Help offset server costs by donating. This is totally optional. Any overages will go to library fines or new books.
Author motivations
A question I have about the book: why did Boyden write this book, in the way he did? It reads more like a dramatisation of historical records and diaries than a work of modern fiction. Should we regard this as a dramatic work, a dramatised retelling of an historical event, an attempt to educate Westerners about that period, or as an attempt to give a voice to the often-silenced First Nations people? And does the book work as any or all of them?
Comments
I can only speculate as to why he wrote it, but my theory is that that having grown up among tge Wyandot, this story had cultural significance to him. It’s based on the Jesuit Relations, which I gather tell this story from the Jesuit perspective. So my guess is that Boyden wanted to re-tell the story, this time giving different perspectives.
Whether the book succeeds in doing that is a matter for debate. Clearly some critics have said it doesn’t. That the characterization of the Iroquois doesn’t reflect their true character. That the Wendat are too materialistic and not properly respectful of nature. On the other hand, the book seems to have been vetted by a notable Wyandot scholar who wrote a favourable blurb for it. The question is also further obscured by questions about the authors bloodline and whether he has the authority to even provide a native perspective. Personally, I’m not qualified to have an opinion on these things.
I do think it succeeds in retelling the story and giving those other perspectives. It’s clearly fiction, because there’s no historical record of the inner thoughts of Bird or Snow Falls and therefore these aren’t factual. Does it succeed in giving us authentic native voices? I can’t answer this, and people with more authority than I are mixed.
I think historical fiction does have some different conventions to some other genres. For example, I think there is a greater emphasis on "what would it be like to live in that place/time". There tends to be less world-building, on the assumption that either people know it or they can look it up. So for example a book set in 19th century London would not bother to explain how the Thames flows through the middle and the docks are at the East End, but would simply presuppose you knew this (or could find out easily enough), and would focus more on what it would be like to live as a duke/pickpocket/sea captain/whatever.
There's another convention too, which is to seek to put some personal motive and feeling behind someone's actions. The historical record of the time may well tell us that so-and-so went to such-and-such a place, and the HF writer may well attempt to fill in these biographical facts with emotion. Was the journey made willingly? Out of duty? With fear and trembling or anticipation?
How does this apply to The Orenda? Well, as you know I found Boyden's lack of world-building to be a problem in accessing the book - he assumed so very much familiarity that I personally lacked, that considerable dimensions of the book were lost simply because I didn't have any real grasp of what the area looked like and how people of the era wold have travelled around. So the lack of systematic world-building certainly fits with some HF, but for me personally this was a problem.
I do feel I got a better sense of what it might have been like to live through that time - even if my conclusion was that I probably wouldn't have liked it or lived very long in it! And I was certainly educated in some facets of Wendat life - for example I had no idea that agriculture played such a key role.
On the other hand, I don't feel I got much insight into the Jesuits - in another thread I contrasted this with The Mission, where I did feel I got more insight into Jesuit community, both those individuals who were devoutly religious and those who were more into activism.
Again with The Orenda, I feel Boyden tried to give us some personal motives behind a scattering of bald facts - for example why Bird tended to derail any attempts at reconciliation with the Iroquois (though it remains to me something of a mystery why the several Indian tribes let themselves be manipulated like this... but that probably shows I just don't really understand a vendetta mindset). But arguably this was patchy, and I wasn't left with a feeling that I'd really encountered any of the people concerned in a deep way.
Was it a better way to present the story than a documentary style? I think yes - over the last couple of years for a variety of reasons I have read more non-fiction than formerly (other than technical study books in various subjects). My overall take has been that writing good non-fiction is actually really hard, and that writing the stuff as a kind of fictional wrapper around the facts is very often a successful way to get something over to an audience. Writing fiction allows you to pick a specific interpretation of events and run with it, whereas writing good non-fiction would require you to consider multiple competing interpretations and give each their due. I don't think I would have read a non-fiction treatise on the setting of The Orenda, but encountering it as fiction meant that I did read it (which is a good thing despite the difficulties I had with it).
