Storytelling as Healing in Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk

Healing, in its physical, metaphysical, and emotional forms, is perhaps one of the few universal postulations. Across a myriad of different and even opposing cultures, traditions, and religions, there is always healing, for the simple fact of life is that pain is part of it. Indeed, problem-solving is human nature, and when faced with even the greatest afflictions, humans learn to survive. Perhaps the oldest form of healing, surpassing in history any version of “modern medicine,” is storytelling, a practice with its origins in Native American healing traditions. The effectiveness of storytelling as healing is demonstrated particularly well in Ojibway author Richard Wagamense’s Medicine Walk in its brave examination of loss and the methods through which we cope. 

But first, a brief account of the work of Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona is necessary. In his introductory essay to the book Coyote Wisdom: The Power of Story and Healing, Mehl-Madrona details the criticality of literal roles “storyteller” and “listener” in Native healing practice. Trained in psychiatry and neuropsychology, he boldly states, “I had long ago abandoned the idea that I did therapy. Therapy contains the idea that I can ‘treat’ someone else, an idea that seems specious and patronizing” (3). To Mehl- Madrona, the title “doctor” functions similarly to that of “mediator,” one who encourages cooperation between storyteller and listener from an impartial third-party perspective. He further explains that the responsibility to share story falls totally to the storyteller, and simultaneously, a story’s lasting existence is contingent upon an audience. He further argues that the roles of storyteller and listener work in a sym- biotically beneficial relationship: “whatever else healing may be, it is a negotiation of story” (3). 

Medicine Walk portrays this crucial relationship between storyteller and listener respectively through characters Eldon and Frank Starlight. The text follows sixteen-year-old Frank while he accompanies his sick, alcoholic father, Eldon, to the place he wishes to die. During their grueling embarkment through the western mountains of British Columbia, Eldon attempts to connect with his son for the first time, addressing Frank’s questions about identity, trauma, family, and strength. It’s not an amicable journey; when Eldon tells Frank he intends to be buried “sitting up, in the warrior way,” Frank initially refuses to help him travel, telling him, “You ain’t no warrior” (23). Broken by Eldon’s short-lived cycles of sobriety and emotional absence, their relationship is inflexibly hostile and tense for the majority of the novel. But there is an eventual softening between them, as Eldon shares and Frank allows him to share. By the book’s conclusion, the father and son reach an “understanding” of each other. 

Wagamese first presents the storytelling motif midway through Eldon’s journey, when Frank shows his father the side of a cliff over-run with red and black paintings of horses, birds, bison, and shapes. Frank explains how he has dedicated much of his time trying to decipher the meanings of these paintings, saying,

[I]t seemed to me no one came up here no more. Like they forgot it was here. That made me sad. So I kept comin’ so there’d at least be someone even if I didn’t know how to read ‘em or get what it was they were trying to say. At least there was someone (70).

In this miniature monologue—largely out of character for Frank, who prior to this chapter speaks exclusively in monosyllabic sentences—Frank echoes Mehl-Madrona’s argument of the listener as essential: “meaning relies on how people use language with one another and is anchored in human communication and evaluation” (7). Frank knows that he is important to this cliff—he is the rare audience to which the paintings perform. He keeps the paintings alive. 

There is a transactional quality to storytelling, explained by Muscogee poet Joy Harjo in her book Catching the Light, “If you look at the traditional power of using words, stories are for teaching, even entrancement... Words can be manipulated into spells that make a person pay attention to you...” (Harjo). She stresses that stories hold power in their effect on others, and this effect depends on “oral delight to open a pathway” (Harjo). It is impossible to divide the listener from storytelling—storytelling cannot, and does not, exist alone. By this sense, Frank continues the telling of these cliff stories, even if he cannot understand them, by observing them. Frank’s willingness to listen in this way extends to his father’s stories, which parallels with Eldon’s perspective of storytelling as a kind of debt. When the two seek refuge in a trapper’s cabin, Eldon tells their host, Becka, “If you don’t mind I wouldn’t mind to pay back a little of what I owe... For him. I got some story that’s needed telling for a long time” (80). Storytelling does not come naturally to Eldon: “I held words better in my head than speakin’ ‘em most my life,” he admits to Frank (142). He finds it difficult to admit the truth: “I don’t know that I got it in me” (58). But through essential requisite, and limited mortal time, he finds it within himself to speak. 

Eldon’s history acts as a pseudo-creation story in three perspectives, firstly providing Frank with information about his background. Creation stories are important to Frank. He was raised by a white man named Bunky, whose comfort—though well-intentioned—unfulfilled Frank’s need to connect with his Ojibway roots. When Eldon expresses his relief that Bunky has taken care of his son for so many years, Frank grows furious: “You think that’s all there is to it. Bein’ taken care of? Goin’ to school and bein’ picked on because you don’t know who the fuck you are, bein’ called Injun, wagon-burner, squaw-hopper, Tonto?” (101). He is desperate for answers, being otherwise divorced from his environment.

