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  • Story WordsAn Interview with Richard Wagamese
  • Blanca Schorcht (bio)

Storyteller, novelist, journalist, and critic Richard Wagamese was born in 1955 in northwestern Ontario and is from the Wabaseemoong First Nation. Wagamese’s literary and fictional writings blend traditional Ojibway oral storytelling style with the highly literate genre conventions of the novel. Wagamese, a National Newspaper Award–winning columnist, was awarded the Alberta Fiction Prize in 1995 for his first novel Keeper ’n Me. He has taught creative writing at Indian Federated College (now First Nations University) in Saskatchewan and currently runs a storytelling circle, Deh-bah-juh-mig (Telling Ourselves), in Vancouver, British Columbia. In addition to his novels Wagamese has written a book of essays, The Terrible Summer: The National Newspaper Award-Winning Writings of Richard Wagamese (1996), and a memoir, For Joshua (2003). His second novel, A Quality of Light, was published in 1997. Dreamwheels, his third novel, was published simultaneously in the United States and Canada in 2006, and his most recent novel, Ragged Company, was released in 2008. Not only was Ragged Company released this August, but Wagamese also published another book released in August called One Native Life (a book of nonfiction essays).

The formidable body of work that Wagamese has produced in the last decade or so reflects his concerns with broadening the scope and range of Native American and First Nations writing while simultaneously drawing on traditional concepts and aesthetic principles of Ojibway oral storytelling.1 Both his fiction and nonfiction writing explore what it means to be human within the context of an often-complicated cultural diversity and oppressive history. When it comes to discussions of his own background, Wagamese insists on an inclusive approach to the ideas of identity and ethnicity; he promotes the blending of old and new to recreate vital, living [End Page 74] traditions that maintain their connections to both past and present realities of Native experience. As the anthropologist Robin Ridington has pointed out, “Oral tradition and narrative authority are not confined to a ‘pristine’ aboriginality and orality. Indians who eat pizza and write novels do so in ways that are true to their traditions” (221). Wagamese’s writing highlights what it means to be Aboriginal or Native within the context of both contemporary indigenous reality and experience, and human experience in general.

All of the characters in Wagamese’s books reveal their points of disconnection with the mainstream, hegemonic world of North American consumer culture. Their stories of transformation, however, often come about through multiple points of connection, both to one another as human beings and with the physical world of which they are a part. Sometimes these points of connection derive from strange and unexpected alliances. In his latest novel, Ragged Company, for instance, Wagamese explores the paradoxically diverse and similar histories and experiences of homeless people through the lens of five very different characters. Some of these characters are Native; some are not. Their backgrounds are as varied as their shared experience of homelessness is similar, and they live out their lives in a fictional town that could be anywhere in the United States or Canada. In this novel, as in much of Wagamese’s writing, the transformative power of storytelling lies in its shared experience. Ridington describes the power of such literature in this way, “First Nations oral and written literatures enact a mode of discourse based on shared experience and mutual understanding. First Nations literature now exists in and about a variety of contexts” (223).

Cultural identity and understanding, Wagamese suggests, come about through story, and perhaps even more specifically through the ability of a story to reframe personal and shared experience. The story functions at once as both catharsis and catalyst. Wagamese, a talented oral storyteller as well as a writer, often begins his storytelling circles with the same words; he says, “There was once, for all of us, a fire in the night . . . To talk, to tell our stories, to teach each other, is as necessary to our growth as water. We’re all storytellers. We always were. But most of us have forgotten that . . .” By encouraging listeners and readers to think about and, ideally, reconstruct and thereby “own...

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