@NeilNjae If you haven't read the Maclean's article that Boyden himself composed a few years after the publication of The Orenda, I suggest you look at it. It has a few suggestive quotes:
He also provides a fairly detailed discussion of his family, where he says of his uncle nick-named Injun Joe, whose identity seems to be connected to Boyden's claim of Metis identity
and
It's unclear to me what he thinks the relation between his family and our shared history is, or should be. His use of explicit religious language is reserved for familial stories, and by extension to communities that are composed of families, which seem to the authorisers and legitimisers of identity, rather than strangers / outsiders. See the last third of the article.
@Apocryphal what makes you think this? Not saying you're wrong, but Wikipedia says that the only Huron-Wendat reserves in Canda are within Quebec City, and that most of the members speak French and are Catholic. Wikipedia also says that after being dispersed the people reformed in Western Ohio and Michigan. Other encyclopedia articles have more details, but the Wikipedia article doesn't seem to have any obvious and egregious errors.
I have some trouble with this - not the characterisation of the genre, but with the idea that emotional motivations (for which we have few words and poor definitions) remain the same across great expanses of culture, space, and time, and that readers of fiction can understand them without a great deal of education. For example the common translation of the Sanskrit Buddhist term karuṇā as compassion (rather than say pity) is not wrong exactly, is right as far as it goes, but karuṇā is not just a feeling sadness or sympathy with someone else's plight. The Tibetans translated it as ཐུགས་རྗེ་ / སྙིང་རྗེ་ both of which connote complete mastery and domination of the mind, which is located at the heart, not in the head. Compassion on the other hand connotes suffering along with another. So to say that Tibetan Buddhists were trying to cultivate compassion, were seeking to be motivated by compassion, correctly connotes the importance of shared feeling, but obscures that they were simultaneously seeking power and domination over the heart-mind.
There is also the difficult question of whether people sufficiently separated from us by culture, space, and time even share our idea of what the correct and necessary bases to correctly identify who is a person, and what personal signifies.
I guess what I am saying is that understanding historical fiction depends on a common cultural matrix of reading, memory, and history, and that matrix shapes what is understood more than any event or person in the so-called actual past.
If these seems too abstract, consider how so-called monsters taken in tales from elsewhere are used in RPGs. What is a djinn?
Hmm, I may have been confusing what I read about Georges Sioui (who was born in Wendak, Quebec) when I wrote that. According to Wikipedia, Boyden claims Ojibwe and Nipmuc heritage (and previously Mi'kmak and Metis.) However, this shift in my perception of his heritage doesn't really change my opinion on why he might have written it.
Here's a transcript from an interview he did, if anyone is interested: https://www.tvo.org/transcript/2197445/joseph-boyden-the-orenda
In here, he says "Before we came... before Europeans came..." so obviously he was a European at that moment.
@Apocryphal that's a very interesting read. I found his comments about oral tradition and story, and using native informants, quite interesting.
>According to Wikipedia, Boyden claims Ojibwe and Nipmuc heritage (and previously Mi'kmak and Metis.)
>
As I recall, the Metis were the remote ancestors of the protagonist in Hiero's Journey, the name having worn down to Metz by the time of the story
> (Quote)
> I have some trouble with this - not the characterisation of the genre, but with the idea that emotional motivations (for which we have few words and poor definitions) remain the same across great expanses of culture, space, and time, and that readers of fiction can understand them without a great deal of education.
I'm not saying it is always done well - I've read HF stories where characters' actions and thoughts are utterly contemporary ones slapped onto people from another era - just as some TV period dramas are basically modern people in fancy dress. But it can be done more sensitively.
