Wil Andruschak

'Everybody who’s on the street, everybody who’s homeless, has a story of how they got there and what happened to them,' says author Richard Wagamese. 'And that’s the important thing to remember.'

Richard Wagamese knows a thing or two about homelessness. The Ojibway writer’s life is marked by success — he’s won numerous awards for his newspaper columns and novels — but he’s also had a long struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism. He used to be homeless, but today, he lives in Kamloops, B.C., where he and his partner run a rooming house for people on low incomes. Wagamese’s latest book is One Native Life, a memoir.

Earlier this year Wagamese was in Calgary to speak at a conference on homelessness. Afterwards, he sat down for a half-hour interview with Fast Forward Weekly. (We made minor edits to the text for the sake of clarity and brevity.)

What did you talk about this morning?

I talked about my own history of post-traumatic stress disorder, and how carrying that and not actually knowing that I had it manifested itself in a lot of things — homelessness being one of them. (Alcoholism, drug addiction and social misbehavior being the other parts.)

I got significantly along in years before I realized, through the help of therapists, the root of all of the difficulties: The post-trauma that I carried forward from events and circumstances when I was a kid. Knowing that and finding ways and means to come to terms with it and to address it was the thing that actually set me free from all of the other manifestations.

If I had that — and I was homeless and a street person and involved in that circumstance — then I know that there’s a whole lot more people than me who have the same difficulty, that have to deal with the same original hurts and the same woundings from abuse or whatever that happened when they were kids.

Roughly how long were you homeless?

The biggest manifestation of my post-trauma was alcoholism, and so I found myself homeless a number of times over the years as a direct result of drinking. I can’t even give you a cumulative number, but I know that I was out there often enough to understand the nature of the situation. I was a binge drinker, and I would walk around in my world and have significant successes, and appear to be somebody who had everything together and was working steadily and being productive and being a regular part of society — and then something would get triggered in me, and I’d find myself drunk and on the street and in desperate circumstances and trying to figure out why that happened.

For a long time, I just outright ascribed it to alcoholism. But always dealing with the alcoholism — and I stayed sober for good stretches of time — I would always find myself in the same situation again and again and again, and I thought that I was crazy. I thought that I was just one of those people that is unable to actually just grab a hold of the ladder and pull themselves up until I discovered what the root of things were. So my homelessness was in episodes rather than long, extended stays.

How did you experience recovery?

I had to go to therapy. And I had to learn to trust my therapist, and I had to start to tell my own story. I had to start looking at things in my life that hurt me, and that I could never really get a handle on. As soon as I started to do that, I started to disarm all of those things.

In therapy, I started to call them “belly bombs” because they’d sit in my belly for years and years and years. I wouldn’t even know that they were there, and then something would happen. Sometimes it would be a word, or a physical thing, and that belly bomb would go off, and I’d erupt again. And I just thought I was crazy. So it took working with a therapist and coming to develop that trust — and knowing that the stories that I was telling weren’t going to be thrown back at me in any way shape or form. I started to be able to look at the things that wounded me and that hurt me.

Another therapist said to look at my life, but to not look at the darkness. To look at the places where there was light, where there was joy, where there was some lesson that I’d learned. And to find places like that in my story, and focus on that. So I started to do that, and the more that I did that, the more that I found. And the more that I found, the less I was looking at my life as grey and bleak and despairing. I started to emerge as a different breed of cat.

What have you taken away from your experience of homelessness?

Well, I think I came into it and I left it with a real burning desire to survive. And I think that without having that burning desire to survive, I never would have made it. Every time I fell down, I wanted to fight, to get back up again. And I fell down lots. When I did, I always got that fight back. I thought, ‘I’m going back at this again. I’m going to try it again.’ So that protected me. It sustained me. And I think that’s what I got out of it. It evolved to include productivity, creativity, stable home life, being part of the community, offering to help when I could help and being far more socially involved and capable than I ever was before.

Was it after you went to therapy that you started focusing on writing?

No, I’ve been writing since 1979. But it’s like I say. With the influence and the presence of that post-trauma in my life all the time, it’s been a wrestling match. I won a National Newspaper Award as a columnist, and I was still having that wrestling match. I wrote a first novel and won a writing award for it and I was still fighting that battle. It took an awful long time.

So I know that for marginalized people and for street people and homeless people who have to deal with that struggle, it’s titanic. All of the agencies, all of the organizations, all of the people whose good hearts and minds go into finding a solution to this problem really need to be there for the length of that struggle, because it takes a long time.

