Joseph Boyden Quotes

The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.

People will say that Canada, unlike America, was not birthed from violence. But I want to say, "What are you talking about?" It's just not true.

There's the concept that dreams are as important - if not more important - than reality. The attention that one pays to those things in the shadows is very much a part of the Indian experience.

Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.

I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it. but there is nothing in the world that needs us for its survival. We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.

America seems to celebrate its more violent past, but Canada doesn't like to recognize those things. The willingness to accept the existence of violence separates our two countries.

The world is a different place in this new century, [...]. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. [...] War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.

Sometimes, it's not getting what we want that offers us the most important Lessons

I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.

The beliefs of Native people are no less powerful or important just because they focus on a different "form of magic."

We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.

I'm fascinated by the magic realism used by many writers. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the Indian experience. It's a very different way of viewing the world.

Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.

There's a few scholars that object to how the italicized sections suggest that Native people are to take some part in the blame for how colonization occurred. But I say, "Yes they are." Not nearly as much blame as the colonizers, of course. But we are not just victims. I hate this idea that we are all just victimized and oppressed and etcetera etcetera. It's dehumanizing in its own way.

When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.

There’s something sexy in cooking for a man who likes my food. Am I growing up?

I'm a writer. I should be allowed to speak about my writing at times. And I'm really excited to speak about that. There's nothing I am shameful of or anything else in my novels. They are my children and I'm happy to speak about my children.

There were incredibly complex societies already existing in North America long before Europeans arrived. So many people think that before European contact it was just Natives huddling around a fire, waiting for civilization to come save them. But that was not the case.

As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.

During World War I the Canadians were the shock troops. In many historical cases, Canadians have been very proficient at killing, and doing what we have to in order to survive. But no one wants to acknowledge that fact.

Canada and America are very, very different. It's true that we share a language and many customs. But Americans have a very different view of the world.

Compared to Americans, Canadians are often more gentle in their approach to things. They're much more apologetic. There's less room for conflict.

We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy.

I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.

From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.

I believe truly that Canada is a living history and we're going through some of the most important time in this country's short 150 years.