That said, some authors can carry off such a juxtaposition. Ages ago I read a story about the early years of Ghenghis Khan - the author had chosen to put into the soldiers' mouths a vocabulary and diction like you might get in a modern film about commandos, marines, etc, including words like guesstimate. I understand why they did this - to convey the sense of an elite unit completely used to trusting each other, while living, working, and fighting in very close quarters. And I suppose the Mongols had a word which drifted somewhere between a guess and a reliable estimate.
For me, this didn't quite work, but it almost did, and I could respect the choice even if sometimes it failed.
Basically an author may well have several motivations behind their choices in writing, and strict accuracy may not be top of their list... I think that's ok, so long as they're not pretending to be accurate. It's maybe analogous to someone writing soft sf rather than hard.
What is history or science when it is not accurate? I'm not saying that what is accurate can or cannot change, but if someone starts presenting say a group identifiable today as experiencing say less physical pain than the reader because "history," is "historical fiction" the name for that?
@Apocryphal , good point. I think I meant that the book doesn't read like standard "adventure" genre fiction. I stand corrected that my range of comparisons was too limited.
@BarnerCobblewood , thanks very much for the link to Boyden's article. It was really interesting, mainly for the very different mindset it demonstrated. For me, my heritage isn't a part of my identity that occupies my mind but heritage is very important to Boyden and, I suppose, a lot of people in Canada. How much of Huron identity is defined by ancestry, upbringing, or community inclusion? I've no answers, but that article opened a window into how it's important, and contested, for many.
My impression was that a major target of Boyden's was to relate in fictional form how the downfall of the several Indian tribes (ie not just the Wendat-affiliated ones but the Iroquois-affiliated as well) was an inevitable consequence of them collectively buying into the agendas of the European nations. He does this partly directly on the physical plane by showing how trade shifted from furs and such like to weapons, and partly indirectly on the spiritual or metaphysical plane by discussing how the Orenda itself, and its personification in the gods such as Aataentsic, shifted away from them... "misplaced" is the word used in the closing sentences, with a string suggestion that one day the proper balance will be restored. Basically the whole italicised coda elaborates this theme.
To that end, I think he is quite happy to adapt known historical facts (such as the number of and identity of Jesuit missionaries present, or the exact temporal positioning of a treaty compared to the French leader's death) and to invent plausible characters and situations to bridge the known facts (such as the existence and comparative importance of Bird, Gosling, Snow Falls and the rest). These things are secondary to him (IMHO) compared to the overall theme of the tribes misplacing Orenda through their own acts, attitudes and omissions. He's writing fiction, albeit historical fiction, and as such is at liberty to speculate, adapt and interpolate between attested facts in a way that an academic treatise on the same subject is not. It's up to readers to decide if he has gone too far in liberty-taking, or whether the changes are acceptable in order to get his main point across.
An analogy, if you will. In science we still use Newtonian physics a great deal of the time. It is wrong - relativistic physics is more accurate over a wider domain of testability - but it is good enough to use for playing billiards, or flying aircraft, or indeed tracking most of the solar system (barring the perihelion of Mercury and a couple of other edge cases). On an even simpler level, it is near-enough true most of the time to reduce equations to linearised versions of themselves, on the grounds that every real-world path is a straight line if you look on a small enough scale. We don't reject the use of these simplified models on the basis that they are wrong in some absolute sense - relativistic physics is certainly wrong too, once you include quantum effects, so if we're looking for strict accuracy in a physics model we're all screwed
But we continue to use models we know to be wrong because they have utility, and are much easier to understand and explain than the better models. That's OK so long as we know we're doing this, and know the limitations thereof.
As an aside, I don't think Boyden can be accused of minimising pain suffered or inflicted - both @NeilNjae and I found the level and graphic presentation of suffering and torture too much to handle in places.
In that case, why not have a viewpoint character in the Iroquois? We readers don't get to see how the Iroquois are affected by the Europeans, apart from them winning the war with the Wendat.
As for the accuracy, I don't have a problem with the story being fact-based fiction.