Two Roads
Two Roads
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Joseph Bruchac on Two Roads
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The story the boarding schools didn’t want toldBruchac had written about the Indian boarding school system in earlier books, including Code Talker and Jim Thorpe Original All American, but each time the subject sat at the edge of the narrative. With Two Roads he wanted it at the center, and he wanted it approached from an angle that the standard historical record obscures.
There are so many stories that still need to be told—and not just stories of Indians as victims. I wanted to tell a story which shows how many Native kids managed to stay Native in those harsh environments, forge friendships, and resist assimilation. Even, though it was far from the intent of those institutions, they learned more about being Native, become more rather than less Indian.
The characters who carry that argument through the novel are not invented from whole cloth. Bruchac drew them from real relationships, particularly with Muscogee elders whose firsthand accounts of Oklahoma boarding school life became the raw material for the book’s most specific scenes.
Several of my characters are based on elders—especially Louis Littlecoon Oliver—who shared stories with me of their Oklahoma boarding school days.
Oliver, a Creek poet, lent not only his stories but his name to a character in the novel. That move from oral account to named fictional presence is one way Bruchac anchors the book’s invented world to documented lives.
The 1930s setting does more than provide historical accuracy. Bruchac chose the decade because of what it rhymes with, and he said so directly when explaining the book’s conception.
I also wanted to have it take place in that time before the New Deal that parallels present day America where the divide between the rich and the majority of people is growing and homelessness is a huge issue..as well as what happens to veterans of our foreign wars.
How he wrote it
Two readers in the room at onceBefore any historical novel reaches print, Bruchac routes the manuscript through the communities it depicts. This is not a courtesy read for tone but a structural part of his writing process, one he has followed across decades of work.
It is important to have people who are culture bearers, and other knowledgeable readers see it before I ever put it in print. It’s really saved me a lot of embarrassment and mistakes over the years.
The reason that review matters is that Bruchac writes with two very different readers in mind from the first draft forward: the community member who will measure accuracy against lived knowledge, and the reader who arrives knowing nothing at all about the subject.
I wanted to tell stories that were true to history and culture, that were going to be read by the people I was writing about, but also informative to people who have no connection or perhaps no knowledge at all about the subject matter I’ve chosen.
Holding those two readers together without shortchanging either one requires a particular discipline. Bruchac frames it as a matter of time, not talent.
Accuracy takes time. It really does take time, and patience is important.
The personal thread
A grandfather who became French CanadianThe novel’s central tension, a father who spent years concealing his Native identity from his own son, is not a device Bruchac invented for dramatic effect. The pattern is one he watched play out in his own family, starting with his grandfather, who lived in Vermont and maintained a fiction about his ancestry to anyone outside the family.
People wouldn’t call attention to their Native ancestry; they kept a low profile and tried to blend in. My grandfather used to visit his relatives in Vermont, but never talked about being Native. He’d tell everyone he was French Canadian.
Bruchac came to understand that concealment not as shame but as a calculated response to a specific and documented danger. That understanding shapes how the novel treats the father’s long silence without making it a betrayal.
I know now that my grandfather did this because of the prejudice against Indians that his family and many other Native families in the Northeast had experienced.
What he wants us to sit with
History you carry, story you live inWhen Bruchac describes what he wants readers to take away from Two Roads, he names historical knowledge and narrative pleasure as equally weighted goals. He resists the ranking that treats one as the justification for the other.
I hope they’ll have a greater understanding about a time and place in our history that we should not forget, that they may have a greater appreciation of the complexity of Native American history. But I also hope, just as much, that they’ll enjoy the story, identify with my main character, and feel as if they’ve been living for a while in his world.
That balance between instruction and experience is something Bruchac traces back to the oral tradition he works from. He described his approach to the Cornell alumni magazine in terms that apply as much to Two Roads as to any of his other books.
I try to write the same way I tell traditional stories. It should be interesting; that way people will listen. But there should be something meaningful within it—a message, an important thought. So that’s what I believe is significant: to teach, and also to entertain.
Behind both goals sits a conviction about who the primary audience for his work really is. Writing for children is, for Bruchac, a deliberate act with a horizon that extends well past the individual reader.
Our native traditions remind us that our children are the continuation of the circle, and there’s no more fertile and creative soil to plant the seed of story than in the mind of a child. When I write for kids, I feel as if I am reaching for the hands of seven generations.
That framing turns a middle-grade novel about one boy’s journey through a 1930s boarding school into something with a longer obligation: not just to document what happened, but to pass it forward in a form that can be held.