Boyden’s aboriginal identity
It’s a salacious story, riven with serious implications, and yet unavoidably sad. Indelicately awkward questions have lately emerged about the aboriginal bona fides long claimed by Canada’s beloved, glamorous and award- festooned aboriginal literary and cultural interlocutor, Joseph Boyden, and a kind of consensus is emerging among white people around the proposition that Boyden is being cruelly drowned in a well of faddish and poisonous aboriginal identity politics.
There may even have been some truth to that before the story really took off, but it’s gotten to the point that the whole drama now reads like a Canadiana send-up, a comic novel lampooning Canadian highsociety manners, with Margaret Atwood dominating the opening passages, and white people plunging headlong throughout the plot into an ever- deepening identity crisis all of their own making. There’s a back- story mystery that hinges on the identity of a white guy play- acting as an Indian, selling curios from a wigwam at the entrance to Algonquin Park back in the 1950s, who accidentally shoots a tourist in the head. Even heroic Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip shows up in the story.
Awkwardly for me, the story presents an encumbrance in telling it straight that I need to get out of the way.
Like Boyden, I come straight up from he calls a “Celtic” ancestry, with one-eighth derived elsewhere.
In Boyden’s case, he has variously described or is reported to have described that eighth, from which he derives and asserts his identity as an aboriginal person, as Métis, Mi’kmaq, Nipmuc, Anishinabe, Ojibwe, and Wasauksing. Since the whole thing blew up, he’s explained that eighth this way: “Nipmuc ancestry on my father’s side, and Ojibwe ancestry on my mother’s.”
In the unglamorous eighth of my own case, it’s a great- grandmother on my mother’s side — an Englishwoman. This isn’t the encumbrance.
It’s that the guy who started it all is Robert Jago, “the most dangerous blogger in Canada,” as Maclean’s called him, owing to his penchant for sleuthing that cost sev- eral Conservative party contenders candidacies during last year’s federal election.
Robert Jago is a Kwantlen and Nooksack tribe member. His genealogy bears mention because among Jago’s aboriginal forebears, a great- great- great- great grandmother was the notable Sto: lo woman Katherine Kwantlen, who happens to have been my wife Yvette’s great- great- great- great grandmother as well.
To make things slightly more complicated: To the degree that there is an argument at all among and between aboriginal people about Boyden’s authenticity as an aboriginal person, you could put Jago in one corner, and most prominently in the opposite corner you might find Ernie Crey, chief of the Cheam community, Pilalt tribe, Sto:lo Nation. A tireless campaigner for the cause of off- reserve and urban aboriginals, Ernie is a dear friend.
To oversimplify their perspectives, Jago most closely notices that there are two conversations about Boyden going on. One among aboriginal people, and another among pretty well everyone else.
In the aboriginal conversation, one’s genes, one’s blood quantum, one’s genealogy, even, don’t really count for much, and it is no offence against manners or decorum to ask where someone is from. What matters is which aboriginal community claims you, not the other way around. Crey, on the other hand, worries that owing to gaping ambiguities in his lineage claims, Boyden is falling prey to envious “identity cops,” and if such things are tolerated, “many of us are going to end up taking mouth swabs and sending them off to a DNA lab.”
Fair enough, Jago says, but that’s what white people are havi ng conniptions about. White sensibilities are such that it is considered the height of bad form to contest someone’s claims of aboriginal belonging, and especially so in the case of the debonair and internationally- acclaimed Joseph Boyden.
After all, Boyden is chummy with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He was an honorary witness to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He collaborated with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet to create a performance telling the “residential school story.” He and Gord Downie have both produced works commemorating the story of Wenjack, an aboriginal child who died running away from a residential school 50 years ago. His novels are similarly set in aboriginal history and the aboriginal experience.
Until last month, the questions aboriginal people have been asking about Boyden have been gentle, and fairly straightforward: Who is he, exactly, and how, exactly, is he indigenous, or aboriginal, or Indian? What’s the deal with all the conflicting and multiple explanations he gives for his indigenous identity?
Those questions have been around for quite a while, Jago says. It wasn’t until CanLit high priestess Margaret Atwood came on the scene that the questions about Boyden making the rounds among aboriginal people boiled down to one, and the tone changed, too: Who the hell does Joseph Boyden think he is, anyway?
Atwood arrived by Twitter on Nov. 24. Just a few days earlier, Atwood and Boyden were among dozens of prominent Canadian literati who signed a letter protesting what they considered the unfair treatment of Steven Galloway, UBC’s creative- writing department chair who had been fired in the wake of “serious allegations” of misconduct. Atwood announced that Galloway was indigenous, and had been adopted. Boyden had “confirmed” it.
As if that should matter to anything. As if Boyden was somehow entitled to bestow aboriginal identity on someone. The social-media response from aboriginal people was furious.
“That was the moment,” Jago told me. “That was just so offensive. I’ve met Atwood and I like her, sort of. I can’t read her, but I don’t dislike her. But when I saw that, it was just so obnoxious.”
Jago then went to work online, setting out all the several and apparently contradictory claims Boyden has made about his identity. Almost simultaneously, APTN’s Jorge Barrera published his own i nvestigations i nto Boyden’s claims, which likewise found that they didn’t add up at all. The oddest part was Boyden’s claims that his Uncle Erl lived a fairly traditional aboriginal life. Erl Boyden is most famous for having been the fellow who, by his own account, masqueraded as “Injun Joe” at Algonquin Park back in the 1950s before that tragic rifle incident.
The editor of The Walrus magazine, Jonathan Kay, weighed in: “An attack upon a man’s racial composition is never an entirely benign exercise.” The Globe and Mail’s Konrad Yakabuski wrote: “Mr. Boyden’s lynching should set off alarm bells in this regard.” On it goes like this.
It is by no means clear Boyden suffers from that weird dysphoria that seems to afflict white people to the point of playing “the Indian,” in the tradition of the Englishman Archie Belaney, a drunk wife-abuser who gained fame and friends in high places as “Grey Owl” in the 1920s. It is, as they say, a thing.
But it does seem that Boyden has trespassed from identifying with aboriginal people to identifying as an aboriginal person. That may be a misapprehension, but he hasn’t cleared it up. He should. It’s a simple question. Who are your people?
This is an identity politics problem of “white” people, not “aboriginal” people. That’s the thing to keep your eye on.