{"id":56364,"date":"2018-05-10T14:55:49","date_gmt":"2018-05-10T14:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56364"},"modified":"2018-05-10T14:55:49","modified_gmt":"2018-05-10T14:55:49","slug":"my-name-is-joseph-boyden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56364","title":{"rendered":"My name is Joseph Boyden"},"content":{"rendered":"

My name is Joseph Boyden<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Maclean’s<\/a>
\n2017-08-02<\/p>\n

Joseph Boyden<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Joseph<\/a>
\nJoseph Boyden<\/a> (Photograph by Jacob C Boynton)<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Being Indigenous isn\u2019t all about DNA<\/a>. It\u2019s about who you claim, and who claims you.<\/em><\/p>\n

My name is Joseph Boyden. Late last December I had a hard time wrapping my head around what a Cree<\/a> Elder I\u2019ve known and respected for 25 years told me when we spoke about the firestorm that questions concerning my ancestry had sparked in Canada<\/a> over the holidays. This elder told me that I was experiencing a rite of passage. I wanted to tell him that I\u2019d not long ago turned 50, and weren\u2019t rites of passage something geared more toward the teenage years? But I knew to listen and not interrupt. He told me that what I was experiencing was actually a gift.<\/p>\n

A gift? People I did and didn\u2019t know were questioning my family\u2019s history, our creation stories, our ancestry. People were questioning me as a fiction writer and a journalist and a vocal activist for Indigenous rights in our country as an honorary witness of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Now, from these months of hindsight, I understand it was the perfect storm brewing. Last October I\u2019d spoken up publicly to demand accountability by a university and its conduct in the treatment of a friend\u2014and the complainants\u2014 embroiled in an ugly and horribly mishandled controversy that ended up sending shockwaves beyond literary Canada…<\/p>\n

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

Being Indigenous isn\u2019t all about DNA. It\u2019s about who you claim, and who claims you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,395,19,8,3015],"tags":[25659],"class_list":["post-56364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-autobiography","category-canada","category-media-archive","category-native-americans","tag-macleans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56364","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=56364"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56365,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56364\/revisions\/56365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}