A celebrated Canadian author whose indigenous roots came under question this past winter is facing new scrutiny over similarities between a passage in one of his short stories and another work published years earlier.
An investigation by Jorge Barrera of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network found that a passage in Joseph Boyden’s 1997 short story, Bearwalker, about a medicine man who receives special powers, contained “similar words, phrasing, structure and narrative arc” to a story by Ron Geyshick, called Inside My Heart, published in 1989.
Warren Cariou, Canada research chair in narrative, community and indigenous cultures at the University of Manitoba, said Thursday while he is not an expert in plagiarism, the similarities are troubling.
“I definitely think the issue is worth further examination,” he said in an email. “The similarities do raise concerns, certainly.”
The stories formally share intimate structural details, they begin and end exactly the same way
In Bearwalker, a character, Antoine, becomes sick and is said to have “bolted his door by jamming knives into the crack between the door and frame.” After lying on a couch for a week, “the Lord came with two helpers. They were all dressed in black suits with white button shirts.” The Lord tells Antoine, “I’m going to give you a special gift,” the ability to “see into people, see what is bothering them.”
Similar details and lines appear in Inside My Heart, according to APTN, which posted a side-by-side comparison of the passages.
“I bolted my door with these knives that I jammed in sideways,” Geyshick writes. For four days and four nights, “I just lay on my couch. On the fourth day, the Lord came in. He had two helpers … They were dressed all in black, with white shirts and black ties.” The Lord said, “I am going to give you special powers.”
My full statement to APTN. https://t.co/ACQd44iQLc
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Joseph Boyden (@josephboyden) February 23, 2017
Boyden, a recipient of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and member of the Order of Canada who has built his career on writing about First Nations heritage and culture, was travelling and not available for comment, his publicist said Thursday. In a statement posted on Twitter, Boyden said the passage in question was drawn from oral histories he heard travelling through different communities.
Boyden said he met an old man, Xavier Bird, in the mid-1990s in Fort Albany, a Cree First Nation in northeastern Ontario. Bird “spoke to me about the Lord and his helpers appearing as old-fashioned preachers, visiting a sick man, barred in his room, and giving him the gift of sight,” he wrote.
Boyden said he heard the story again in nearby Moosonee, Ont. “I saw it as a type of modern parable, a Christian story, filtered through the distinct local experience and lens. It was a story that stuck with me.”
Suggestions of plagiarism are “speculative and reckless,” Brian Kelly, Boyden’s lawyer, told APTN.
Earlier this winter, APTN published a lengthy story raising questions about Boyden’s claims of indigenous ancestry. Boyden took to Twitter then, as well, acknowledging he was “partly to blame” for confusion surrounding his indigenous identity.
“I’ve used the term Metis in the past when referring to myself as a mixed blood person. I do not trace my roots to Red River, and I apologize to any Red River Metis I’ve upset,” he wrote.
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My response to APTN. https://t.co/zAzH9duTYy
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Joseph Boyden (@josephboyden) December 24, 2016
Boyden said he was of mostly Celtic heritage, but added: “I once said that, ‘A small part of me is Indigenous, but it is a huge part of who I am.’ This remains true to me to this day, and I have never spoken of myself in different terms than that.”
Chuck Bourgeois, a PhD student in native studies at the University of Manitoba, first alerted APTN to the similarities in Boyden’s Bearwalker and Geyshick’s Inside My Heart.
APTN reached out to Judith Doyle, a Toronto filmmaker who helped Geyshick, a teacher in Lac La Croix First Nation in northwestern Ontario, compile his short stories into a book. She said the similarities between the works of Boyden and Geyshick, who died in 1996, are “beyond coincidence.”
“The stories formally share intimate structural details, they begin and end exactly the same way, the turns of phrase, the cadence, the description, the characters, such symmetry between the two passages,” Doyle told APTN.
APTN also reported that Xavier Bird’s younger brother, Louis Bird, was doubtful of Boyden’s claim that the story was passed on to him by the elder Bird, who also died in 1996.
“That is something that is very strange for me. The kind of stories we tell has nothing to do with the Lord, helpers, black suited men with white ties, white shirt, there is no such thing that exists in our brain,” Louis Bird told APTN, adding that his older brother spoke only of “hunting and trapping skills and … everyday living.”
Gregory Scofield, a Metis poet and English professor at Laurentian University, said in an email that issues of “story/cultural/spiritual theft” cannot be taken lightly.
In a related Facebook post, Scofield wrote: “From my Cree teachings, to steal or to take without permission or to make appropriate offerings/acknowledgements is to be okitimakisiw, a poor person. Over the years I’ve argued with many about respecting these protocols, about taking things without permission from whatever community they are ‘exploring.’”