Did you have a lot of support when you were going through that struggle?

There was always somebody there. There was always somebody there to lend me a hand, but it was therapy that actually got me to where I am now. But I always took advantage of the agencies and organizations that were there. You don’t have a choice.

I related this morning my memories about sleeping for about 38 to 39 days in a nativity scene outside a church one winter. That was where I stayed for like a month and a half. I would get up from there and I would go out into the city and I’d go to places where I could shower and get something to eat and get a change of clothes and stuff like that, until I found work. And then finding work in itself wasn’t an answer because I made $160 a week, and after food and stuff it took a long, long time to save enough money to be able to pay for a roof over my head. So there was no instantaneous answer, even though there was help out there. There wasn’t any instant fix. It took a lot of doing.

One thing you hear a lot in this city is comments like: ‘Homeless people choose that life. It’s of their own making.’ How do you respond to that?

That’s so easy to say from the outside. In the comfort of your little condo, or the comfort of your Roxboro bungalow, it’s really easy to say that, ‘Oh, they bring it on themselves and it’s their doing.’ But the thing of it is everyone has a story. Everybody who’s on the street, everybody who’s homeless, has a story of how they got there and what happened to them. And that’s the important thing to remember.

Everybody who’s walking around out there is somebody’s son, somebody’s daughter, somebody’s uncle, somebody’s grandfather, somebody’s grandmother. They’re somebody’s family, a member of a small group of people. They somehow got displaced and detached and dislocated and found themselves on the street. So there’s a story there.

If we continue to say, ‘Oh, they bring it on themselves and it’s their fault and they create the situation for themselves,’ then we’re doing our entire social structure a gross disservice because we’re not asking them what happened to them. And we’re not listening to their stories. We’re not giving any credence to the reality that wounds and hurts are perpetrated on people. And they sometimes are so deep and so buried that the people who are walking around — like I was — don’t even know that they’re reacting to them.

It’s those stories that we need to hear so that we come to understand that the “issue” — for lack of a better word — of homelessness is as broad as our human story. Because in the end, we’re all one story. We’re all one consciousness. We’re all one spirit. And so the longer we ignore those stories of how those people got to where they are, the more that we’re ignoring our own cultural human story. We’re not showing that any respect, and we need to.

I think that stories have within them the capability to heal and to bring people closer together. So the more that we share our stories, the more capable we are of doing that for each other. My story is just part of the story. I don’t think that anything that I did or survived or went through was anything so spectacular or so unique or different from anybody else did. It’s just part of the story, this experience that we’re all sharing right here right now.

I think if we can get to the point where we recognize that our human story, our cultural story, our national story as Canadians is just one tale, and that the filaments of that tale are everywhere — they’re your filaments, his filaments, everybody’s — we start to listen to each other, and we start to see the importance of those stories including the ones that are stuck on the fringes of our society where they shouldn’t be.

How do you listen to the stories of people on the margins?

There doesn’t need to be a formula. There doesn’t need to be a whole bunch of research. There doesn’t need to be another study. There doesn’t need to be all of this stuff that goes on. See, one of the things that particularly irritates me is that I’ve watched, over the years, the development of an aboriginal industry. We employ hundreds and hundreds of people across the country. And the results of that industry are reports and surveys and studies. We get inundated with all of that. And the aboriginal industry pays a lot of wages. They pay a lot of academics, archaeologists, scientists — they pay a lot of people. And it’s sad to know that my people have become an industry, because we’re more than that.

The frightening thing about homelessness is it seems to be that that’s becoming an industry too. All the amount of paper that we’re generating. All the amount of studies and surveys and reports and all of these things that we’re generating — we’ve become an industry and we need to stop that. The way that you get to be able to tell those stories or hear those stories doesn’t involve anything more than what my partner does at her rooming house in Kamloops. She sits on the edge of those people’s beds and she puts her hand on their knee and she just looks at them right in the face, right in the eye, and says, ‘What’s wrong? What do you need?’ That’s all it takes.

Neither one of us are college educated. We don’t have degrees or advanced standing at an educational institution. We’re just folks, and we recognize that those people, like us, have stories. And the more that you get a chance to release those stories, the freer that you feel inside.

So that’s all you do. You just sit and you talk to somebody and you listen. And you hear them. And you give them that time to use their voice and to release a lot of stuff that may have been pent up in there for a long, long time.

So you don’t need a lot of training. You don’t have to go to school for thousands and thousands of dollars or hundreds and hundreds of years. You just have to be able to find your own humanity and bring that forward and just ask somebody an honest question.