Book 30: One Native Life - Richard Wagamese
"In 2005, award-winning writer Richard Wagamese moved with his partner to a cabin outside Kamloops, B.C. In the crisp mountain air Wagamese felt a peace he'd seldom known before. Abused and abandoned as a kid, he'd grown up feeling there was nowhere he belonged. For years, only alcohol and moves from town to town seemed to ease the pain. In 'One Native Life,' Wagamese looks back down the road he has traveled in reclaiming his identity and talks about the things he has learned as a human being, a man, and an Ojibway in his 52 years. Whether he's writing about playing baseball, running away with the circus, attending a sacred bundle ceremony, or meeting Pierre Trudeau, he tells these stories in a healing spirit. Through them, Wagamese celebrates the learning journey his life has been."
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I loved this book. Simply loved it. It is equal parts heartbreaking and heart-healing. The essay that appears on page 30, "Upside Down and Backwards," is a good example. In this essay, Wagamese writes of his struggles as a young child. His teachers thought he was "slow, a difficult learner" and held him back for a year...and then put him in the back of the classroom and ignored him. As he entered Grade Three, he moved to a different school and the teacher wanted to introduce him to the class, so she had him write his name on the blackboard:
"I went to the board, leaned close to it, squinted and began to write. I heard snickers at the first letter and open laughter when I'd finished.
I'd written my name upside down and backwards. To the rest of my classmates it was strange and hilarious, but it was how I'd learned, and I felt the weight of their laughter like stones. Walking back to my seat that day I felt ashamed, stupid and terribly alone.
But I had a teacher who cared. She walked me down to the nurse's station herself and waited while I got my eyes tested. Astigmatism, the nurse told her. Terrible astigmatism. Then the teacher listened closely as I explained why my writing was wrongly shaped.
I had taught myself to write by squinting back over my shoulder. When we were taught to write in script, I wasn't given any attention, wasn't offered any help in forming the letters. So I watched the kid behind me and I mimicked what I saw. What I saw was upside down and backwards, and that was how I had taught myself to write."
The teacher spent hours working with him to undue his self-taught method. To this day, he writes Gs and Ds back to front. But, he says, "Sometimes life turns us upside down and backwards. It's caring that gets us back on our feet again and pointed in the right direction."
Not all of Wagamese's essays have endings quite this nice or lessons quite this Hallmark-esque. But I learned something from nearly all of them.
Yes on this one. Great book.
