Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Three Day Road, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Isolation vs. Community
Racism and Assimilation
Language and Storytelling
Nature, War, and Survival
Summary
Analysis
“After the death of my father, your grandfather, Xavier,” Niska says, “our people were directionless.” Many went to Moose Factory and “learned to stomach the wemistikoshiw food and ways,” but a small group decided “to go into the bush instead.” There, Niska’s mother showed Niska “the magic deep in that bush that is as real, as alive as the flashing glow of the Wawahtew.” But the Hudson’s Bay Company “instilled in the Cree a greed for furs that nearly wiped out the animals,” and the land could no longer sustain them. They were forced to go to Moose Factory.
Niska’s father was killed when he wouldn’t assimilate. Niska and her mother also resist assimilation but are forced to conform (by going to Moose Factory) through excessive hunting, trapping, and trading initiated by the wemistikoshiw. The wemistikoshiw are determined to stamp out Native culture through any means necessary. Boyden’s language also points to Niska’s deep connection to nature and the bush. She speaks of “magic” that is “alive” like the Northern Lights and has a spiritual connection to her land much like the wemistikoshiw and their religion, yet the white settlers still disregard this connection when they force Niska into Moose Factory.
Themes
Eight of them arrived in Moose Factory, including Niska, her mother, and Rabbit. “So ye all come for handouts now, do ye?” the man at the Company store said. “Do ye bring furs to trade me, or are ye like the rest of them devils that expect to live on credit?” They traded furs for a bit of food and “scattered around the reserve to different relative who had room.”
This is too is evidence of racism in the novel. Niska’s family doesn’t even want to be on the reserve, but they are nonetheless treated with absolute disgust and are made to feel like beggars. Their lands have been stolen and their way of life forever altered, and it is the wemistikoshiw who expect to be paid.
Themes
Rabbit wanted to go to school with the other children on the reserve, but Niska refused. Soon, word hit the wemistikoshiw that an Indian girl was running around Moose Factory “as uncivilized as an animal.” A priest came and took Niska to the reserve school. “She is all I have,” Niska’s mother said in English.
Niska’s mother’s rights as a mother and a human being are completely disregarded here. Furthermore, their traditional life (which Niska tries to uphold as well on she can on the reserve through refusing the wemistikoshiw school) is viewed as “uncivilized.” What is “uncivilized,” Boyden seems to imply, is taking a child from her mother and forcing her to live according to wemistikoshiw culture.
Themes
Niska fought the priest “like a lynx” and tried to run, but she was overpowered. At the school, the nuns kept Rabbit, now called Anne, away from Niska. They washed Niska’s mouth out with lye soap if she spoke Cree, and they did not give her food for days. When the nuns cut her hair, they cut it shorter than the other girls. That night, Niska snuck down to the room where they cut the hair and shaved her head down to “a stubbly field.”
Again, Boyden makes the connection between Niska and the lynx, which he implies is Niska’s spirit animal. She channels the strength and aggression of the cat to escape the priest but is unsuccessful and is subsequently forced to assimilate. Niska’s shaved head is evidence of her resistance to wemistikoshiw culture (if she can’t have her own hair, she won’t have any) and she is punished for this as well.
Themes
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As punishment for shaving her head, the nuns threw Niska in a basement room like the one from her vision where her father had been imprisoned by the wemistikoshiw. The nuns said she would not come out until her hair grew back, and Niska knew there was no escape. In the small room, Niska again had visions; this time of being in a canoe with a young man she did not recognize. Niska’s hair began to grow, and she “waited and dreamed and plotted.”
Niska is completely abused by the nuns. They treat Niska worse than an animal, which is further evidence of their racism against Indigenous people. The connection between Niska’s punishment and that of her father’s illustrates how widespread this hate and abuse is—they are quite literally all affected by it. Niska’s vision foretells her “three-day paddle” with Xavier, but she doesn’t yet know this.
Themes
One day, Niska heard the breaking of glass far above her head, and “with a flourish of long hair,” Niska’s mother appeared at the room’s only window. She ordered Niska to throw her the bedsheet and pulled her up out the small window. “Did you see Rabbit?” Niska’s mother asked quickly. “Will she come with us?” “She is called Anne now,” Niska answered, and her mother understood. “My mother and I walked out of there and back into the time of our ancestors,” Niska tells Xavier, “living on what the land would give and slowly becoming wild like the animals around us.”
Rabbit has been completely assimilated to wemistikoshiw ways and does not wish to return to the bush, even if they did manage to find her and sneak away. Niska and her mother return to their Native life and identity by going back into the bush, and their connection to nature is further reflected in Boyden’s language. They become “wild like the animals,” he writes, but this also upholds racist assumptions that Native people are “like the animals” and are therefore uncivilized—an attitude that has been historically used to dehumanize Indigenous people and justify colonialism.
Themes
