One Native Life

 Stories are meant to heal. That's what my people say, and it's what I believe. Culling these stories has taken me a long way down the healing path from the trauma I carried. This book is a look back at one native life, at the people, the places and the events that have helped me find my way to peace again, to stand in the sunshine with my beautiful partner, looking out over the lake and the land we love and say – yes.

In the introduction to One Native Life, author Richard Wagamese explains that when he and his partner Debra Powell moved to a house on a mountainside lake, the setting – everything from the morning light to the sounds of wildlife to the sense of community with his neighbours – provoked strong memories from his tumultuous life, and having been a professional writer for his entire career, he decided to write them down. What follows are sixty-five short vignettes, ranging in length from three to five pages, and while at first I was a bit put off by the jarring format, I soon saw the wisdom in Wagamese's method: this isn't a book to rush through, but rather one to pick up, savour, and set down again for contemplation. With the beautiful prose for which I have long admired Wagamese, and a candid revelation of those events that propelled him from the foster care system to the streets and then on to peace, this book is not just beautiful but important: this is the history of Canada and the history of its relationship with its native population, and through the example of this one native life, in a voice without anger or bitterness, Wagamese invites us all to join in a conversation, as neighbours, over our common back fence.

As an example of the format, the story The Country between Us opens with an observation from Wagamese's present:

   There are times when something as simple as the rain that freckles slate grey water can take me back to it – that feeling I remember from my boyhood when the ragged line of trees against the sky filled me with a loneliness that had nothing to do with loss. The land sometimes carries an emptiness you feel in you like the breeze.

   It's not a sad feeling. Rather it's a song I learned by rote in the tramp of my young feet through the rough and tangle of the bush that shaped me. I come to the land the same way still, expectant, awake to the promise of territories beyond the horizon, undiscovered and wild. All those years in cities never took away that feeling of tremendous awe.

Wagamese then tells a brief story about camping with his birth family after he had reconnected with them; about how he experienced true reverence in the presence of unspoiled nature on a canoe trip with his brother in traditional Ojibway territory, and then returned to find the elders watching baseball on a portable television. The story concludes:

   All Canadians have felt time disrupt them. Everyone has seen the culture they sprang from altered and rearranged into a curious melange of old and new. So the country between us is not strange. We all carry a yearning for simpler, truer times. We all crave a reaffirmation of our place here, to hear the voices of our people singing on the land.

And every vignette is like this: a lovely introduction, a related memory, and a concluding paragraph on the lesson to be learned from it. Reading them quickly makes the collection feel formulaic, but taken more slowly, each is a perfect round berry hanging in a cluster from a mountain ash branch; more satisfying when plucked one by one.

Despite the brevity of each story, One Native Life serves as a satisfying memoir, throwing light on the Wagamese novels I've read: explaining his knowledge of baseball and radicalism in A Quality of Light; homelessness and the carnie life in Ragged Company; hockey and the effects of residential schools in Indian Horse; the sorrow of being disconnected from your heritage in Medicine Walk. Wagamese reveals his fascinating life story in a thoughtful order, and I couldn't help but admire him for finding his way to peace in the wake of trauma and prejudice. Consistently concluding with words of quiet wisdom, I repeatedly got the sense that if only all Canadians, of every heritage and circumstance, could take a moment in stillness to really listen as the neighbours speak their truths over the back fence, we'd be the true partners in the national project that would raise us all up.