The first time I heard author Joseph Boyden speak was last June when he gave the keynote address at a health-care conference in a Richmond Hill hotel.

Boyden spoke for nearly an hour, played the harmonica and held the crowd captive as he spoke of his battle with depression and attempted suicide when he was a teen.

When he described himself, I felt an immediate kinship. Boyden was raised in Toronto and he described his background as mostly Celtic — his dad, Raymond, a Second World War hero, was Irish and his mom, Blanche, Scottish and Anishinaabe.

While I’m not Irish, I was raised outside of Toronto, my father was Polish Canadian, and my maternal grandmother, Margaret Dyck, is indigenous. She carries an Indian status card and her community is Fort William First Nation. She never lived on the reserve but in the bush, in Graham and Raith, places so small you would be pressed to find them on a map.

I thought Boyden’s background gave authenticity to his writing because his voice came from his mixed-blood background.

Then, shortly before Christmas, I read APTN reporter Jorge Barrera’s story, “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-Shifting Indigenous Identity,” and I cringed. Barrera’s detailed investigative report challenged Boyden’s claim to indigenous blood.

“Boyden has never publicly revealed exactly from which Earth his indigenous heritage grows. It has been an ever shifting, evolving thing. Over the years, Boyden has variously claimed his family’s roots extended to the Métis, Mi’kmaq, Ojibway and Nipmuc peoples,” Barrera wrote.

Those are roots from many trees.

The storm that followed on social media has been epic. Indigenous academics, writers and artists have weighed in. The debate has been thoughtful and informed and has evolved from bloodlines to one of belonging and nationhood. It is the nations that decide who belongs and who doesn’t. A nation can claim you, embrace you. And you are also responsible to your nation. You help, you contribute and when you make a mistake, you own up, ask for forgiveness and then the nation decides.

On Wednesday, Boyden, who declined to be interviewed for this story, broke his self-imposed silence. He defended his ancestry, saying he has spent a lifetime exploring and leading an indigenous life and that he has not misled anyone in any way. He has chosen not to provide proof or specifics of indigenous heritage but he knows what he was told, feels it and that is all that matters.

Boyden, 50, has enjoyed a wildly successful career as a self-identified indigenous author. His novel Three Day Road burst onto the literary scene after author Isabel Allende promoted it. He won the Giller Prize for Through Black Spruce and The Orenda won CBC’s Canada Reads and became a bestseller.

He has won awards specifically for being an indigenous author, including the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year, and he is an Indspire fellow, one of the highest awards an indigenous Canadian can receive. He has spoken out on murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, was an honorary witness at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and wrote a ballet on Canada’s residential school legacy.

Boyden has been an indigenous star in the mainstream media. But in the indigenous community, questions have been floated for some time about who his people are, or, conversely, who exactly claims him as a member of their community.

“I kind of wonder what drove him to say such things? And why is he the voice of First Nations people?” asks Mike Metatawabin, a Cree leader and former chief of Fort Albany First Nation on James Bay, where Boyden has frequently travelled and drawn upon to shape his novels.

Metatawabin thinks Boyden may have issues about his upbringing. “But aren’t we all like that, especially (about) who we are and places we come from?” asks Metatawabin, a survivor of the notorious St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Fort Albany.

Metatawabin said he had some “mixed feelings” about Boyden's claim of indigenous ancestry but he does credit Boyden for living and working among the people of James Bay. Canada is at a crossroads concerning reconciliation with indigenous people. Mistakes will be made and we all must learn from them, he said. “As for wanting to be one of us, we understand, we get it, and not too many people will be so open and honest about that.”

In a statement posted in December to his Twitter account in response to APTN, Boyden states he is from a “mixed-blood background of mostly Celtic heritage.” He offers that he has “Nipmuc roots from Dartmouth, Massachusetts, on my father’s side and Ojibwe roots from Nottawasaga Bay traced to the 1800s on my mother’s side.”

But he offers no names, no papers, no history beyond his family’s stories. His statement on Wednesday is equally elusive.

“My family’s heritage is rooted in our stories,” he said. “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 1900s,” he said.

“My mother’s family history is certainly not laid out neatly in the official records or on ancestry.ca either,” he wrote. “From the age of 9 or 10, 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.”

Indigenous history is an oral history. Stories are passed from generation to generation. Records were imposed on indigenous people by colonial settlers and governments. So was the Indian Act of 1876, legislation that pronounces exactly who can be called an “Indian” and who can’t. This would not be decided by the indigenous nations but by the Government of Canada.

If records exist at all, they can sometimes be wrong. My great-grandmother Elizabeth Gauthier’s death certificate spells her maiden name as “Gautier.” Her birth date changes, depending on the document, and in some cases so does her ethnicity. Some list her as “Indian” and others as not. Her mother, Annie Carpenter, born in 1871, is an “Indian” while her father, Joseph Gauthier, is French. Elizabeth’s husband, Russell Bowen (a.k.a. Alphonse Piskey), was also indigenous, part of Fort William.

In his comment to APTN, Boyden apologized to the Red River Métis. He said he had no ties to the Red River Métis and that he has sometimes used Métis to describe himself as a mixed-blood person. Métis translates to “mixed” in English.

Louise Goulding, a former executive with the Métis Nation of Ontario, is surprised Boyden did not know better. She has heard him speak in the Georgian Bay area where she lives.

“I know he was at some Métis events. One was an education seminar and he came to the general assembly a few years ago. He always claimed to us he was Métis,” said Goulding.

