Chapter 7 Gyllian Phillips Getting Away from It All, or Breathing It All In Decolonizing Wilderness Adventure Stories

Wild, Into the Wild, and the Wilderness Adventure Story

The idea of outdoor adventure is given a colonial frame through certain texts and stories. Kristin Jacobson suggests that venturing into “wild” spaces calls up a particular character trope and invites associations with a frontier mentality: “Extreme environments evoke mythic heroic frameworks and historically specific national narratives” (2020, 62). In other words, the way humans who are habituated to Western knowledge systems think about and move through nonhuman spaces is partially determined by text.

The authors of Into the Wild and Wild portray the real-life journeys depicted in these books as having bookish origins: Cheryl Strayed writes that she was inspired to embark on her improbable hike by The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California, a book that she picked up randomly in the checkout line of a sporting goods store (Wild, 51), and Jon Krakauer makes much of Chris McCandless’s small portable library, which included books by Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and—especially important for Krakauer’s narrative—Jack London. From a Western cultural perspective, when mythic heroic frameworks, Jack London, and a backcountry trail guide are brought together, their shared properties become obvious: there are humans and there is wilderness; a human ventures into the wilderness to prove him or herself; and in both the idea of wilderness and the wilderness adventure there is a tacit mastery of self and place. As Jonah Raskin points out in his discussion of London’s Call of the Wild and Krakauer’s Into the Wild, “the wild is a story, a fiction if you will, that we tell ourselves in order to make sense of our lives” (2011, 201). Like all stories we tell, “wild” stories help us determine our conceptions of real place, time, other people, and ourselves. Kristina Groover, speaking about the literary lineage of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, identifies this type of story as “not merely an adventure story, but the central paradigm of spiritual experience in the American literary tradition” (1999, 187). The individual established in this tradition is a loner, most often masculine, self-reliant, resourceful, and in control of his space. The environment through which he moves is the “wilderness”—a space in opposition to the human world, a space that the individual maps, is temporarily undone by, and ultimately conquers.

The land story that comes from Jack London and shapes Krakauer’s portrait of McCandless is one of self-determination through dominance:

The only passage from The Call of the Wild that McCandless selected for special attention . . . is a description of Buck after he has killed Spitzbergen, the dog who had led the pack. London calls Buck “the dominant primordial beast.” McCandless tweaked the phrase and wrote, “All hail the Dominant Primordial Beast!” which makes it sound like a hymn to brute conquest. (Raskin 2011, 199)

Krakauer shapes the bits and pieces of writing left by McCandless, along with interviews with those who knew the somewhat hapless young man, into a heroic character by means of the mythos created by London. Krakauer purports to see himself and McCandless as something like kindred spirits in their defiance of authority, love of being outdoors, and enjoyment of physical challenge. For example, Krakauer describes how his youthful self hungered for risk and mastery through his own attraction to rock and ice climbing in the remote north: “Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real” (Into the Wild, 134). Krakauer depicts McCandless, and in some ways himself, as a character in the tradition of American outdoor iconoclast, attempting the impossible out of a desire to establish his “heroic masculinity” (Jacobson 2020, 13, 40), but also to experience a deep connection between himself and the “real” (as opposed, I assume, to the human-made) world.

Cheryl Strayed breaks with this “cult of masculinity” (Kam 2015, 353) by assuming the traditionally male role of lone adventurer, becoming the “Queen” of the Pacific Crest Trail (Wild, 289). However, she adds a dimension to her journey that remains somewhat latent in the more typically masculine stories. She is seeking a physical experience not only to thrill her into “the real” but also to transform her inner reality, which has been damaged by loss and trauma. Her literary frame is twofold: “It was true that The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California was now my bible, but The Dream of a Common Language [by Adrienne Rich] was my religion” (60). Her outer project—the through-hike—is physical; her inner project is liberatory and spiritual. Shelley Sanders has usefully identified the literary project of Wild as part of an “athletic aesthetic” of sports writing (2017, 12), one in which writing and reading can be felt as a “transfigurative practice” (14), possibly one that makes readers move with Strayed, as it were, into the wild. (Among readers in online forums such as Goodreads, this transfigurative practice is identified more simply as “inspiring”). Strayed’s book is moving, in both senses of the word. And, though Into the Wild can’t focus much on McCandless’s interiority, both it and Wild imply that “venturing away from urban spaces into the wilderness can be particularly therapeutic during periods of malaise and alienation” (Kam 2015, 352). In addition to the transformation of physical state through hard, daily exercise and the occasional thrilling confrontation with danger, Strayed identifies the motivation of long-distance hiking as a need “to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets” (Wild, 207). Strayed identifies the experience as “powerful and fundamental” and part of a timeless connection: “It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way” (Wild, 207). The therapeutic effect seems to come from all of the above: hard exercise induces euphoria and good sleep; facing and overcoming external dangers creates internal strength and resilience; something as mindlessly mindful as walking for hours allows for intense rumination on dark thoughts and an eventual letting go; and intimacy with trees, rocks, and water is wired into our very brain chemistry (see F. Williams 2017).

