Joseph Boyden Quotes

Canada and America are very, very different. It's true that we share a language and many customs. But Americans have a very different view of the world.

There were incredibly complex societies already existing in North America long before Europeans arrived. So many people think that before European contact it was just Natives huddling around a fire, waiting for civilization to come save them. But that was not the case.

Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.

Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.

I passed the friendship centre and nodded to an old couple on the porch. Kookum smiled back and nodded, a cotton kerchief on her head. Moshum's eyes squinted, too, but never looked straight at me, just glanced my presence once, and that was enough. Old school. I knew that when they stood up to hobble home, he would lead a few feet ahead, and she would follow. They grew up in the bush and still walked the same way, as if the wide road was nothing more than a narrow path through the muskeg and spruce.

There's the concept that dreams are as important - if not more important - than reality. The attention that one pays to those things in the shadows is very much a part of the Indian experience.

From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.

You are a hookimaw. Happiness is not yours to have.

Sometimes, it's not getting what we want that offers us the most important Lessons

I would give my left arm to fly in one of those aeroplanes ...

This memory, this pretty little stone, I examine it with my eyes closed tight. Turn it over in my fingers.

I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me. -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119

In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, [ ... ].

They laugh at this, the idea that one might keep herds of friendly deer or elk that walk happily to their slaughter whenever it's time for the human to eat meat. Some ask openly if there aren't consequences of a life so easy to live.

We all fight our own wars, wars for which we'll be judged. Some of them we fight in the forests close to home, others in distant jungles or faraway burning deserts. We all fight our own wars, so maybe it's best not to judge, considering it's rare we even know why we fight so savagely.

We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can seem something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to makes sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.

Lots of times growing up, I'd just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things. -Will Bird, Through Black Spruce

America seems to celebrate its more violent past, but Canada doesn't like to recognize those things. The willingness to accept the existence of violence separates our two countries.

Compared to Americans, Canadians are often more gentle in their approach to things. They're much more apologetic. There's less room for conflict.

There's a few scholars that object to how the italicized sections suggest that Native people are to take some part in the blame for how colonization occurred. But I say, "Yes they are." Not nearly as much blame as the colonizers, of course. But we are not just victims. I hate this idea that we are all just victimized and oppressed and etcetera etcetera. It's dehumanizing in its own way.

I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it ... But there is nothing in the world that needs us for its survival. We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.

Mother Nature was one angry slut. She'd try and kill you the first chance she got. You'd screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you.

But why?" Gabriel asks. "Why do they wish to cause such pain to another human?"
"Why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?" I ask. "Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?"
Gabriel thinks about this. He knows I don't beg answers for these questions.
"Of course it's easy to say that we mete out punishment to those who are an abomination in God's eyes," I say. "But it's more than that, isn't it? I think we don't just allow torturers but condone them as a way to excise the fear we all have of death. To torture someone is to take control of death, to be the master of it, even for a short time.

I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.

The world is a different place in this new century, [ ... ]. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. [ ... ] War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.

I can see that Elijah knows exactly what Thompson's asking. Thompson is asking if Elijah likes killing. Elijah considers it for a moment. 'It's in my blood,' he finally says.

Wolves are so frightening not because of their fangs and claws but because of their intelligence, because of their hunger.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.