everyone was super worried about Gustav. We took some roof damage insurance to replace our roof. But other than that, we survived.

Mirror: Did you always plan on writing another book about this family?

JB: I planned on writing three, a trilogy actually. So there will be one more. I’m not sure if that will be the next book I write. There’s another one I’m working on as well. But yeah, eventually there’ll be a third that will kind of complete this world of the Bird clan.

M: How does that decision get made, which book you’re going to work on?

JB: Whichever characters are babbling in my head the most. They’re duelling right now, as we speak (laughs)... For this one, I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and explore the contemporary First Nations world. Especially because there’s so much going on. So much of what we hear is negative—the addictions, the beatings and the haunting of the residential schools, which wasn’t that long ago. We rarely get to hear about the beauty of it. So I wanted to explore that as well, without pulling my punches. I wanted to talk about what I’d seen, in a realistic way.

M: You’re not Cree [Boyden has strands of Métis and Micmac in his DNA], but you keep going back to that material. Is there something about the Cree that has gotten into your blood?

JB: Yes. It comes from living up in James Bay and continuing to go back there. I’m off to a moose hunt on Thursday for a few days as a break from my book tour. But yeah, it’s the people. The most amazing people I’ve ever met. The most generous, and just ready to laugh, and [they] really open their arms to you. They’re a brilliant people with a brilliant history that no one in Canada has really touched on.

M: So apart from going back regularly, what kind of research did you do for the new book?

JB: Lots of watching America’s Next Top Model, and flipping through Vogue (laughs). But actually, that was part of it. I wanted to explore this idea of the fashion world—how, on the surface, there’s this carefree world where everyone’s young and beautiful and everything comes naturally. But right behind that is a corporate world, where beauty is just disposable. Suzanne’s agent is so impressed by her because one day she can look Asian, the next day she can look Mexican, the next day she can look like an Eskimo. Anything but Moose Cree.

THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE BY
JOSEPH BOYDEN, VIKING CANADA,
HC, 352 PP, $34