Jonas, by Stephanie Wesley, Lac Seul First Nation. For the students of Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School, past and present, here and gone. Read Wesley’s winning short story below, and have a look at the five art winners’ works in the 19-29 age category. “We were impressed how she accomplished so naturally things I work hard to teach graduate students.” This year though, partly because of the challenge’s expanding popularity-of the 1,000 pieces of writing submitted over the eight years of the challenge, 300 came in this year-“we had to choose between three or four outstanding entries in both writing categories.” The winner in the older age group, which Boyden says “reads like a really good CSI episode, was “Jonas” by Stephanie Wesley from the Lac Seul First Nation. “Usually there is one head and shoulders above the others,” says Boyden. “Canadians mostly hear the negatives of Aboriginal life, but here we’re showing them some of the really powerful, really beautiful works of Aboriginal people.”Īnd he and the other judges didn’t have an easy time determining the winners.
It’s simply too important and too positive an event for him not to be involved, Boyden says. Boyden’s fellow judges include the likes of Tomson Highway, Drew Hayden Taylor and Lee Maracle. The challenge has taken on an impressive momentum: there are cash prizes for the top 10 entries in each category ($2,000 for first prize) all-expenses-paid trips for the first-place finishers to the city hosting the awards presentation on June 21, National Aboriginal Day, (Winnipeg this year) and intense, ongoing support from high-profile Aboriginal authors. Aboriginal youth, in two age groups, 14 to 18 and 19 to 29, were invited to submit a piece of creative writing (short stories, plays, screenplays, collections of poetry), or a piece of two-dimensional artwork, capturing a defining moment in Native history. For the fourth year running, Boyden-who personally (he’s part Metis) and as a writer has always been acutely attuned to “the big part played in my life by the small part of my ancestry that’s Native”-was deeply involved, as judge and master of ceremonies, with the Canadian Aboriginal Writing and Arts Challenge.Ĭreated and organized in 2005 by the Historica-Dominion Institute as a national writing competition for Aboriginal youth, the challenge this year added a visual arts component.
“The book’s actually a deep prequel,” Boyden says in an interview with Maclean’s, an exploration of events from well before the 20th century, “developments that lead up to what happens in the other novels.” Nor is the author tending entirely to his own garden. Neither expectation, strictly speaking, has come to pass. Joseph Boyden was supposed to be busy staying under the radar and finishing his third novel, which was widely expected to be the capstone to a trilogy begun by Three Day Road (2005) and Through Black Spruce (which won the Giller Prize in 2008).
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