Richard Wagamese

My brother Jack had passed away before I made it back to my people. I was 24 and all I learned about my brother was what I learned through my family’s stories and recollections.
That’s not a great way to enter what should be one of the most profound of human relationships. But I was hungry for any connection at all and I took what I could get. I’d never really had a brother and the idea of never having met him hurt a lot.

My wife is a tremendous cook. She’s creative in the kitchen and can conjure fabulous meals out of whatever she finds in the larder. Unlike me who seems perpetually condemned to the same old unenlightened throw-it-in-a-pot and watch it boil philosophy, she’s a whiz. We eat well because of that. We’re not wealthy people at all, but out suppers are inventive, nutritious and fun.
Lately she’s been working through a cookbook that features recipes for four-ingredient meals.

For the longest time I wondered what it really meant to be Ojibwa. As a child growing up in a non-native world the word Ojibwa was always just a word. I was never allowed to frame a definition for it. Instead, I was expected to become a cardboard cut-out of the person my white adopted family wanted me to be. That image had nothing to do with being Ojibwa.

I remember learning history in school. Even though the stories held a degree of fascination for me, the idea of whole others lives and times before mine, the learning of it always felt less than the subject matter. It was all a matter of memorizing dates and names and events so you could write them down when exam time came. The people and places lost their luster in all of that and in the end it became all about the grade.

Friends of ours are foster parents. They make their living at it and it’s a commitment they’ve made with themselves and with the kids who come under their care. They’ve been doing this for years and in that time they’ve positively influenced a lot of young boys. Since we’ve been friends we’ve gotten to meet a handful of these kids and it’s always been a pleasure. They’re shy at first, restrained, scared maybe, but they bloom eventually and become themselves.