This kind of authenticity is really important to the native community, for reasons that I think will be obvious to any Canadian. My question here is not whether authenticity is important, empirically, but to what degree it matters to you. Think about your own unique cultural heritage. Who is qualified to tell the stories of your culture? Does that authenticity come from birth, upbringing, love, interest, or something else?

And yet others have pointed out several historical accuracies, particularly around the way the Iroqouis were portrayed, and how the fall of the Wendat took place a generation after the death of Champlain:

https://peggyblair.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/the-orenda-by-joseph-boyden-a-historical-review/

How important is historicity to historic fiction? To what degree can we forgive the inconsistencies in favour of a good story?

And so when the crows arrived to caw that our orenda was unclean, at first we laughed. Aataentsic [the Sky Woman and mother of the Wendat] did, too. But she didn't laugh for the same reasons. She'd already foreseen the nests the crows had begun to build as they plucked the odd feather from our hair or begged a strip of hide from our bundle even as we looked into their eyes. Aataentsic laughed because she is just as imperfect as we are. She laughed because we couldn't see our own demise coming.

But hindsight is sometimes too easy, isn't it? And so maybe this is what Aataentsic wants to tell. What's happened in the past can't stay in the past for the same reason the future is always just a breath away. Now is what's most important, Aataentsic says. Orenda can't be lost, just misplaced. The past and future are present.

Who is the narrator. What are they trying to say about the past and the future?

Here we have a rather unusual situation in that this story is told to us by three different people, each in the first person. To give us all these different voices, Boyden had to put himself mentally into the headspace of each of these three people and attempt to tell their story in a unique voice. Isn't that a form of authorial roleplaying? Did he succeed in this? When you roleplay, how likely are you to make each character distinct? Is each character really different, or are they afterall, just aspects of YOU?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17661831-the-orenda?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=efE3graFZD&rank=1

The Back Cover Blurb:
"In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl’s captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation’s great warriors and statesmen. Years have passed since the murder of his family, and yet they are never far from his mind. In the girl, Snow Falls, he recognizes the ghost of his lost daughter, but as he fights for her heart and allegiance, small battles erupt into bigger wars as both tribes face a new, more dangerous threat from afar.

Traveling with the Huron is Christophe, a charismatic missionary who has found his calling among the tribe and devotes himself to learning and understanding their customs and language. An emissary from distant lands, he brings much more than his faith to this new world, with its natural beauty and riches.

As these three souls dance with each other through intricately woven acts of duplicity, their social, political and spiritual worlds collide - and a new nation rises from a world in flux."