A Library Shelter Made an Ojibwe Novelist

Richard Wagamese was born on October 14, 1955, on the Wabaseemoong First Nation in northwestern Ontario. His first home was a canvas army tent, and his family fished, hunted and trapped. Residential schools had deeply scarred his parents and extended family. When he was nearly three, he and his siblings were left alone in the bush in winter. Older siblings took the two youngest to a railroad depot, where police placed them with the Children's Aid Society. He did not see his mother or extended family again for 21 years. He was fostered, then adopted at nine by a strict family and moved to southern Ontario, away from his Indigenous heritage.

He left home at 16 in St. Catharines, Ontario. For years he lived on the streets or in jail, and was often without a home even while working. Looking for shelter one day, he walked into the public library and found a warm refuge. Though he had only a Grade 9 education, he kept a notebook of subjects that interested him, such as astronomy, geometry and music, and asked librarians for books on them. One librarian left him a bag with a muffin and a sandwich, introduced him to a listening room where he first heard Beethoven, and took him to a performance.

At 23 he reconnected with his family, and an elder gave him the storyteller's name Buffalo Cloud. In 1979, hitchhiking across Canada, he landed a job at the First Nations publication New Breed in Regina, passing a test by rewriting newspaper articles after studying journalism in the library. In 1991 he became the first Indigenous writer to win a National Newspaper Award, for his Calgary Herald columns.

He published 14 books. Keeper'n Me (1994) was his first, and Indian Horse became a national bestseller and a Canada Reads contender in 2013. Medicine Walk followed in 2014. He received the Molson Prize in 2013 and the Writers' Trust Matt Cohen Award in 2015. Wagamese died at his home in Kamloops in March 2017, aged 61, of natural causes, according to his fiancée.