Ragged Company

Content Warning: This section discusses substance use disorder, child endangerment, and abuse.

Wagamese, Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), the author of Ragged Company, was an Indigenous writer from Canada. He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Alberta Writers Guild Best Novel Award in 1995 for his debut novel, Keeper’n Me, and the Canadian Authors Association Award in 2007 for his novel Dream Wheel.

Like much of Wagamese’s work, Ragged Company addresses the socioeconomic issues affecting Indigenous communities in Canada and explores questions of identity and culture. Three of the four unhoused main characters in the book have Indigenous ancestry. The experience of being unhoused is an issue that Indigenous communities in Canada disproportionately face—a direct result of rampant colonization, followed by racism and oppression, that took place in the country (“Indigenous Peoples,” Canadian Observatory on Homelessness). In addition to historical trauma, personal issues such as substance use disorder and family dysfunction among the people of these communities contribute to and exacerbate the problem of homelessness. The characters in Ragged Company reflect these circumstances.

Wagamese’s personal life and experiences strongly influenced the book as well. His family followed the traditional lifestyle of the Ojibway people (“Richard Wagamese.” The Canadian Encyclopedia), as does Amelia One Sky’s character in the book, whose family lived on an Ojibway reserve. Likewise, Digger and Dick’s experiences of parental neglect and substance use disorder in the family are inspired by Wagamese’s life. When Wagamese was three years old, his parents left him and his three siblings alone for days while they went drinking in a town almost 100 km away. Wagamese and his siblings were found by policemen and turned over to the Sixties Scoop, a government program in Canada that took Indigenous children from their homes and placed them in foster care, as are the One Sky siblings in the book.

After entering foster care, Wagamese was reunited with his family only after 25 years. He has spoken extensively about the hardships he endured while growing up in multiple foster homes—from beatings to the emotional distress caused by the instability and confusion about his identity. Wagamese dropped out of school when he was 16, and began living with friends or on the streets. For years, he experienced substance use and post-traumatic stress disorder, both of which he mirrors in the experiences of the four unhoused individuals at the center of Ragged Company. Dick, in particular, struggles with substance use and has flashbacks to a traumatic experience in his past.

Wagamese began to frequent libraries during his late teens and early twenties, and the extensive reading he did then contributed to his eventually becoming a prolific writer, and Ragged Company reflects the author’s love for stories and literature. Granite Harvey, the only character among the central five who has a home, is a journalist (the only similarity between him and Wagamese). Fittingly, cinema and the stories it provides as an escape become the uniting factor between Granite and the other four—the “ragged company.”