By Richard Wagamese, 2014

Great Expectations, Fugitive Pieces, The Lizard Cage and Bel Canto are among my favourite novels because they depict an adult taking on a parental role with a child who is not biologically related. Richard Wagamese’s book deals with this same theme.  

Medicine Walk is the story of a boy named Frank who is loved and raised to young manhood by a foster father. The boy is native, the father is a white man who teaches the boy what he needs to know to survive on the land. It is heartening that a white man teaches Frank how to be an Indian, to some extent atoning for the crimes of other whites.

Franklin’s biological father Eldon is an alcoholic who fought in the Korean War and whose own father died in World War Two. Eldon is temporarily saved by a native woman, the woman who becomes the mother Franklin never knows, who has her own issues with alcoholism and racism. I found Franklin’s mother and Bunty and Eldon’s great love, Angie, to be a somewhat unbelievable character. Certainly she is an idealized figure. Often she seems too good to be true, but perhaps this is how such a character is remembered.

Angie and Eldon are part of sub-culture of itinerant workers constantly on the move to make a little money wherever they can find a few days or a few hours of work. These workers are just a step or two above many members of my family, who moved around just slightly less than these two in their efforts to keep the wolf from the door. I am thinking here of my dad and some of my uncles and great-uncles.

In his eighties, one of these great uncles looked back fondly on this period of his life.  “Life was easier then,” he said.  “There were so many ways a fellow could earn a dollar.” My uncle moved on to a more stable life as a farmer. Eldon descends into  hopeless alcoholism.

Bunty, usually referred to as “the old man,” waits for Franklin to hear the story of his origins from Eldon. Throughout his childhood Franklin has intermittent contact with him, contact that always disappoints because the father’s primary love and loyalty belong to his addiction. Eldon is too wounded by his own traumatic experiences to be a father.

At the age of 16 Franklin embarks on a journey into the wilderness of British Columbia to take the dying Eldon to a beautiful place to die. Along the way Frank catches fish to feed himself and feeds his father a herbal mixture given to them by a woman they meet on their journey. The mixture keeps Eldon alive and helps with the DTs. The medicine of the title is this concoction and the healing time father and son spend together.

It took me 20 pages or so to get into the rhythm of the story and the language. The language describing actions and the landscape is spare and beautiful and verges on the hypnotic. The dialogue is full of “yer” and “ya” and dropped “g’s” and double negatives which enhance the authenticity of the story. Often books about such characters do not ring true because they are written in highfalutin literary language. The problem with using more authentic language is that it can become tiresome to the highfalutin literary reader such as myself. The story the dialogue carries is so powerful that I did not get tired of it. For the most part I also did not tire of a sixteen-year-old talking and philosophizing like a wise old man.

A friend who has taught native literature and read more of it than I have says that this literature has really come of age. The first writers were not very good but were read because they were native. Now Joseph Boyden and Wagamese have produced simply good writing. The latter rejects the label of native or aboriginal writer and says he is just a writer.

A few weeks ago I heard Wagamese talking on the radio about how he became a writer. A lot of the learning took place in the public library, a place where he could go as a homeless person and where he did most of his reading. He could not get a card for borrowing because he had no address. It was in the library that he experienced the “magic that happens when you are touched by language.”

I was touched by the language of this book and want to read more of this author.