“But if you have an Indian ancestor, you can’t just say you are Métis,” Goulding said. “You have to have the community behind you.”

The courts have ruled a Métis person has to have ties to an ancestor in a Métis community that existed before First Nations signed treaties with the Crown. The Métis Nation of Ontario has about 18,000 people registered.

Four years ago at an indigenous writers conference, Boyden told Rebeka Tabobondung, publisher of Muskrat magazine, that he was a member of Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. She was stunned. That is her nation.

“I had the opportunity to meet him, casually, and I asked him, in a very common fashion, you know, ‘What nation are you from?’ and, he said he was from Wasauksing. So I got very excited. I asked around the community and asked someone who is a community historian who knows all the family connections. She said she didn’t know. That set off alarm bells for me,” Tabobondung said.

The Wasauksing community understands this is a sensitive topic. “We don’t want to destroy somebody or pull them down. He had a lot of support, even though people didn’t know where his heritage came from. That didn’t seem to be an issue, so you are kind of silent with not wanting to be a negative person,” she said.

At its heart, the debate over Boyden’s identity isn’t about blood but about nations’ rights to decide who is a member or part of their community.

“If you feel indigenous, no, that is not enough. There are indigenous protocols that we have that very much include verbalizing your kinship connections, your connections to the community and relationship to it. The danger is anyone can self-identify. We could have 1,000 Joseph Boydens and we already do,” she said.

In response to Boyden’s statement that his father’s indigenous roots can be traced to Nipmuc people in Massachusetts, Nipmuc Chief Cheryll Toney Holley posted in a blog on Jan. 11: “Whether the author is Nipmuc or not, I cannot really say since I only casually glanced at his genealogy. He has not to my knowledge made any attempt to engage my people. However, I hope this article has demonstrated that Dartmouth Indians are not the same people as Nipmuc so there is some confusion in his claim to be Nipmuc from Dartmouth, Mass.”

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Boyden has said that his father’s family, who were established furniture merchants in Ottawa in the 1870s, kept that Nipmuc ancestry hidden.

In the 1892 edition of Prominent Men of Canada, the author’s great-great-grandfather, Joseph, is listed as a prominent furniture merchant and real estate holder. According to the small profile, Joseph Boyden was born in Almonte, Ont., in 1840 to Gilmour Boyden, a native of New York state, and Ann McLean, a native of Scotland.

“He is a member of the Masonic fraternity, having joined Corinthian lodge, Ottawa, some 20 years ago. In religion, he is a supporter of the Presbyterian Church,” the book states.

Joseph and his wife, Josephine Luddington of New York state, had one son, Grant Ellsworth, who is the author’s grandfather.

Maclean’s magazine published a story in 1956 about Injun Joe, a much-beloved figure who lived outside of Algonquin Park, called himself “Injun Joe,” wore a headdress, lived in a teepee and sold souvenirs. This is the author’s uncle.

Erl Boyden told the journalist he didn’t think he had a drop of indigenous blood in him.

“Erl König Boyden may look like an Indian, think like an Indian and spend most of his year among Indians, but so far as he knows he hasn’t a drop of Indian blood. His father was a well-to-do Ottawa merchant (in household furniture) who traced his family to Thomas O’Boyden of Yorkshire,” the article said.

Easily traceable indigenous bloodline or not, Boyden has identified as being connected to an indigenous family from the James Bay region. Not by blood, but by love.

In his Wednesday statement he said he is part of the Tozer family from Moose Cree First Nation in northern Ontario.

“For the last 22 years, I’ve been a member of a Moose Cree First Nation family, active in their community and doing everything we can to get youth out onto the land at Camp Onakawana on the Abitibi River. This is my life,” the statement read.

When the statement was released, three weeks after the controversy began, Boyden agreed to speak to Candy Palmater, a friend, on CBC Radio’s program Q.

On Wednesday, Boyden told Palmater on Q that he is traditionally tied to the Tozer family, who help him run the camp for youth.

“We are the Tozer family,” Pamela and William Tozer posted on Facebook Thursday night. “We are Moose Cree and we have deep roots in the James Bay region called Mushkegowuk. The Cree side of our families (goes) back centuries on this land.

“Joseph Boyden has been like family to us for over 20 years. It started when he came to the region as a teacher and has continued ever since. He and his family are as close to our family as one could ever hope. Our families are one family.”

There are two approaches concerning belonging, says Damien Lee, who is finishing his doctorate at the University of Saskatchewan on Anishinaabe citizenship through adoption.

The first approach is self-identification, and the second is acceptance by a community.

“The first approach has been the status quo forever, since the Indian Act. It put the bloodline approach front and centre. But we are in an era right now where that is being seen as tenuous. It boils down to, are you accountable to a community?” he said.

Before Wednesday, Boyden had stuck to the first approach. But families have claimed people who are not their blood, forever.

“Indigenous communities are saying they have the right to who belongs to us. The next step is how do you claim your people? It is going to be different for every nation, every community,” Lee says.

Boyden makes no apologies for telling indigenous stories.

“The stories that I tell . . . the voices come to me. The average person might not get this. But when I sit to write, I don’t ask the voice that comes to me, are you indigenous or are you white?” he told Palmater. “As a writer to my core, I have to tell the stories I am compelled to tell.”

When Palmater began her interview, she asked, “Are you indigenous?”

Boyden’s response: “Absolutely. I am the person I have always shown myself to be both privately and publicly and my family says, I’m a white kid from Willowdale with native roots.”