Through Eldon, Frank learns that his people, the “Starlights,” were considered the first teachers. Eldon spins a tale about “star people,” all-knowing sky-beings who communicated their celestial wisdom to the We’re meant to be teachers and storytellers” (159). In an interview with professors Kathleen Manely and Paul W. Rea, celebrated Acoma author and scholar Simon Ortiz affirms such a concept, saying, “...I have always used language, language as a form of energy, as energy within I as an individual and a clan son thrived and was nourished. The oral tradition existed before me, and my writing of it in narrative or lyrical forms of writing is a step in line with that traditional force...” (366). Ortiz sees his own writing as an extension of himself, which is in turn an extension of his Native background, his family. His stories are an intrinsic cog within ancient oral tradition, which bolsters him with purpose. He finds his identity through storytelling, just as the Starlights do: “I like that story. Makes sense to me how I wanna be out here so much. Under the stars,” Frank tells Eldon, seeing, for the first time, a connection between himself and his heritage (159). 

Eldon’s storytelling also reveals explanations for his destructive, scattered decision-making. He tells Frank about Jimmy, his childhood best friend and the man with whom he enlisted in the Korean War. Wagamese describes a conversation between the two:

“What’s fired together is wired together,” Jimmy would say.
“Joined by sweat and muscle,” he’d reply. 
“Forged by steel.”
“Welded by grit.”
“Screwed by circumstance.”
It became their running joke (86).

In this small excerpt, Wagamese establishes the two eighteen-year-olds as exactly what they are: kids, often crass, their language frank but saturated by harsh reality. Forced into arduous landscaping and construction work, the two boys formed a relationship of shared pessimism, which they aimed to solve by joining the military. Such a phenomenon was not unique to Eldon and Jimmy; in her essay “The Lie of the Land,” Sharon Holm analyzes the complicated history of Native Americans in the US army. She writes, “...such a politics-aesthetics of accommodation was a position adopted by many Native activists and writers who saw assimilation as a way to achieve improved socioeconomic position and the hope of full rights of citizenship” (253). Eldon is a reflection of Holm’s thesis, in which she describes the faulty premises of Native American nationalism based in hope for future prosperity. As Jimmy says to Eldon: “[T]hat Korea place... Might be a good go. Come back an’ earn big. No more bustin’ a nut for peanuts no more” (Wagamese, 152). Again utilizing simple vernacular and slang, Wagamese subtly highlights Eldon’s and Jimmy’s naïveté. Their service in the army was nothing less than devastating. Eldon reveals that, while spying on Chinese troops, Jimmy suffered several gunshot wounds. Out of mercy, Eldon killed him (166). The guilt that followed is what led to his excessive drinking. 

Herein is the second way in which Eldon’s history functions as a creation story—the creation of his alcoholism. Mehl-Madrona explores the importance of such stories in his research: “Just as creation stories explain our existence by preserving our culture’s mutually-agreed upon idea of how we got here... the stories we tell give us clues about the cre- ation of our illness,” he writes (6). He views illness as a “creative solution” to personal imbalances, a reaction not only to physical well-being but mental state, too. Sharing stories that foster illness, Mehl-Madrona believes, is the root of healing. While Eldon’s fatal liver damage is irreversible, he manages to “heal” in a metaphysical sense–and Frank, too, heals, relieved of the internal burden of misunderstanding his father. “Musta been hard... Carrying Jimmy all this time,” he says to Eldon (166). 

The final story that Eldon shares, just moments from death, follows his disappointing, if not overwhelmingly depressing return from Korea. Traumatized and lonely, Eldon struggled to find decent work–the reality of many Native veterans. As Holm writes, the promise of a “better life” post-war went largely unrealized: “The off-reservation and urban experiences of the returning Indian vets (of whom there were many), whose heightened social and economic expectations were not met by depressed reservation economies on their return, raised the level of Indian post war unemployment” (254-255). Drawing from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Holm argues that a perspective of Native identity in a vacuum interferes with veterans’ hope for sovereignty, using the character Tayo, a World War II veteran, as an example. She writes: “Tayo quickly learns that the uniform provides an illusory effect; while it is worn it effaces Indian identity in a white world, but the minute the war is over they become ‘Indians’ again, with all the associated negative and prejudiced connotations” (256). 

