73 pages • 2 hours read
Richard WagameseMedicine Walk
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Nature-Human Continuum
Frank is intimately connected with the world around him. He is constantly aware of the way sky and land connect and mirror each other. Frank’s true home is nature: “His life had become horseback in solitude, lean-tos cut from spruce, fires in the night” (5). Frank’s way of living is honest and courageous. Nature provides Frank with purpose and a sense of completeness, a sharp contrast to Eldon’s broken world—one associated with the industrial and commercial world of white civilization that uses rather than respects nature. Eldon has lost touch with the continuum, and the purpose of his quest with Frank is to reestablish this lost connection. Frank and Eldon leave the industrial world and its associations with personal failure, economic exploitation, and dissolute behavior and travel deeper into the wilderness. Finally, Eldon can spread his arms like an eagle, echoing an earlier moment in the novel when Frank is described as traveling to “places only cougars, marmots, and eagles knew” (6).
The Dangers of the White Man’s World
On the one hand, the novel includes characters like Bunky—an understanding and accepting white man who seeks to help his Indigenous friends, Angie and Eldon, by giving them money and a truck, even after they have betrayed him. Bunky raises Eldon’s son, Frank, and teaches him the ways of Frank’s people, the Ojibway. Frank acquires a sense of virtue from Bunky that he would not have learned from Eldon, given Eldon’s dissolute lifestyle.
On the other hand, the narrative makes plain how negatively the white world affects the Indigenous characters. A white man abuses Eldon’s mother and is responsible for the breakup of Eldon’s family, something from which Eldon never recovers. Eldon seeks comfort with alcohol, which eventually prevents Eldon from being a good husband and father and contributes to Angie’s death. Eldon also finds it difficult to find work that will sustain a family. He is excluded from management jobs that go to whites and is confined to manual labor all his life. These negative aspects of the white world and city life also have a poisonous effect on nature. When Frank enters the city, a sulfurous smell replaces the sweet aroma of spruce trees. The harm inflicted upon the Indigenous people directly affects nature.
Virtue
Bunky is open, honest, and lives in harmony with the natural world; he teaches Frank to do the same. Bunky does not tolerate mistreatment or unfairness, and he believes in treating all people with respect. When Bunky witnesses a lumberjack mistreating a weaker man, Bunky stands up for the weaker man and forces the lumberjack to back down.
Though Eldon has not been able to attain virtue in life, Bunky, Angie, and eventually Frank see the capacity for virtue within Frank. It takes Frank a while to recognize that Eldon’s request for a warrior’s burial is virtuous; Eldon desires to return home to his people’s traditions and to the sense of virtue those traditions instill.
Frank embodies virtue even though he is only 16 years old. He speaks honestly to Eldon and never minces words. Even though Frank has not seen Eldon in years, he agrees to help him because natural family ties are important to Frank and his people. It is easy for Frank to set aside his distaste for Eldon’s lifestyle to help Eldon find peace.
At the end of the novel, Eldon finally discovers virtue when he learns to be honest instead of making excuses for himself. It is not until Eldon openly shares his pain and trauma with Frank that Eldon can heal those parts of himself that have prevented him from living virtuously.
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By Richard Wagamese
