Richard Wagamese


Richard Wagamese was a Canadian author and journalist. An Ojibwe from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario, he was best known for his 2012 novel Indian Horse, which won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013, was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads, and was adapted into a 2017 feature length film, Indian Horse, released after his death.

Life

Wagamese described his first home in the essay "The Path to Healing" as a tent hung from a spruce bough. His family fished, hunted, and trapped. At the age of two, he and his three siblings were abandoned by adults on a binge drinking trip in Kenora and left their bush camp when they ran out of food and firewood. They sheltered at a railroad depot and were found by a policeman.
Wagamese later described his family by saying "each of the adults had suffered in an institution that tried to scrape the Indian out of their insides, and they came back to the bush raw, sore and aching." His parents, Marjorie Wagamese and Stanley Raven, had been among the many native children who, under Canadian law, were removed from their families and forced to attend government-run residential schools, the primary purpose of which was to separate them from their native culture.
After being taken from his family by the Children's Aid Society, he was raised in foster homes in northwestern Ontario before being adopted, at age nine, by a St. Catharines Presbyterian family in that refused to allow him to maintain contact with his First Nations heritage and identity. Of this experience he wrote: "The wounds I suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks." The beatings and abuse he endured in foster care led him to leave home at 16, seeking to reconnect with indigenous culture. Then, he lived on the street, abusing drugs and alcohol, and was imprisoned several times. During this time, he also began frequenting public libraries, at first for shelter and later to read.
Wagamese only reunited with his family at age 23. After recounting his experiences to them, an elder gave him the name Mushkotay Beezheekee Anakwat – Buffalo Cloud – and told him his role was to tell stories.
Wagamese lived the later part of his life outside Kamloops, British Columbia, and was granted an honorary doctorate from the city's Thompson Rivers University in 2010. He was married and divorced three times, and had two sons, one of whom was estranged. On March 10, 2017, two days after Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations was nominated for a BC Book Award, Wagamese died at his home of natural causes. He was engaged at the time of his death.

Career

In 1979 Wagamese began his first job as a newspaper author, working at New Breed, a First Nations publication. With the encouragement of Lorna Crozier among others, he later worked as a writer for the Calgary Herald. He won a National Newspaper Award for writing in 1991. His journalism also won the Native American Press Association Award twice and the National Aboriginal Communications Society award. His newspaper columns can be found in his anthology The Terrible Summer. Wagamese stopped working full-time in journalism in 1993 but continued to write as a freelance journalist for publications such as The Globe and Mail.
His debut novel Keeper 'n Me was published in 1994. The book was co-winner with Roberta Rees's Beneath the Faceless Mountain of the Georges Bugnet Award for Novel at the 1995 Writers' Guild of Alberta's Alberta Literary Awards gala.
He published five other novels, a book of poetry, two children's books, and five non-fiction books, including two memoirs. He also wrote for the television series North of 60. Throughout his writing life, he was renowned for his riveting live readings, consisting of passages from his works, traditional stories, anecdotes, and even stand-up comedy.
In 2012 he was given an Indspire Award as a representative of media and communications. In 2012 he also served as the Harvey Stevenson Southam Guest Lecturer in journalism at the University of Victoria. In 2013, he won the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize and the inaugural Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature. Other awards included the Kouhi Award for outstanding contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario and the 2015 Writers' Trust of Canada's Matt Cohen Award for his body of work.
In the same year, Canada's Super Channel announced that it was funding a film adaptation of Indian Horse, to be directed by Stephen Campanelli and written by Dennis Foon. Clint Eastwood is listed as one the many executive producers who contributed to the making of the film. Following Super Channel's filing for creditor protection, the film Indian Horse instead premiered theatrically at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
His final novel, Starlight, was published in 2018, and a posthumous collection of stories and non-fiction writings, One Drum, was published in 2019.

Published works

BookAwards & Honours
The Terrible Summer. Warwick Publishing. 1996
2007 Canadian Authors Association MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction
Included in The Globe and Mails 2008 Top 100 Books of the Year
2011 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature
2013 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature; Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
2015 Banff Mountain Book Festival Grand Award
2017 Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award; finalist for the BC Book Award