Joseph Boyden's whole life seems to be fiction. I've been reading what little Boyden has written about himself and I am not happy with what I found. In the short memoir Driving Lessons https://thewalrus.ca/driving-lessons/ Joseph Boyden tells two implausible stories with himself as hero and savior. He comforts a dying black teen one night in New Orleans in one, and he saves his newborn son after a difficult birth in the other. Both stories are riddled with inconsistencies and factual errors. The New Orleans story has racist overtones and the backseat birth story is misogynistic.

Boyden has been weaving tales of being indigenous into his public lectures for some time. But the details are always sketchy. And when he does give a precise detail it can almost always been proven to be false. This is also true with his so-called White life. He has bragged that his father was the most highly decorated medical officer in the British Empire during WWII. This isn't true. It's exaggeration.