Richard Wagamese -- VIU's First Indigenous Writer in Residence -- Reading and Welcome Reception

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Monday, February 3rd, 2014
7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Welcome award-winning writer Richard Wagamese, who has arrived at Vancouver Island University to begin a month-long visit as the University�s first Indigenous Writer in Residence.

The public is invited to attend a reading and reception welcoming Wagamese to VIU and the community.

An Ojibway from the Wabseemoong First Nation in Northwestern Ontario, Wagamese is the author of 13 books of fiction, memoir and poetry, and was the recipient of the National Aboriginal Achievement Award in Media and Communications in 2012, as well as the Canada Council Molson Prize in the Arts in 2013. Wagamese is also the first Indigenous Canadian to win a National Newspaper Award for column writing.

Taken into care in the ��60s Scoop� along with thousands of other Aboriginal children in Canada, Wagamese became one of the �Disappeared Ones,� where federal and provincial authorities refused to reveal a child�s location or foster care circumstances to family members. Escaping his foster home at 16, he completed school only to Grade 9, was homeless, unskilled and unemployed, incarcerated, and addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Wagamese credits the turn-around in his life, and his eventual success as a writer, to a chance encounter in Kenora, Ontario, where he was passing through in his early 20s. Meeting some people who recognized his last name, he returned with them to his community to begin the reconnection and healing that would change his life.

Wagamese will spend the next month meeting with students in First Nations Studies, English, Creative Writing, Tillicum Lelum Adult Basic Education, and a Nanaimo high school, as well as VIU faculty and all who join him in casual drop-in coffee times at Shq�apthut.