Joseph’s
Boyden’s Three Day Road was set during World War One (1914-1918) when
women had very little say in their role in society. It wasn’t until 1921 that
Canadian women could vote in a federal election, but this didn’t include all
women. Aboriginal and Asian women still weren’t allowed to vote at this time.
The wemistikoshiw males deemed
themselves superior to the wemistikoshiw
women, and even more superior to the aboriginal women. To the male Europeans aboriginal
women were considered the lowest of the low on the social scale.
Aboriginal
women played a very important role in their aboriginal societies before
European contact. They would have say in decisions that involved the chief and
had powerful statuses like clan mothers or healers. In some tribes it was
tradition to take the last name of the women during marriage. Niska, the last
Oji-Cree medicine women to live off the land had a very high status in the
novel. She always had other aboriginals (mostly men) come to her for her
visions and advice. She is known to be a “windigo
killer” (169), which is an aboriginal spirit that possesses characteristics of
both a beast and a human. This spirit is a gift that according to aboriginal
tradition gets passed on through the generations of powerful families. Niska’s windigo spirit is valuable and is feared
by the Christian Europeans. Her new wemistikoshiw
affair eventually tries to take this from her.
Young
Niska becomes involved with a French trapper one Winter. She invites him into
her tent and despite their language barrier he ends up taking her virginity.
After the fact Niska admits “That’s when it dawned on me that maybe I wasn’t
the hunter anymore” (134). The trapper left before dawns making the reader believe
that he was only involved with Niska for physical pleasure but when they meet
again the reader discovers his true goal. Niska’s mother notices a difference
in Niska and warns her not to trust the trapper. She doesn’t listen because she
was “too full of him and too flushed with him” (164). Niska goes into the wemistikoshiw town to find her trapper. As
she walked through the town “The converted Indians blessed themselves and
closed their doors when I walked by. Young men pointed at me and stared” (168).
She was an outcast and everyone in town knew about her and the trapper. He was
rumoured to have “a taste for red meat that he can’t satisfy” (169) and has
many half-Indian, half-French children he refuses to claim. Regardless of all
the warnings Niska meets with the French trapper and he takes advantage of her
in his church. After he said “You are nothing special, just another squaw
whore. I took your power away in this place and sent it to burn in hell where
it belongs” (174). During their whole relationship he was trying to take her windigo spirit and power away.
Aboriginal
women were not the only women that were taken advantage of but European women
too. When the soldiers get a break from the trench lines they go estaminets
where “women come and men line up to be with them in the little rooms in the
back” (155). One night Xavier beds one of the local women, Lizette. With all
the drunken men always around her, he worries for her safety. Xavier wants to
see Lizette again so he sneaks away from the front lines to visit her one
night. She tells him “You can’t stay Indian boy, I’m with another. He is
upstairs” (252). Xavier becomes enraged and tries to fight the other man. He
was unaware that Elijah “paid a lot money for her time” (257) with Xavier. War
creates hard times financially so the local women sell themselves for money.
After all, it is the only job other than care for the house and children that
they would have been allowed to do back then. The local whores are the only
women mentioned in the in the war as women were not allowed to enlist. This
would finally change once the Second World War started in 1939. Women have made
a lot of equality advances since World War One and aren’t as limited as they
were in Three Day Road.
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