the loop richard wagamese was in didn't start with him. that's the first thing, and it might be the most useful thing on this whole page. his parents and extended family were survivors of canada's residential schools — an institution he said tried 'to scrape the indian out of their insides', so that the adults who raised him 'came back to the bush raw, sore and aching.' the wound was already running through the family before he was born. what happened to him was the same pattern, one generation down.
he was born in 1955 into an ojibwe family from wabaseemoong, in northwestern ontario. as a toddler — accounts put it at two or three — he and his siblings were left in a bush camp during a family crisis near kenora and taken into care by children's aid. that was the sixties scoop: decades of canadian child-welfare authorities removing indigenous kids from their families and placing them almost always with non-indigenous ones. he was moved through foster homes (family, he said, was something like an ever-changing set of faces) and around age nine adopted by a white presbyterian family in st. catharines. the adoption came with erasure — no language, no community, the only indigenous kid in the school — and with violence. "the wounds i suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks," he wrote.
at 16 he left. and here's the loop in its plainest form: homelessness, alcohol and drugs, stretches in jail, a string of hard jobs — tree planting, ditch digging, sugar beets, dishwashing. a kid cut off from his own people, repeating disconnection and self-destruction into his twenties, because nobody had ever shown him another way to carry it.
the librarian, and the name
two small things broke it. the first was a librarian in st. catharines who realised the teenager in her library was homeless and started giving him food, then books, then beethoven. he'd left school around grade nine. that library is where the writer started, and he said so for the rest of his life.
the second came in his twenties (his own account says about 23; other sources put it later — call it 'his twenties'). he found his birth family. an ojibwe elder gave him a name — mushkotay beezheekee anakwat, buffalo cloud — and told him his role was to be a teller of stories. he says he didn't speak his first word of ojibwe until 26. the way back to his people ran through english and story, not through a language he'd simply forgotten.
so he told stories. first job in 1979 at an indigenous-run paper. columns at the calgary herald, where he spent years interviewing residential-school survivors — other people's versions of the wound that made his childhood. a national newspaper award in 1991. then books: keeper'n me (1994), the memoirs for joshua (2002, written to the son he didn't raise) and one native life (2008), and in 2012 indian horse — a novel, not a memoir, about a boy in a residential school and the hockey that becomes his one way out. it became a film in 2017, the year he died.
'stories are meant to heal. that's what my people say, and it's what i believe.' he wasn't describing the wound. telling it was the way through.
the honest ledger
ages here are approximate; the sources don't agree. indian horse is fiction and shouldn't be read as his diary. he died at home in kamloops in march 2017 at 61; the cause is reported as natural and not specified, so it isn't specified here. and one much-shared line about all of us being story couldn't be pinned to a source, so it isn't used here.
what's left, for the loop: the thing you keep doing might not have started with you. and the way through, for him, was not to fight it in silence — it was to say what happened, out loud, to someone, on repeat, until it was a story instead of a wound. who could you tell yours to?