Through all of this, however, Krakauer and Strayed make little effort to know and acknowledge where they (and McCandless) are in the way that Jolie Varela suggests. I don’t write this to disparage Strayed or Krakauer, or any other past wilderness adventure writer. I write it as a settler hiker myself, and as someone working my way towards a different understanding of my relationship to land, of my own responsibility for justice, and of my own conceptions of “nature.” There is altogether a scanty acknowledgment of Indigenous Peoples and history in much of North American nature writing produced by non-Indigenous people. This is an absence, so it is hard to point to or address, but it functions as a kind of wound, a gap in the discourse defining human and non-human relations: “Stories are bigger than the texts and bodies that carry them. When absent, they leave gaps that communicate as surely as the presences” (Justice 2018, 184). In her discussion of Indigenous literature of the American southwest, Joni Adamson points out that “the separation of nature and culture into two separate worlds creates blind spots” and “fails to account for the ways in which some human communities have inhabited land in sustainable ways” (2001, 16). These gaps have real, tangible effects in the lives of Indigenous people.

The rare examples of acknowledgement of Indigenous Peoples that do exist in Krakauer’s and Strayed’s narratives often only serve to underline the gap or further erase Indigenous presences. Krakauer expends considerable energy, money, time, and print space unravelling the seeming mystery of McCandless’s death without ever turning to the very people on whose land he died and, as it turns out, on whose knowledge he relied to survive. McCandless’s cause of death was identified as starvation, and in an effort to maintain McCandless’s heroic masculinity, Krakauer undertakes to establish that this was not just the result of arrogant stupidity or a suicidal death-wish. Instead, he points to another book in McCandless’s library, Tanaina Plantlore by Priscilla Russel Kari, an ethnobotanist working with and writing about the Dena’ina people on whose territory McCandless died. Tanaina Plantlore was McCandless’s main source of information on food foraging in the area. Krakauer speculates that, “had McCandless’s guidebook to edible plants warned that H. alpinium seeds contain a ‘highly toxic secondary plant constituent’ . . . he probably would have walked out of the wild” (Into the Wild, 212). In the acknowledgements to her own book, Kari makes clear the debt of knowledge she owes to the Dena’ina Elders who helped her to understand the plantlore of the area. McCandless himself placed his life, indirectly, in the hands of the Elders Kari talked to, though he never acknowledged (at least in Krakauer’s telling) that the information contained in Tanaina Plantlore came from millennia-old stories of land-based living. Yet Krakauer does not appear to have spoken to anyone with Indigenous knowledge of the plants and animals McCandless consumed, instead commissioning costly laboratory studies of plant specimens and interviewing many academics. Nowhere in Into the Wild is there an admission that the people with the expertise McCandless might have relied on for help, and Krakauer might have turned to in order to solve his mystery, have lived successfully since time immemorial in the same territory where McCandless perished.

