‘The Orenda’ by Joseph Boyden

Reviewed by Rachel Carlson  (originally posted November 18, 2013)

Joseph Boyden has been honoured with a multitude of literary awards. His debut novel, Three Day Road, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year, and the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award. Boyden’s accolades continued when he won the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Through Black Spruce, the stunning sequel to Three Day Road.

Unflaggingly, his latest work, The Orenda, is garnering widespread commendations, including being long-listed for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize and short-listed for the 2013 Governor General’s Literary Awards. While The Orenda is not a formal part of Boyden’s acclaimed trilogy, it most definitely takes an honoured place along the inspired continuum of his work.

Like Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce, The Orenda explores the clash of First Nations with European or Eurocentric cultures. Reaching back through generations, The Orenda resurrects the opening moments of colonial contact.

Three narrators shape our experience of resistance and containment in the Canadian colonial context. Bird is a masterful political and military leader of the Wendat nation (what the French termed the Huron).  Broken by personal tragedy, Bird seeks the solace of both revenge and replacement for the family he lost to the deep and abiding conflict with his neighbours and rivals, the Iroquois. Snow Falls is the mysterious and powerful young woman adopted by Bird following the murder of her family. Finally, Pere Christophe is the deeply naïve Jesuit priest who enters the Wendat community in the hopes of sacrificing himself for the salvation of the sauvages and himself.

What ensues is an epic tale of the human ambivalence that allows for the simultaneous eruption of love and hate, cruelty and compassion, and tenderness and brutality. The Orenda is an instant classic that unsettles our sense of historical certitude and, in turn, challenges our contemporary worldview.

The Orenda is not a novel to comfort or assuage readers; indeed, it could make you writhe with discomfort. As readers we have the unsettling honour of being addressed by each narrator as an unseen entity of tremendous emotional value.  Bird speaks to the wraith of his murdered wife, while Snow Falls speaks to her slain father and Pere Christophe to his tortured Christ.

Unflinching honesty is thus the main through-line of the narration, making us privy to the thoughts and emotions of these deeply ambivalent characters. Snow Falls craves love and warmth, but is consumed by rage and revenge fantasies. Both Bird and Pere Christophe are the objects of her affection and her reprisal. Bird is at once profoundly tender in his love for his family and his people, yet unflinchingly cruel to his enemies. Finally, Pere Christophe, with compassion in his heart, accepts the full range of tacit and direct brutalities he has wrought. Flawed and inconsistent, Boyden’s characters embody a common humanity that terminates all colonial notions of absolute condemnation or exculpation.

These complex characters also influence our perception of Canadian colonial history and culture. Boyden dispenses with the myths of both the noble and the blood thirsty savage.  The Wendat characters are not innocent children of nature, but rather members of a culturally and technologically complex society that has developed with intelligence and innovation.

Boyden searches out another origin for the misconception of the noble savage: the misunderstanding, both willful and accidental, on the part of colonial agents like our Jesuit priest Pere Christophe. When Pere Christophe asks how everyone knew how to stop at the same time and place during a long canoe journey, Tall Trees responds, “did you not see the signs?” Paradoxically, Pere Christophe does much to dispel the myth of the bloodthirsty savage when he acknowledges the parallels between the ritual torture practised by the Wendat and the Iroquois and the cruelties practised by Europeans.

When a fellow Jesuit asks him how the Iroquois and the Wendat can be so cruel, Pere Christophe responds, “why does the Spanish Inquisition do what it does?… Why does our own Church burn witches at the stake? Why did our own crusaders punish the Moors so exquisitely?” But alas, like so many colonial agents, Pere Christophe does not see beyond his own judgement and bias; he continues on his mission by reconciling these contradictions and leaving the outcome with his god.

Like the great post-colonial novel Things Fall Apart by Igbo author Chinua Achebe, Boyden’s The Orenda traces the complexity of the colonial experience—stretching it until only paradox and ambivalence remain. Boyden and Achebe equally demonstrate that both European and indigenous cultures made decisions that changed the course of history; the indigenous peoples in both these works have agency.

But Boyden also makes it clear that North American history did not begin with European contact and that colonial conquest was not a justifiable inevitability. The Wendat, the Iroquois, the Anishinaabe, and the Montagnais had long rich histories chronicled in art and oral sources, and as evidenced by the long and bitter war between the Wendat and Iroquois nations.

Still the turning of history has as much to do with chance as with choice. The final blow to peace between the Wendat and the Iroquois begins with a lost peace offering, the culturally communicative Wampum, by a bungling Pere Christophe; it ends with Bird’s choice to kill Snow Falls’ uncle as the they treat with the Iroquois for peace: “And that action, that changing the course of events without thought, is as powerful as dreams. All this must be listened to.”

The outcome of this war and of the European conquest was only one outcome of many that were possible. Consequently, reading this novel sometimes feels like being aboard a heeling ship in a turning gyre, and at other times like a light boat being poled across a river with deep currents. It is at once about choice and agency, but also about fate and chance.

While institutional power is everywhere at stake in The Orenda, individual power is the undercurrent that shapes it. Boyden beautifully traces the interplay of authority, prestige, and hegemony both within and between cultures.

Significantly, Boyden explores the power and prominence of women in the Wendat culture. Gosling, an Anishinaabe healer and mystic wields an immeasurable power that terrifies the Jesuit priests, but offers wisdom and healing to the Wendat. Snow Falls is a young woman of intelligence and strength who knows when to learn and when to question. The relationship between Gosling and Snow Falls is compelling in its complexity, binding together the clash of envy and respect, authority and submission, affection and abhorrence. Both Snow Falls and Gosling challenge the authority of Bird and of Pere Christophe to take their places in a rich tradition of feminine influence and respect.

In keeping with the reconciliation of paradox, The Orenda is a testament to both blunt and subtle power. A whisper is as powerful as a scream in this novel. The gentle and prophetic words of Gosling made me shiver and the accounts of ritual torture made me nauseous. The tragic fates of Snow Falls and Pere Christophe stayed with me for days as a lingering sorrow. A single sentence resurrects the still-living spectre of residential school: “But without our ability to use the rod, imagine how much trouble this will give us in our plans to bring these young ones to the Lord.”

But hope and joy are also in abundance: they are present in the loyal friendship between Fox and Bird, the transformation and empathy of Pere Christophe, and the developing wisdom of Snow Falls. Most hopeful of all is the intergenerational echo of the name Bird throughout Boyden’s works that speaks a subtle promise of survival and resurgence.

If I were to allow myself a small complaint about this work, it would be the over-reliance on the reader’s preconceived notions to construct and enliven the landscape and the day-to-day life of the inhabitants. The cover-art is suggestive of a dense and mysterious landscape with bifurcated meaning. For the colonists, it is a dense landscape that contains both shadowy terror and bountiful resources. Cartography, as evidenced on the inner cover, represents the taming of the landscape, the codifying of colonial ownership. I wanted more connection to the setting, to step into the dense thicket of birch stretching endlessly into the horizon; a small complaint in a glut of praise.

Otherwise, I would not change the intensity or the subtlety of this work in any way. Both beauty and brutality shape our lives and our history; to deny one or the other dishonours the human experience and erases factors of contingency and context. Appropriate to its paradoxical nature, The Orenda demonstrates the immediacy of the past and its endless resonance with the present.

Hamish Hamilton | 496 pages |  $32.00 | cloth | ISBN # 978-0670064182