10/10/2026
Richard Wagamese ❤️
He was taken from his family as a small child. He left school after Grade 9. He slept on the streets and sat in jail cells.
Then he walked into a public library to get warm, and went on to write one of the most important Canadian novels of this century.
This is the story of Richard Wagamese. 🇨🇦
Richard was born on October 14, 1955, near Minaki in northwestern Ontario, a member of the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. His parents and extended family were survivors of residential schools, and they carried that pain home with them.
As a young boy he was taken into care, part of what is now known as the Sixties Scoop. He grew up in foster homes, where he suffered abuse. At nine he was adopted by a family in St. Catharines, Ontario, who kept him away from his Ojibwe culture and identity. At 16, he left.
The years that followed were hard: homelessness, alcohol, drugs and time in jail. Libraries were his shelter first. Then they became his school. With no formal education past Grade 9, he taught himself to write by reading everything he could.
In 1979 he began working as a journalist at New Breed, an Indigenous publication in Saskatchewan. He later became a columnist at the Calgary Herald, and in 1991 he became the first Indigenous writer to win a National Newspaper Award for column writing. He also wrote for the TV series North of 60.
In his twenties he reunited with his birth family. An elder gave him the name Mushkotay Beezheekee Anakwat, Buffalo Cloud, and told him his role in life was to tell stories.
He did exactly that. His first novel, Keeper'n Me, came out in 1994. More than a dozen books followed: novels, memoirs, poetry and reflections.
In 2012 he published Indian Horse, the story of Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe boy who survives residential school and finds freedom on the ice playing hockey. It was a Canada Reads finalist, won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature, and is now taught in classrooms across the country. In 2017 it became a film directed by Stephen Campanelli, with Clint Eastwood as executive producer.
His 2014 novel Medicine Walk, about a teenager taking his dying father on a final journey into the backcountry, is considered by many to be his finest work.
Richard Wagamese died on March 10, 2017, in Kamloops, British Columbia. He was 61. His final novel, Starlight, was published unfinished in 2018.
He never attended a residential school himself. But through his own life and his books, he showed Canadians how that harm travelled from one generation to the next, and how story, land and forgiveness can help a person find the way home.
Have you read Indian Horse or another of his books? 🍁
