Summary Of Three Day Road

Indigenous Identity Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road is a story of two friends, Xavier Bird and Elijah Weesegeechak, who volunteer to join the Canadian army and fight in the First World War. Both of them are Cree aboriginals from northern Ontario. Even though Xavier has a different personality from Elijah, they become best friends. Xavier is a shy person who is proud of his Cree identity while Elijah is more assimilated into the white Canadian society because he spends most of his childhood in Christian school. The story is told from a male perspective, Xavier, and a female perspective her aunt, Niska. In the novel, Boyden concentrates on representing the indigenous identity of the protagonists of the novels through following the tradition

The first group chooses to separate the Indigenous nationalist critical approach from the postcolonial approach while the second group emphasizes the need for engagement of these two approaches. Ortiz suggests that Native critics and writers, who separate other approaches from the Native literary study, should take a central position between these two approaches. He emphasizes that it is the time for theses critics to stop marginalizing themselves and involve themselves to be in the center of the two cultures. According to Ortiz, separatists are faulted for isolate and separate their literary works from other literary studies. He believes that these separatists could not be able to create a literature that might play a major role in building a tribal

He describes how nuns expose all of Xavier, Niska, and Elijah to physical and sexual violence. Niska decides to escape from the school, and she helps to rescue Xavier and Elijah’s life from the harsh treatment of the residential school. Boyden introduces the violence of the residential school, in his novel, to show that violence is a universal theme in colonized countries. He does not only represent that Native Indians are suffering, but he also presents that any colonized people, in any place, are suffering too. For that reason, Boyden believes that the postcolonial approach cannot be isolated from the Indigenous nationalist approach, because Native Indians have the experiences of the two cultures. Native Indians either become assimilated to the white culture, such as Elijah or become silent and unsociable as