Walking the Ojibwe Path, Review by Ruth Edgett

Walking the Ojibwe Path:
A Memoir in Letters to Joshua
Richard Wagamese

Milkweed Editions, 2023
Doubleday Canada, 2002
205 pages

A heart, once shattered, can never heal back to its original shape. Always, there will be lesions and scars that keep it from beating exactly as it once did. Still, with care and gentle nurturing, a heart can re-form stronger, more polished and faceted than before its breaking.

But, if that heart is a child’s heart, if no one but the child knows it is shattered—and there is no one who can take that heart in their hands, piece it gently back together and love it—that heart will beat the rest of its days an off-kilter, limping beat; always in pain, never feeling complete in the happiness every heart deserves.

This was the heart of Canadian Indigenous author, Richard Wagamese (1955-2017). He died in his sleep at age sixty-one, having declared in later years a measure of peace and contentment with his place in Creation. He had only recently made plans to marry for his fourth time.

“In my opinion it was just heartbreak,” fiancée Yvette Lehmann told The Globe and Mail at the time. “From the life he had to live. The past.”

In Walking the Ojibwe Path (first published in 2002 as For Joshua: An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son and re-issued this year by Milkweed Editions), Wagamese traces that heartbreak to his first foster family—the one he’d begun to think of as a mother, father, brothers and sisters. These were the people who taught him to say “we” around the dinner table as they made plans together for a special summer vacation. They were the family who, suddenly without explanation, left him behind with neighbours while they set off on their adventure.

“That was the first time I learned that the world can drop away from beneath your feet and that your heart can break and still keep beating,” wrote Wagamese in this, the earliest of two memoirs. (The second, One Native Life, was published in 2008.)

The re-issued memoir speaks to Joshua, first of two sons, then a six-year-old from whom Wagamese was already parted. He does not spare himself explaining why:

“Drinking is why we are separated… Booze owned me. I offered myself to it when I was a young man… and your mother did the only thing that she knew to do and that was to take you away… I don’t blame her… I’m thankful in fact.”

By the time he’d published his first life story, Wagamese had already produced three novels to critical acclaim. This as a former sixteen-year-old runaway, a survivor of physical abuse, homelessness, crime, incarceration, alcoholism, drug use, depression and thoughts of suicide. In total, he would produce sixteen books, two published after his death. All on a self-administered education gleaned in secret visits to libraries that he could never reveal to his rebel friends, who were homeless and angry like him.

By 2002, Wagamese had searched for and found his Indigenous roots, become a journalist, broadcaster and respected public figure. In the years that followed, he received awards and acclaim for his journalism, his novels and, even, this memoir. Yet, in it, he confesses to Joshua that the accolades could not heal the broken-hearted little boy inside. They could not eradicate the fear that people would discover he was somehow improperly made, not loveable enough to have relationships, not good enough to be who others thought he was.

Although Wagamese didn’t go through Canada’s infamous Residential School system, where the stated mission was to eradicate Indigenous identities and replace them with the dominant culture, he suffered the results of that system all the same. Not until his second memoir do we learn his parents were residential school survivors, and that the toddler Richard, his brothers and sisters became part of the now-reviled “sixties scoop,” during which thousands of children like him were taken from their parents and sent to non-Indigenous homes.

In fact, Wagamese was twenty-three before he learned of residential schools and other government policies aimed at pushing aside or assimilating the original people of the land now known as Canada. Even at the time of this first memoir at age forty-six, Wagamese was unaware of exactly how he came to be in foster care. From his writings, one takes away the learnings of a person always searching for his true origins, for the truth of his existence, which he pursued through the wisdom of Ojibwe traditions and spirituality.

In Walking the Ojibwe Path, Wagamese writes of a time when he held onto anger toward the society that had marginalized him, taken away the identity that called to him from the time he was a child. Even as he wrote this book, he had only partly uncovered it. Yet, he had managed to lay his anger aside, to replace it with a basic teaching of his people: That all Creation is one, that the original people of this land have been and always will be the caretakers of it; that they are delegated by The Creator to help the rest of its inhabitants become caretakers, too.

“You don’t have to be Ojibwe, Cree, Haida, Inuk or Blackfoot to love Canada. You don’t have to be Native, because the truth is that everyone born here is native to this land,” he writes.

Milkweed Editions has re-issued Wagamese’s memoir under a new title as part of its Seedbank initiative, which has the object of preserving and sharing “ancient, historical, and contemporary works from cultures from around the world” in order to “foster conversation and reflection on the human relationship to place and the natural world…” Re-publishing Wagamese’s writings is a worthy step toward that goal. His skillful weave of story, self-examination and wisdom provides readers with inspiration and space to reflect, not only upon their relationship with the natural world, but upon their relationship—past, present and future—with others who co-habit that world.

Wagamese wrote to his son before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which traveled the country between 2007 and 2015 hearing testimony from more than 6,500 people. But, within Wagamese’s pages, the effects of inter-generational trauma that the Commission showcased come across all-too-plainly in a narrative about what the author humbly describes as “one Native life.” Despite his own and his family’s experiences, Wagamese continued to choose generosity toward the society that injured him, to remind his readers that, fundamentally, we are all keepers of this land.

All good writers write for the love of words; many write for love of their characters; others for love of the story. But only the great ones put all of these together with love for their readers. Wagamese accomplished this. Walking the Ojibwe Path may have begun as letters to his son, as an apology of sorts combined with a detailed how-to and how-not-to manual for living on—as well as with—this land and its people. But, in an unselfconsciously poetic and searingly honest voice, Wagamese lets each of us feel that we are that six-year-old boy, that we are being shown a way of seeing life that will serve us for the rest of ours.

Editor's Note: In Canada, the English spelling of Richard Wagamese's cultural identity is "Ojibway." In the United States the spelling is "Ojibwe." Hence the discrepancy between the 2002 title, published in Canada, and the latest title, published in the United States. The Ojibway-language term is Anishinaabe.

A Maritime Canadian by birth and upbringing, Ruth Edgett now lives in Ontario, Canada. She’s a former print journalist and prize-winning short story writer with work published and forthcoming in books, magazines and journals based in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. She is the author of A Watch in the Night: The story of Pomquet Island’s last lightkeeping family (Nimbus, 2007), a narrative non-fiction book about her mother’s family. A novelist in waiting, Ruth is seeking a home for one manuscript and is writing a second. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Prince Edward Island and an MS in Communications Management from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University.