In Wild, Strayed similarly neglects to acknowledge Indigenous presence, and for the most part does not acknowledge the traditional territories through which she moves on her Pacific Crest Trail hike. She makes one exception near the end of the book, but that naming of traditional territory is framed as a historical artifact. In the chapter called “Mazama,” named for the place also known as Crater Lake, to account for the powerful affect she has in response to the landscape, she offers a geological and cultural history in which she conflates an ancient and implicitly prehistorical past with the Klamath, a present-time people, thereby rhetorically disarming their claim to the land (Deur 2002, 33–43). In Mazama, what is now a lake was once a mountain, a volcano that erupted 7,700 years ago: “The Klamath tribe of Native Americans who witnessed the eruption believed it was a fierce battle between Llao, the spirit of the underworld, and Skell, the spirit of the sky” (Wild, 261). At the end of the chapter, she acknowledges the continuation of that history by saying that “the Klamath tribe still consider the lake a sacred site” (271; my emphasis). Though Strayed admits here the continuity of human-land relationships that extend far beyond her own personal encounter with “wilderness,” this moment remains bracketed from the rest of the hike and seems to align Indigenous authority on the land with the ancient geologic past rather than a living present. Strayed elides Indigenous presence in other ways, too. For example, throughout Wild, Strayed’s history dates the Pacific Crest Trail to before its official designation in 1968, noting that it was used by “hikers and wilderness enthusiasts” as far back as the 1930s (61). But we know, thanks to Jolie Varela and others, that the trail is much older than this. For example, the John Muir Trail (JMT)—part of the Pacific Crest Trail—was not “discovered” by John Muir: “These are our ancestral trade routes. They were there long before John Muir was. So I’m going to do the JMT but I’m going to call it the Nuumu Poyo—which means the Paiute Road or Paiute Trail, but directly translates as the People’s Trail” (Varela in Johnson-Groh 2018).

These lacunae in Into the Wild and Wild reveal the work of the continuous erasure that goes into preserving a particular story about “wilderness.” As is typical in the adventure story genre, these two books mostly represent the land as being free of humans; they both imply that by venturing into wild space, the outdoorsperson becomes more self-aware and more human, stronger and more self-reliant. In the process, or perhaps as a result of this understanding of nature as “other,” neither Strayed nor Krakauer see the presence of the people whose land the heroes of their stories—themselves or another—cross. As Kylie Crane puts it, “wilderness entails a colonial gesture, placing indigenous presences and practices under erasure” (2012, 2). Thinking critically about the absence of land acknowledgements in wilderness adventure stories leads to an ecocriticism with social justice in mind:

[T]he ecocritic’s default loving attitude toward North American nature . . . is a condescending artifact of colonialist settlement in North America. . . . [I]f our territorial acknowledgements about unceded lands are genuine, as they must be, then the basic conception of “wilderness” is misplaced in any discussion of nature or place here, and destructive of any possibility of building a settler-colonial ecocriticism to be proud of. (Pickard 2018, 321)

Decolonizing wilderness adventure narratives also has pedagogical importance insofar as it may help readers develop an integrated understanding of humans’ relationship with the world. Lisa Kortweg and Jan Oakley, discussing the decolonization of similar narratives in film, argue for this point: “We hope that a ‘Land education’ approach focused on epistemological and cosmological relations between all peoples, land, water, and flora and fauna will take the place of (Eurocentric) place-based environmental education” (2016, 140–41). Decolonizing narrative thus takes us a step closer to two goals: decolonizing the land itself and shifting human perception of land from object to relation.

Walking Home: Medicine Walk

The ways in which stories are told, and who or what tells them, is central to Wagamese’s Medicine Walk. The novel tells the story of sixteen-year-old Franklin Starlight, the son of a half-Cree mother (Angie) and half-Ojibwe father (Eldon), who has been raised by a White farmer (Bunky) near a small logging town called Parson’s Gap. From its first page, Medicine Walk invites readers to draw associations between Frank’s story and a wide history of other kinds of storytelling. As he walks his horse out of the barn in preparation for his journey with his father Eldon, for example, Frank sees the horse’s hoofprints: “The tracks looked like inkblots in the seeping melt, and he stood for a moment and tried to imagine the scenes they held” (1). This moment suggests a connection with classic adventures texts from the Anglo-European literary tradition such as the Arthurian quest romances or Miguel de Cervante’s satirical Don Quixote. In a more popular vein, there are associations with scenes from wilderness adventure stories by writers like Jack London, and from cowboy stories. Importantly, it is the tracks themselves that tell these stories, which also invites comparisons with non-print traditions of storytelling, such as oral storytelling or another type of story told by tracks: the movement of an animal across a landscape. This is a powerful feature that often recurs in Indigenous fiction, for instance in Louise Erdrich’s novel Tracks (1988), which weaves together the various dark consequences for a people dispossessed by colonialism from their lands. The opening scene in Medicine Walk is a signal to consider how a wide variety of journey storytelling shapes the perception of time, space, and self.

