English Blog Post on Three Day Road
Josh Blake
A key scene in Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road was when the French trapper raped Niska and she went away to find her spirits to help her. I think that this scene is so important to the novel because it shows the connection that the native people have with their spirits no matter how far away from home they are. Just like when Xavier, Elijah, and many other Native Americans went over seas to fight in the Second World War. Even though they were far away from home their spirits always protected them.
"When I heard the Frenchman’s voice in my head, my fear and anger came back to me so that I needed to prove to myself that I still had power. I constructed my shaking tent and went inside to pray. It did not take long for the spirits to come to me. My tent filled with a light as if a thousand fireflies had entered it. And then the spirit animals began to arrive, the spirit of the bear, the moose, the fox, the wolf, the sturgeon, rallying around my hurt in that tent like night insects to a fire. It was the lynx that came to me most strongly, his growl puffing out the walls of my tent like a great wind trying to escape. And I asked the lynx a favour that would change me forever. I asked him to go out and find the source of my hurt and extinguish it. As soon as I whispered my request, the tent went silent and the light of the spirit animals left it, so that I lay on my back in the dark of night, alone and shivering." Page 176
This scene connects with the rest of the book because it shows the immense trust and guidance that the spirits give to Native Americans. This is trust and guidance is evident through out the book from Xavier and Elijah’s first kill to their last in the novel. Many times in the book they talked about a persons ahcahk, or spirit making it to their spirit world. When Sean Patrick dies from a sniper shot Elijah and Xavier pray to their spirits, Gitchi Manitou, to take care of him. Spirits and the spirit world is a major theme in this novel and is talked about and performed many times. The French man that raped Niska later went mad and killed himself by jumping out of a hotel window. Niska’s experience with the lynx is only one example of the power that the spirits can have on people. Was it the spirit of the lynx that made the French trapper kill himself? We can only guess and speculate.
