Through Black Spruce

Boyden highlights the impact that white influence has had on indigenous peoples and cultures. Throughout the novel we learn different ways that colonization has negatively affected the local population of Moosonee and the Bird family:

 In their lives, they’ve gone from living on the land in teepees and askihkans, hunting, trapping, trading in order to survive, to living in clapboard houses […] Diabetes and obesity and cancer plague our community, in communities all across the north (37).

The neglect of communities was deliberate in some cases, like the government’s decision to put Indian children into white boarding schools. Will notes that “they were bent on crushing the old ways in order to sow the new. And if that meant parents and children who no longer really believed one another, so be it. Generation after generation” (104). The use of boarding schools to colonize populations is not specific to Moosonee or even to Canada; this is a strategy used by many colonizing nations, including the United States and several European countries.

Will remembers the government’s neglect and denial. When multiple community members were diagnosed with brain cancer, “the government called it coincidence, but the army had left piles of oozing barrels […] And most any Indian within a hundred miles knew that ‘coincidence’ is just a white phrase for bummer” (42).