One Native Life

By: Richard Wagamese / Narrated By: Christian Baskous

Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins

Such a warm and healing book!

Let us all take lessons from those who’ve lived longer, suffered much, and come out the other end to be wise, loving, and who spread joy and laughter. I’ve spent a goodly number of stupid years bemoaning my dumb childhood (And let’s not forget the stuuuuuupid choices I made in my teens and early 20s; nobody to blame but my own danged self), and it’s taken a lot of deconstruction and biweekly chats with someone far wiser than myself to kinda figure out that there’s a much kinder, less stressed-out way to live.

Ahhhhh, but one AWEsome thing: I am a devout listener of audiobooks, and I’m blessed enough that here at Audiobook Accomplice we do these nifty things like Heritage Months. This has brought me some stellar Listening… like being introduced to a prolific writer… and treMENdous human being… Richard Wagamese. Oh what a find, what a truly (Is “great” too lame a word?) GREAT experience One Native Life has been. Written when Wagamese was much further on in life, had experienced pretty much everything by that time, it’s a look back on his journey in really rather brief essays (Short bits that are easily listened to and can be thought of, considered, even savored), but it's really the whoooooole collection taken together that gives it its entirely soothing essence.

It was one of those things where I was listening, was held spellbound, then rabbited off to check out the entry for him on Wikipedia because it was chronicling an exceptional life. Yup, the guy went through some pretty horrific times, made his own self-destructive choices, and then re-engaged with life on its terms to become a wise and wry observer of Life itself.

Apparently it’s not the only memoir he wrote, and I dunno how the other one plays out, but in this one he only scratches the surface of childhood abuse and trauma suffered in the foster care homes he had to endure, plus a maybe not so warm and loving adoptive family he was brought into as a 9-year old. Mostly it’s about finding a sense of self and about how he’s the product of a system which destroyed the lives of his biological parents—they who had to endure the isolation and degradation of government residential schools that were used to stamp out all Native culture, heritage, language, identity. His parents were raw and couldn’t deal, so addiction became their life source. Wagamese and his siblings had to flee into the winter after his parents went on a faraway drinking binge and never quite made it back, hence the foster system to grow up in.

Even tho’ here Wagamese is pretty open about being a confused and angry person, one who found addiction as a way to cope with the PTSD he didn’t know he had, the entirety of the book is one of patience and loving observation. When he finally begins to really take stock of himself as an Ojibway man (And I’ve seen Ojibway spelled soooooo many ways that I’ve decided, as a totally NON Native myself, I’ll use the spelling found in the Publisher’s Summary), he self-describes as angry. When he dons braids and the garb of the Native man, when he shouts at people that they’re not being true—He finds himself called an Angry Injun’ and he wryly accepts that the moniker is apt. It takes him a while to discover a life that is not filled with anger, that anger has no place to be at peace with life, to be a true Ojibway man.

Really, the dude was (Died in 2017 at the early age of 61) just a lovely, lovely man, and such a lovely, lovely writer. But I s’pose that’s to be expected from someone who sought shelter in libraries then grew to love the treasures that those libraries held within their wondrous walls.

Christian Baskous does a (Can I use the word “lovely” again? No?) marvelous job with narration. What his performance comes across as is of a warm and patient man, one who can laugh at himself, one who forgives what seems unforgivable (Oh the things we do to children!), one who sees the utter glory of the world around him. He delivers beautiful writing evenly, methodically, but in no way haltingly, and he seems to be in complete control of the text, reading as tho’ he IS Wagamese.

I did another audiobook by a Native writer from Canada, and I was happy that he thanked Wagamese as a mentor and someone to look up to.

For someone who was taken so early from this planet we all share, it was nice to see that he got some of those well-earned kudos!