Richard Wagamese

Richard Wagamese (October 14, 1955 – March 10, 2017) was an Ojibwe Canadian author and journalist from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in Northwestern Ontario. He was best known for his novel Indian Horse, which won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013, and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads.

It was adapted into a feature-length film, Indian Horse (2017), directed by Stephen Campanelli and released after Wagamese's death.

Life

In the essay "The Path to Healing", Wagamese described his first home as a tent hung from a spruce bough.

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."

After being taken from his family by the Children's Aid Society, Wagamese was raised in foster homes in northwestern Ontario before being adopted, at age nine, by a Presbyterian family in St. Catharines. They refused to allow him to maintain contact with his First Nations heritage and identity. For a time he lived on the street, abusing drugs and alcohol, and was imprisoned several times.

He was married and divorced three times, and had two sons named Jason and Joshua, one of whom was estranged. He was engaged at the time of his death. The film adaptation of his best-known novel, Indian Horse, was released later that year.

Career

I did not speak my first Ojibwa word or set foot on my traditional territory until I was twenty-six. I did not know that I had a family, a history, a culture, a source for spirituality, a cosmology, or a traditional way of living. I had no awareness that I belonged somewhere. — Richard Wagamese — 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. 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.

In 2012 he was given an Indspire Award as a representative of media and communications. In 2012 he 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 for his novel Indian Horse.

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 one of the executive producers who contributed to the making of the film. Following Super Channel's filing for creditor protection, the film Indian Horse premiered theatrically at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. A collection of stories and non-fiction writings, One Drum, was published posthumously in 2019.

In 2022, Sea to Sky Entertainment and Grinding Halt Films announced that Foon, Campanelli and Jules Arita Koostachin were working on a film adaptation of Wagamese's 2009 novel Ragged Company.

Published works

Book Awards & 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 Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017 Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award; finalist for the BC Book Award