Walking the Ojibwe Path: A Memoir in Letters to Joshua (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Don't be misled by the title: this is not a self-help book. This is a memoir told through a love letter from a father to his estranged son. In it, Wagamese recounts his mistakes, struggles, and triumphs. All of this is to fulfill his responsibility as an Ojibwe father, to show his child the world and teach how everything breathes together with one breath.
-Brittni
— From Brittni
"We may not relight the fires that used to burn in our villages, but we can carry the embers from those fires in our hearts and learn to light new fires in a new world."
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding "that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe." In this new entry in the Seedbank series, an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life--separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing--and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and, eventually, profound alienation.
At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.
Ojibwe tradition calls for fathers to walk their children through the world, sharing the ancient understanding "that we are all, animate and inanimate alike, living on the one pure breath with which the Creator gave life to the Universe." In this new entry in the Seedbank series, an intimate series of letters to the six-year-old son from whom he was estranged, Richard Wagamese fulfills this traditional duty with grace and humility, describing his own path through life--separation from his family as a boy, substance abuse, incarceration, and ultimately the discovery of books and writing--and braiding this extraordinary story with the teachings of his people, in which animals were the teachers of human beings, until greed and a desire to control the more-than-human world led to anger, fear, and, eventually, profound alienation.
At once a deeply moving memoir and a fascinating elucidation of a rich indigenous cosmology, Walking the Ojibwe Path is an unforgettable journey.