Medicine Walk

This month’s Reader’s Choice selection was made possible by you, our book club members. With several hundred votes for 2017’s Readers’ Choice, Medicine Walk was the favourite pick from our readers, with Katherena Vermette’s novel The Break not far behind. Clearly this is a book club that is passionate to hear more from Indigenous authors!

The novel revolves around the story of Franklin Starlight, who is called to visit his father, Eldon. He’s sixteen years old and has had the most fleeting of relationships with the man. The rare moments they’ve shared haunt and trouble Frank, but he answers the call, a son’s duty to a father. He finds Eldon devastated after years of drinking, dying of liver failure in a small town flophouse. Eldon asks his son to take him into the mountains, so he may be buried in the traditional Ojibway manner.

What ensues is a journey through the rugged and beautiful backcountry, and a journey into the past, as the two men push forward to Eldon’s end. From a poverty-stricken childhood, to the Korean War, and later the derelict houses of mill towns, Eldon relates both the hardships his life and a time of redemption and love. In doing so, Eldon offers Frank a history he has never known, the father he has never had, and a connection to himself he never expected.

Richard Wagamese (October 14, 1955 – March 10, 2017) was an award-winning Canadian author and journalist from the Wabaseemoong Independent Nations in northwestern Ontario. Wagamese was best known for his 2012 novel Indian Horse, which was featured in our Book Club in 2015. Indian Horse won the Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature in 2013 and was a competing title in the 2013 edition of Canada Reads. The film Indian Horse premiered theatrically at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. Wagamese worked as a professional writer since 1979. He was a newspaper columnist and reporter, radio and television broadcaster and producer, documentary producer and the author of 13 titles from major Canadian publishers.

Wagamese’s parents and extended family members were among the tens of thousands of Indigenous women and men forced to attend Residential Schools in Canada. Wagamese called himself “a second-generation survivor” because of the impacts that he experienced. In many of his works, he drew from his own struggle with family dysfunction that he attributed to the isolating church-run schools.

Richard Wagamese is remembered not only for his powerful writing that reflected on the legacy of the residential school system, but for his generous and loving spirit.