Award-winning Ojibway novelist and journalist Richard Wagamese (Indian Horse), who died in 2017, is considered an integral part of the "Indigenous literary universe." As editor Drew Hayden Taylor notes in the introduction to Richard Wagamese Selected: What Comes from Spirit, "it is perhaps Richard Wagamese who has captured the Canadian zeitgeist best of all us Indigenous writers." Wagamese's works, which blend his vast life experience and his many reflections on the world as it was and how it might yet be, have spanned genres and platforms. Richard Wagamese Selected brings together thoughts and writings from his blog, his newspaper columns and even his social media to give readers an inspiring look into his philosophies on living.
The book is loosely organized into four sections. His writings testify to the cruelties to Indigenous families committed by the Canadian government as well as how institutional decisions added to and compounded the complexities in his life. But he also shares his decision to reconnect with his culture and explains how, in making active choices, those faced with systemic injustices might avoid becoming cruel themselves. He writes: "Never forget that we carry a common practical magic within us; that we are star dust and we carry comets and whirlwinds inside of us. That we are all magical beings--and we always were." A hopeful, meditative tone dominates. This is a collection to be savored slowly, as readers allow what Wagamese shares to sink in under the noise of modern life. --Michelle Anya Anjirbag, freelance reviewer