Dream Wheels: A Novel by Richard Wagamese (review)

IN MARCH 2017 the world of Native writing lost one of its exceptionally effective and productive storytellers. Even as relatives, friends, and readers mourn the death of Ojibway (Wabaseemoong First Nation) writer Richard Wagamese, the recent reissue of his novel Dream Wheels should contribute to the continued growth of his already extensive and well-deserved audience. Originally published in 2006, the book was reissued in 2016 by Milkweed Editions, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit publisher and co-constituent of the Open Book literary arts center. Following two plotlines that organically merge, Dream Wheels tells the stories of a catastrophically injured Ojibway–Sioux rodeo cowboy and a traumatized African American mother and son enduring a string of abusive relationships and navigating the juvenile corrections system. On the cusp of attaining the All-Around Cowboy championship, gifted rodeo rider Joe Willie Wolfchild is injured during a bull ride and must face a life beyond rodeo with drastically limited physical capacities. Claire Hartley is simultaneously straining to extract herself and her son Aiden, who has been imprisoned in association with an attempted robbery, from a cyclical series of abusive relationships. Despite setting shifts from corrals to hospital rooms, suburban sprawl, juvenile prison, and working ranchland, the book consistently reflects the prevalence of land. The novel's groundedness is frequently made explicit through dialog and narration while also remaining as a constant presence even when unmentioned.

Like other works by Wagamese, Dream Wheels emphasizes the healing power of land and relationships in its portrayal of abuse of various sorts: physical, sexual, emotional, and alcoholic. While many literary representations of Native peoples depict social dysfunctions such as alcoholism, sexual violence, and physical abuse—and while some of those literary representations acknowledge that dysfunction emanates from and is constitutive of colonialism—Dream Wheels makes a conspicuous departure in its own consideration of these phenomena. Within the world of the novel, abuse and dysfunction are quite clearly associated with settler provenance. None of the Native characters in the novel engages in alcohol or substance abuse, and none of them perpetrates or even experiences physical or sexual violence. All characters engaging in alcohol abuse are white, and physical, emotional, and sexual abuse are the exclusive domain of white male perpetrators. Moreover, Wagamese is not heavy-handed with these representations. The narrator does not, for example, directly remark on the absence of Native alcohol consumption. Nor is there abstract commentary on racialized white violence. The toxicity of settler masculinity and the healthy functionality of Native kinship are instead both organically situated within the novel. While the impact of the former is not at all minimized, the transformative power of the latter is nevertheless more prominent. The kinship traditions maintained, honored, and shared within the novel's Native family are the source and outcome of healing.

The healing process narrated in the book rests within a simple yet robust web of relations. These connections bring together the Wolfchild story and the Hartley story as mutually enabled accounts of recovery. The intersections afford Wagamese several occasions to consider the dynamic nature of living tradition. Whether Ojibway knowledge and protocol, rodeo heritage, or black and Native cowboy histories that defy stereotypical expectations, Dream Wheels consistently returns to the traditions that ground its characters and provide the foundations and resources for living in a good way. Linked to its consideration of tradition, the novel repeatedly addresses the concept of history, primarily when focalized by Claire Hartley. Her yearning to create a usable past for her family's future marks both the early absence of relations and the significance of kinship in her and Aiden's lives—kinship ultimately learned and intertwined with the Wolfchild family.

Even at four hundred pages, Dream Wheels is an eminently readable episodic text that moves briskly and firmly holds reader attention from start to finish. This Milkweed reissue brings forth a widely accessible and affordable printing of the novel that should be of particular interest to course instructors at the undergraduate and upper-secondary levels, as well as to academic readers interested in contemporary...