Such a realization manifests in Eldon, as his perceptions of time shift when he comes back to his birthplace in Nechako: “He realized somehow that coming and going had become the same direction and he slunk back into the valley with a pocketful of wages and no idea what to do. He only knew that nowhere was a place he occupied” (173). Wagemese communicates a debilitating sense of despair in the following pages, with the concept of displacement taking a novel, abstract form. Eldon floats from job to job, participating in the same onerous work as he did before joining the army. He becomes a day laborer, waiting on the road for trucks to pass and hollering out for petty cash, which he then spends immediately at a slummy bar called Charlie’s (175). 

Eldon’s post-war misery gives way to a third, final creation story, that being Frank himself. Eldon tells Frank about his mother, Angie, whom Frank has never known, deepening Frank’s cognizance of his roots. The two met at Charlie’s–Angie was dating Bunky and convinced him to hire Eldon for a couple of weeks, to put fencing around Bunky’s ten-acre farm in exchange for room and board. She understood Eldon in ways that others did not, sneaking him flasks on his lunch break. “I know about the need...Done my share of hurtin’ too,” she tells him (187). Angie persistently pesters Eldon with questions, stubborn in her attempts to break through his walls constructed by PTSD. “Watching you, you’re like a kid with a stick making circles in the sand because you don’t know how to shape words yet,” she tells him (196). Though contained within Wagamese’s plain and literal dialogue style, Angie’s metaphor stands alone as significant, perhaps even shocking. She is unlike any other character in Medicine Walk, honest and open and compassionate. With Eldon, she shares the story of her father, who died from a heart attack when she was twelve years old. She shares pieces of her Cree identity. She tells him about her jobs as a cook in camps around British Columbia. “When you share stories you change things... If you told me one of your stories, you’d get lighter,” she says (203). Harjo reiterates this point in her book, explaining how writing became a tool against her depression: “As I slid down into the borderlands between waking and sleeping, negative beings attempted to pull me into their darkness. I learned to escape them by using words to make a ladder to bring me back.” 

Furthermore, Angie’s and Eldon’s relationship demonstrates how storytelling heals the listener too, as portrayed most evidently during Eldon’s first night working for Bunky. The three gather together after dinner and Bunky encourages Angie to tell one of her stories, telling Eldon, “She spins ‘em right outta the air. Tells ‘em whole so’s you’d think yer readin’ a book. You’ll see. Flummoxed me the first time she did it” (192). To Eldon’s reluctance to listen, Angie says, “Stories work to calm you down” (191). It is therefore unsurprising that Eldon’s response to Angie’s description of a sea-dwelling spirit who ventures onto land holding the tail of a whale is guttural: “As the tale wound down to its ending, he didn’t know that he was crying until she stopped,” Wagamese writes (193). 

Although this moment is communicated to Frank via Eldon, Wagamese writes from a third-person perspective, rather than first. He contextualizes Eldon’s life not only for Frank, but for the reader, inviting both in this way to participate as a “listener.” By extending the intimacy between Eldon and Frank to encompass and include the reader, too, Wagamese creates a connection between reader and text. Ortiz talks about this connection, referring to his own book A Good Journey : “I wanted to create a sense of a person sitting in a room or walking along a road on that journey of his life, telling stories, or the stories being their own power from the storytelling tradition” (373). The two authors share a goal of personifying literature as conversation. 

After Angie and Eldon run away together, Eldon remains sober for a couple of years. But their insecure financial situation eventually led to relapse: “...layin’ there knowin’ how weak I really was brung on the dark in me. The dark that always sucked me back into drinkin’,” he tells Frank (Wagamese, 220). Angie died in labor after Eldon, intoxicated, failed to drive her to the hospital in time (222). Terrified by the prospect of fatherhood, Eldon entrusted Frank in the guardianship of Bunky, who heroically and selflessly rose to the occasion. 

Although unforgiving of Eldon’s mistakes, Frank manages to accept his father for the man that he is. He tells him, “I ain’t never had no hurt like that. But I think I get it now,” accepting his father for the first time (233). He finds himself unexpectedly emotional once Eldon dies, frustrated by the lack of guidance for death: “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” he yells while digging his father’s grave (237). His grief reflects a new semblance of a relationship with his father, which Mehl- Madrona theorizes as the origin of healing: “Healing involves restoration of ‘right relationship’” (4). By knowing his father through his stories, Frank’s relationship with him teeters closer to such a relationship, one that is balanced—one in which Frank can find peace. 

Though running the risk of oversimplification, it can be concluded from Wagamese’s Medicine Walk that storytelling operates as a source of healing, in that it creates understanding between even the most estranged, tumultuous, volatile relationships. As Becka tells Frank, encouraging him to listen to Eldon: “It’s all we are in the end. Our stories” (103). The “medicine” in the titular concept is storytelling, and this medicine is shared mutually across the storytellers and the listeners.