In many ways, Medicine Walk echoes the traditional Western heroic monomyth. In the middle part of Frank and Eldon’s journey, for example, they find refuge from a storm with Becka, a woman living alone in her dead father’s cabin, who makes space for Eldon’s first story. In line with the quest romance tradition, Wagamese portrays Becka as a spirit guide, almost a witch: Frank thinks with amusement that she looks like a “gnome” (75). When they leave Becka’s place, Frank encounters a frightening “monster” on the trail in the form of a large bear. Like a knight of yore, he must challenge the bear in order to continue. Interestingly, versions of this type of scene also appear in the film adaptation of Into the Wild (Penn 2007)—when McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) comes face to face with a bear—and in Strayed’s book Wild (91). In all three stories, the lesson is about building strength not by killing another creature but by moving forward in spite of obstacles and fear. As Frank says in Medicine Walk, “the only way was forward” (108).

While certain resemblances are clear, Wagamese changes the outline of this mythic narrative. As I have argued above, Into the Wild, Wild, and other popular adventure stories are stories of personal transformation that implicitly equate the individual conquering the land with a conquest over trauma or disaffection. In contrast, Medicine Walk is a story about individuals building relationship with land, trauma, and each other. The settler-colonial outdoor adventure narrative usually adopts the out-and-back rubric of the quest structure: the protagonist or writer leaves home, conquers obstacles, learns something new, and returns a hero (or, in the case of Chris McCandless, not returning makes him a tragic hero). In a way, Medicine Walk inverts that structure, and redefines the notion of wilderness because Frank and Eldon’s journey is not about moving away from home and into the wilderness only to move out of it again, but about moving towards a sacred centre of land as home. In Wagamese’s novel, “the wild” is not an antagonist to be conquered but a collaborator, supporting Frank and his father Eldon physically and emotionally. Settler narratives like Krakauer’s and Strayed’s erase Indigenous presence and history on the land by leaning on the trope of the “wild” as a seemingly human-free space, and thereby tacitly reaffirm the continued colonial occupation and exploitation of that place. In Medicine Walk, the relationship forged between humans and the land reclaims Indigenous rights to land. This replacement is deeply affirmative because it demonstrates the necessity for everyone who lives on any land (namely, everyone) to see human-land connections as relational and supportive, not as separate and exploitative.

Medicine Walk is set sometime in the early 1970s (although we can only infer this from the fact that Frank’s father, Eldon, fought in the Korean War, which ended in 1953, and Frank, who is now sixteen, was born about five years later). Though the town in which Frank was raised, Parson’s Gap, seems to be a fictional location, there is a town called “Parson” in the Columbia Valley in interior British Columbia. The landscape of the novel is similar to Kamloops, the traditional territory of the Tk’emlúpsemc, the people of the confluence, now known as the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, where Wagamese lived until the end of his life. Frank’s adoptive father Bunky, sometimes referred to simply as “the old man,” is a somewhat idealized example of a White settler who loves the land he “owns” and who works with it rather than exploiting it. Bunky does his best to honour Frank’s Indigenous heritage, in part by taking him into the backwoods to learn to hunt, forage, and survive in a good way. As Wagamese writes of Frank:

He was Indian. The old man said it was his way and he’d always taken that for truth. His life had become horseback in solitude, lean-tos cut from spruce, fires in the night, mountain air that tasted sweet and pure as spring water, and trails too dim to see that he learned to follow high to places only cougars, marmots, and eagles knew. (5)

Rather than replicating a social ideology of assimilation, Bunky builds a respectful and mutual relationship with the land and with the Indigenous members of his community whom his colonial assumption of land ownership has displaced. Ultimately, Bunky gives back to Frank some, but not all, of what the younger man has lost to centuries of occupation and racism. One central element of Frank’s sense of self that Bunky feels unable to give him is the story of Eldon, Frank’s biological father.

In narrative’s present, Frank has been called by his dying father to perform a service—namely, to bring Eldon to the back country to die and then to bury him. What follows is the alternating storylines of Frank and Eldon’s present-time journey into the wilderness and the gradual unfolding, through Eldon’s storytelling, of their past relationship, Eldon’s own history, and the story of Frank’s origins. Stories and land are integral to building a strong self in relationship with the world and all its beings. Moreover, storytelling itself is embodied, and journeys are one of the most elemental narrative forms to express both restoration and transformation. As Warren Cariou suggests, oral storytelling “‘keeps and transforms’ the meaning through embodied practices that move from one body to another” (2016, 475). Frank’s mother Angie, in a flashback to a time before her death, emphasizes that stories can be both comforting and transformative: they can “calm you down” (191), and “when you share stories, you change things” (203). Frank and Eldon’s journey demonstrate this. Their physical journey through the land has a restorative effect for both of them, and in their emotional journey, Eldon’s storytelling is key to forging a relationship between father and son. Taken together, these elements make Eldon’s passage out of life less painful and more meaningful.

