{"id":51245,"date":"2017-01-19T00:25:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-19T00:25:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=51245"},"modified":"2017-01-19T00:26:00","modified_gmt":"2017-01-19T00:26:00","slug":"statement-by-joseph-boyden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=51245","title":{"rendered":"Statement by Joseph Boyden"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statement by Joseph Boyden<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

CNW: A Cision Company<\/a>
\n2017-01-11<\/p>\n

Joseph Boyden<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

TORONTO<\/a>, Jan. 11, 2017 \/CNW\/ – A few weeks ago, I found out that my 85-year-old mom had been contacted by a journalist who prodded her with pointed and personal questions about her heritage. Specifically, he asked her to prove how Indigenous she is.<\/p>\n

My family’s heritage is rooted in our stories. I’ve listened to them, both the European and the Indigenous ones, all my life. My older sisters told me since childhood about my white-looking father helping his Indian-looking brother hide their blood in order to survive in the early 1900’s. My mother’s family history is certainly not laid out neatly in the official records, or on ancestry.ca either. From the age of nine or ten, the woman I knew as my grandmother told me stories about my mother that, until recently, my mother preferred not to share with anyone. The details are private and painful, yet my mother has been forced to revisit aspects of her past she believed were closed away forever.<\/p>\n

Children don’t go about consciously presenting identities; they just are who they are. And that’s how I was: a white kid from Willowdale<\/a> with native roots. The Ojibwe<\/a> family I grew-up with in summers on Christian Island<\/a> still call me cousin or uncle.\u00a0 The bad poetry I first scribbled as a troubled teen was about searching for my mother’s clan.\u00a0 For the last 22 years I’ve been a member of a Moose Cree First Nation<\/a> family, active in their community and doing everything we can to get youth out onto the land at Camp Onakawana<\/a> on the Abitibi River<\/a>. This is my life.\u00a0 And I’ve always said pretty much the same thing: “a small part of me is Indigenous, but it’s a big part of who I am.”…<\/p>\n

Read the entire new release here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statement by Joseph Boyden CNW: A Cision Company 2017-01-11 Joseph Boyden TORONTO, Jan. 11, 2017 \/CNW\/ – A few weeks ago, I found out that my 85-year-old mom had been contacted by a journalist who prodded her with pointed and personal questions about her heritage. Specifically, he asked her to prove how Indigenous she is. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,19,8,3015,22],"tags":[26018,16792],"class_list":["post-51245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-autobiography","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","category-statements","tag-cnw","tag-joseph-boyden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51246,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51245\/revisions\/51246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}