Renowned Native Author as Keynote Speaker at National Homelessness Conference

At the core of their being, everyone carries a need for belonging. According to Richard Wagamese, author and journalist, when you discover that sense of belonging and essential worth, then you will find yourself at home wherever you go.

Wagamese has written several books on homelessness and Aboriginal experiences. He currently writes a weekly column for the Calgary Herald and helps run a rooming house in Kamloops, BC for low income, marginally housed people. He says that using a “housing first” philosophy is a good start when working with homeless individuals, but that listening to their stories is also vitally important.

The cause is close to Wagamese’s heart, since he too has struggled with homelessness on and off throughout his adult life. Of these experiences he says, “Life brings its spiritual wonder, its tragedies and its deaths and disappearances, which can make it hard to walk down the street with pride and dignity.”

Wagamese shared his experiences as well as excerpts from his novel Ragged Company at “Growing Home: Housing and Homelessness in Canada,” a conference that was hosted by the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Social Work from February 18-20, 2009.

Wagamese hopes the conference will have an impact on homelessness. He says, “To live in one of the most advanced countries in the world, and then see people who don’t have the basics - you have to ask yourself why that should happen.”

Jason Gail, a Master of Social Work student completing a thesis on poverty, says, “I don’t believe homelessness is a knowledge or awareness-based issue. Addressing it is an issue of will. With all of our modern technology and resources, it’s just a matter of having the political desire to make change.”

Wagamese says he had an elder friend who once told him how to change the world. “She took a pebble and threw it into a pond that we were standing beside. As the pebble rippled through the water, she pointed to the circles that began to form and said, ‘That’s how you change the world - with the smallest circle first.’”