Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden

It arrived. More than one copy in circulation, obviously. Really looking forward to a read that is reputed to be better than Three Day Road. Will soon know.

Through Black Spruce is the book that I was hoping to read as a followup to Three Day Road. Awarding of the Giller Prize was properly witheld until this one appeared.

Joseph Boyden takes us into the world of the James Bay Cree with this story in ways only hinted at in Road's residential school and the forced march of FN people into the book world and religion of the "settler", a concept the author does not use. It becomes clear however why, still today, education is seen as both a tantalizing entry into a more comfortable lifestyle - out there beyond the black spruce trees that circumscribe one's world - while also being a known and tested destroyer of a way of life. Although schools do not factor into this story - noteworthy only for their absence, although the schoolteacher is seen as a reject of that other world down the railway. outside. Boyden does not lecture, he simply leads the reader through the experiences of the Anishnabe,and, one has to believe, writing from a strong empathy and some involvement with life around Moosonee. So that a snippet of dialogue like an admiring "Not too shabby for an Anishnabe" , voiced by a streetside admirer of human form, tells you he's been downtown. There is much, much more intimate detail of family life.But then, Boyden was awarded the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award for Road. 

From a First War Setting for most of Three Day Road, we travel to today's exposure to booze and drugs, television and the internet, corrupting in a total cultual way that the religious schools initiated at the family level. And as in Road, a woman relative provides stability, having retained a powerful spiritual connection to a past that, in settler culture, is seen in a Jungian like the late Robertson Davies whose readers will note the difference as well as similarity. Davies' never got past the cigar store aboriginal in his fiction.

It's in the storytelling that we see the importance of tradition for a people. The importance of storytelling itself as therapy as well as a means of communicating in a world where the book age seems bypassed by TV and the IT world, and magazines are valuable mostly for their illustrations of people who win fame for their exotic appeal as much as their beauty. A one-line dustjacket account of Boyden's life says he "divides his time between Northen Ontario and Louisiana," where he teaches creative writing. There is also an inviting address: www.josephboyden.com. v