The novel makes other strong connections among land, journeys, stories, and Indigenous place. The first stop on Eldon and Frank’s “hike” is an ancient rock painting. When they reach these “symbols painted in dull red, black, and a stark greyish white,” Eldon wonders what they mean (68). Frank replies that he imagines them to be stories about travelling, but he also notes that sometimes “‘you gotta let a mystery be a mystery for it to give you anything’” (68–69). This moment represents the idea that travelling and storytelling are ways for humans to understand their relationship to existence and to each other. Frank and Eldon’s journey is, at the outset, not unlike Strayed’s or McCandless’s: an attempt to get “away” from personal “malaise” and social “alienation.” Driven by alcoholism and abandonment, they look for healing in the woods and mountains. However, though Frank returns alone, they undertake the journey together, and what Frank achieves is something more like integration than individuation. Like McCandless and Strayed, though with more knowledge and experience, Frank and Eldon seek healing in being on and in the land. While for McCandless and Strayed, their journeys start as recreational, all of these “characters” find space away from others for re-creation. However, for Frank and Eldon the journey across the land is less about moving away from and more about moving towards a home. Though their literal meaning is mysterious to the men, the paintings fill a gap. Left directly on the land itself, they are signs, from past people to the present, of the continuity of land and story. This restored continuity is mirrored in the relationship between Frank and Eldon, with Eldon’s storytelling about his life filling a gap in Frank’s knowledge of himself. Maybe most importantly, these paintings are statements—acknowledgment, as it were—of connections between people and land since time immemorial. In honouring this statement from the past, in feeling its pull in the present, Frank and Eldon take their place respectfully on this ground. As Eldon says, he wanted to die out in the land because “‘[t]his here’s the only place I felt like I belonged’” (150). He is not saying that the land belongs to him, but that he belongs to the land.

The final destination in Eldon and Frank’s journey, the ridge where Eldon wants to be buried, though very far away from where they began, is revealed to be a spiritual home. The ridge is deep in the wilderness, the farthest distance from either man’s house and the highest point in elevation. In another sense, however, it is close to the heart of existence, a place that Frank went, in younger years, “when it got too noisy in my head” (144). It is also a place that Eldon had been when he was just a year younger than Frank: “‘I come here when I was fifteen. . . . Stayed here for two days just sitting on the edge of the cliff looking at it all’” (149). This wild spot, the faint trails, the trees, and streams, are all familiar and welcoming to Frank and Eldon. The outermost point of their trek is actually a homecoming, an embeddedness in place that is materially reinforced when, after two final stories from Eldon, Frank buries his father. In doing so, Frank fulfills his promise to Eldon, and Eldon, in a way, brings closure to a promise of his own. One of the layers of trauma Eldon unpacks for Frank is the story of his role in Jimmy Weaseltail’s death when they were soldiers together in the Korean War. Eldon recalls that had had promised to bury Jimmy “in the warrior way”: “‘Ojibs usedta bury their warriors sat upright in the ground, facin’ east where the sun rose’” (160). However, Eldon was never able to fulfill that promise to Jimmy. When Frank buries his father, this also allows for Eldon to close the circle with his dead friend.

Along their journey, Eldon’s stories serve as confessions or talk therapy, allowing him to pass out of life peacefully. They also fill in historical gaps or wounds for Frank, allowing him to heal, to be a little less alone. When Eldon makes his burial request to Frank at the outset of the novel, he says that stories are “all I got to give ya.” Frank replies, “Ain’t never gonna be enough” (23). What Frank learns on this journey, however, is that relationships are not conducted in an exchange economy characterized by claim and debt. Instead, Frank “takes it all in” from his father and finds compassion and love for him despite Eldon’s dark past. Rather than being heroically powerful, ascendant, and essentially independent, Frank’s alternative kind of heroism consists in being expansive, open, and essentially connected with others. At the same time, Frank realizes that some gaps can never be closed: “His father would die and he would never know his mother. . . . She would remain as shadowed as the trees and rocks and bracken that surrounded him. There was a hole in his history and there was nothing that would ever fill it” (223). The comparison between his lost experience of his mother and the forest shadows around him hint that, though tragic, this gap is another one of those “mysteries,” the traces of a story, like the images on the rock face. In many ways, even Eldon’s stories, the ones that did fill gaps, leave Frank feeling empty. He notes that he had originally thought that knowing his history “might have filled him but all he felt was emptiness and a fear that there would be nothing else that would fill that void” (232). When he returns to the farm, he tells this to Bunky, which leads to the following exchange:

“Sometimes when things get taken away from you, it feels like there’s a hole at your centre where you can feel the wind blow through, that’s sure,” the old man said.

