Attention Must Be Paid: The Role of the Native Soldier in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road

D Coates
University of Calgary

     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: January 26, 2007

Abstract
In the “Acknowledgements” to Three Day Road, Joseph Boyden writes that he wishes to “honour the Native soldiers who fought in the Great War . . . . Your bravery and skill do not go unnoticed” (383). But in both historical and literary accounts, they have, for the most part, been ignored. Although L. James Dempsey pays tribute to the disproportionate number of Natives who volunteered to fight in Warriors of the King: Prairie Indians in World War One (1999), he tends to focus on the reasons they enlisted—“the survival of a warrior’s philosophy or ethic, the existence of a loyalty to the British Crown, and the opportunity to escape the stagnant life on the reserve” (vii)--but ignores their courage and fighting prowess. Similarly, Adrian Hayes’ Pegahmagabow: Legendary Warrior, Forgotten Hero (2003), the sniper and scout whom Boyden calls “one of Canada’s most important heroes” (and he gives “Peggy” a cameo role in his text), highlights the native soldier’s “struggles against the Canadian government that occupied most of his postwar years” (9), butslights his valor and superb marksmanship.
To date, Joseph Boyden is the one of the few writers (literary or historical) to argue that the native contribution proved vital to the war effort. Boyden’s Cree recruits, Xvier Bird and Elijah Weesageechak, volunteer for duty in 1915 and fight with the Southern Ontario Rifles at major battles such as the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele until near war’s end in 1918. Both excel as scouts and snipers, transferring to the battlefield the tracking and hunting skills they have learned while struggling to survive a harsh existence in the bush near Moose Factory, Ontario. In suggesting that these native warriors distinguished themselves on the battlefields because of their experiences in the bush, Boyden challenges the common perception held by Canadians at the time(and to some extent ever since) that recruits came from rural backgrounds and hence could ride and shoot. But according to contemporary historian Jonathan Vance’s Death So Noble, most of the men who enlisted in the Canadian Army hailed from cities, a fact which validates Boyden’s claim that aboriginals raised in the bush were better sharpshooters and soldiers than their non-aboriginal counterparts.
Boyden also argues that Xavier in particular possesses the best traits of an officer--“the ability of judgment under duress, the will and strength to carry out unpleasant and dangerous duties, decisiveness” (176)—most of which he has absorbed from “the transmission of a vast amount of spiritual and practical knowledge from elders to the young, through an exclusively oral tradition” (Fournier and Crey 52). (Elijah has been too damaged by his lengthy stay at residential schools to have learned such skills.) By investigating the kinds of leadership skills necessary for success on the battlefield, Boyden offers a departure from traditional historical accounts of Canadian military history, for an analysis of the ways in which officers and men interacted with each other while pursuing their military duties is almost entirely absent from Canadian historiography. But although Boyden’s Xavier demonstrates the attributes of a leader, he is denied promotion because he is aboriginal. (The prejudice against aboriginal soldiers has a basis in historical fact, for according to Brock Pitawanakwat, the Canadian Armed Forces displayed “little respect for their fighting or leadership abilities” and thus refused many Indigenous soldiers a commission, [unpublished paper]). By paying attention to the bravery, skill, and leadership abilities of Native soldiersduring the Great War, Boydenthus attempts to insure thatthey will no longer go “unnoticed.”