Richard Wagamese

Richard Wagamese (October 14, 1955 – March 10, 2017) was a Canadian author and journalist. An Ojibwe from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario, he was best known for his 2012 novel Indian Horse, which won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013, was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads, and was adapted into a feature length film, Indian Horse, in 2017.

Wagamese described his first home in his essay "The Path to Healing" as a tent hung from a spruce bough. He and his three siblings, abandoned by adults on a binge drinking trip in Kenora, left the bush camp when they had run out of food and sheltered at a railroad depot. Found by a policeman, he would not see his family again for 21 years. He later described the adults in his family. "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." His parents, Marjorie Wagamese and Stanley Raven, had been among the many native children who, under Canadian law, were removed from their families and forced to attend certain government-run residential schools, the primary purpose of which was to separate them from their native culture.

After being taken from his family by the Children's Aid Society, he was raised in foster homes in northwestern Ontario before being adopted, at age nine, by a family that refused to allow him to maintain contact with his First Nations heritage and identity.Of this experience he wrote: "The wounds I suffered went far beyond the scars on my buttocks." He was moved to St. Catharines, Ontario. The beatings and abuse he endured in foster care led him to leave home at 16, seeking to reconnect with indigenous culture. Then, he lived on the street, abusing drugs and alcohol, and was imprisoned several times. Wagamese was an intergenerational Survivor of Residential Schools.

He reunited with his family at age 23. After recounting his life to this point, an elder gave him the name Mushkotay Beezheekee Anakwat – Buffalo Cloud – and told him his role was to tell stories.

Later, he lived outside Kamloops, British Columbia, and was granted an honorary doctorate from the city's Thompson Rivers University in 2010.Wagamese was married and divorced three times and had two sons.

Wagamese died on March 10, 2017 at his home in Kamloops, British Columbia.

In 1979 Wagamese began his first job as a newspaper author, working at New Breed, a First Nations publication. He later worked as a writer for the Calgary Herald. He won a National Newspaper Award for writing in 1991. He won the Native American Press Association Award twice and won the National Aboriginal Communications Society award for his work as a newspaper writer. His newspaper columns can be found in The Terrible Summer publication. Wagamese stopped working full-time in journalism in 1993 but continued to write as a freelance journalist for publications such as the Globe and Mail.

His debut novel Keeper 'n Me was published in 1994. 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 has since published five other novels, a book of poetry, and five non-fiction books, including two memoirs and an anthology of his newspaper writings,. He also wrote for the television series North of 60.

In 2012 he was given an Indspire Award as a representative of media and communications. In 2012 he also 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. Other awards include Kouhi Award for outstanding contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario and In 2015 he received the Writers' Trust of Canada's Matt Cohen Award for his body of work.

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. Following Super Channel's filing for creditor protection, the film Indian Horse instead premiered theatrically at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.

His final novel, Starlight, was published posthumously in 2018, and a new collection of stories and non-fiction writings, One Drum, is slated for publication in 2019.