“Whattaya do about that?”

“Me, I always went to where the wind blows. . . . Don’t know as I ever got an answer but it always felt better bein’ out there.” (244)

Some mysteries are as elemental as the land that breathes life into beings and takes it away again. The wind, the shadows in the forest—these are not just metaphors for unknown and uncontrollable emotional forces. In this conversation, Bunky moves from using the wind as a simile to emphasize the emptiness at the heart of grief to finding solace in real wind as a comfort rather than an enhancement of loss.

In Medicine Walk, humans and “nature” have porous boundaries. As Robert Bringhurst says in “The Mind of the Wild,” “Humans are liminal creatures. We exist on the margins of the wild. The idea that we might exist in perfect bliss entirely within the wild is rich, romantic fiction. The idea that we might ever exist entirely outside the wild is equally fatuous” (2018, 32). Expressing a different dimension of this recognition, Robin Wall Kimmerer points out that “[i]t takes a real effort to remember that it’s not just in a wigwam that the earth gives us everything we need. The exchange of recognition, gratitude and reciprocity for these gifts is just as important in a Brooklyn flat as under a birchbark roof” (2013, 240). In Medicine Walk there are certainly spaces and places that are more wild, like the backcountry where Frank takes Eldon, and less wild, like the sad, industrial town of Parson’s Gap that looks like a “bruise” on the landscape (6). The farm where Frank lives with Bunky is nicely in between the two, and its liminal status is continually reinforced. When Frank leaves the farm to start his journey, he crosses a gradual threshold: “The bush started thin where the grass surrendered at the edge of the field” (4).

Just as “nature” and “culture” are a continuity, not an opposition, so is the individual not a bounded fortress, separate from everything around them. Joni Adamson explains Stacy Alaimo’s idea of trans-corporeality as “the idea that the bodies of human and nonhuman species are made up of cells and that organic and inorganic matter can move across sites and through bodies in surprising, unpredictable or even unwanted ways that reveal the interconnections of human bodies with the more-than-human world” (2012, 157). In Medicine Walk, the characters are connected to, and in relationship with, each other and the land through embodiment. For example, at the start and end of Frank’s journey, he has farewell and welcome-back encounters with Bunky in the barn (itself a liminal space). Frank absorbs the relationship with the elements that make up the space he is in: “There was the smell of leather, liniment, the dry dust of feed, the low stink of mould and manure. He heaved a big breath of it into him” (2). When Bunky embraces Frank after he returns from burying Eldon, Frank “could smell the oil and grease and tobacco on him and it was every smell he recalled growing up with and he closed his eyes and pulled it all into him” (244). Frank is not an individual human who stakes his claim on identity with a fictional boundary between in here and out there. Instead, he takes the world in, and by implication, breathes it back out again. He is a permeable barrier. His apprehension of love and belonging is felt not just as words and named emotions but with every sense.

Let’s assume that Medicine Walk is a teaching story. What does it teach? Frank’s heroic quest is a test of physical strength and courage. He achieves greater wisdom and maturity in overcoming the obstacles along his way. So much is typical of the mythically inclined adventure story, of which Into the Wild and Wild are prime examples. More than all this though, Medicine Walk posits that the hero needs to have their boots on the ground to be grounded. They need to breath the air made by trees to stay alive. And to be fully alive, they need to walk their stories. Frank is not just a better individual in his successful quest; he is a more integrated individual or, rather, he has lost some separation and come into greater connection through bringing his father back into the land. Eldon creates a relationship with Frank by confronting him with a responsibility of care even when he is angry, and Eldon’s body literally fills a hole in the land left by the legacies of colonial erasure. By travelling over the land, acknowledging its human history, and integrating the more-than-human elements of place, Frank and Eldon shift the adventure genre from one of human mastery over the wilderness to one of relationship with it. For readers who have absorbed colonial tropes of Western wilderness adventure genres, this story potentially opens a new way of thinking about the work of decolonizing the land under our feet.

Works Cited

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