Medicine River

Harlen Bigbear is Will’s best friend in Medicine River. He is the one who convinces Will to move back home, and he is ever-present in Will’s life. Harlen is resilient and an eternal optimist, and Will describes Harlen as being “like the prairie wind. You never knew when he was coming or when he was going to leave” (3). Harlen always shows up at Will’s studio unannounced, sometimes with food, and always with the latest town gossip. Harlen considers himself to be the person responsible for keeping the town together and keeping everyone informed of its goings on. When there is a conflict between two people, such as between Eddie and Big John, Harlen is there organizing a game night to try and resolve it. Will likens him to a “spider on a web” (26). Will’s simile stresses the interconnectedness of the “web” of Life in an Alberta Blackfoot Community: Like a web, any damage to a single part affects the whole web, and Harlen is its architect.

Harlen keeps the community together and reminds Will and others of the importance of connecting to nature and their heritage. He is rather pushy, as is evident from the very beginning, when he gives Will the pack of letters from his father and encourages him to read them. But he is not particularly forthcoming about himself. He can dance around questions for hours, occasionally never answering them at all. It seems as though there is a tug-of-war between his involvement in others’ lives and his reservation about his own. And Will experiences his own tug-of-war with Harlen, with whom his relationship is one of Friendship and Forbearance and then becomes even closer. The longer that Will lives in Medicine River, the more he and Harlen become less like friends and more like brothers.

Will and James’s mother, Rose Sampson, was a Blackfoot woman raised on the reservation near Medicine River, but banished from it when she married a white Canadian. She also lost her Native status and the respect of her family. Abandoned by her husband, she raises their two sons alone. In the novel, she has already died and thus exists only as a memory for Will, which is more than can be said for Will’s father, about whom he knows virtually nothing and whose letters to Rose reveal even less: “Hope the boys had a good Christmas,” reads one. “I sure miss you all” (9).

The mother whom Will remembers was adventurous. His fondest memory is of the time they went camping and took a rowboat out on the river. When they crashed and wrecked the boat, they were all sure they would drown, but when Rose’s feet met the bottom, they all begun to laugh at their own panic. Rose is characterized as a resilient survivor who can recover from misfortune.

When Will thinks of her devotion to her sons, he remembers her going to yard sales and buying used clothes, only to wash and iron them so well they would appear new when she gave them to Will and his brother. She continued to do this well into Will’s adulthood, sending him a shirt every year. But by then, the relationship seems to have become more one-sided. Will does not return to Medicine River when Rose dies. It is only afterward that he comes back the funeral and then eventually settles there. In this way, Rose’s death helps create an opportunity for Will to move back home permanently and begin a new life that is much more connected to his roots than in Toronto. 

Louise Heavyman is a local woman who is abandoned by her boyfriend when she becomes pregnant. Will steps in almost immediately, helping Louise during the pregnancy and being present at the birth of her daughter, whom he names South Wing. Louise is a kind and soft woman, but also “formidable” (174), as Harlen describes her. She is stubborn and, like Will, largely unwilling to adjust her life to make room for a committed relationship. She also believes marriage to be better for men than for women. She prefers to keep Will close enough but not too close, and this seems to suit Will. He, too, is ambivalent about commitment to Louise, even though he loves her and especially her daughter. Their relationship thus persists in the kind of limbo that characterizes much of Will’s life.

James Sampson is Will’s brother. He is present in many of Will’s childhood memories, but is only a distant correspondent in his current life. Will remembers James best for his artistic abilities and recalls the way he would draw animals that looked almost real. At one point, Will and his friend became jealous of James’s drawing of an eagle and destroyed it, but James reacted stoically by creating an even bigger, better drawing and hanging it outside his window for all to see. In this, he appears to be very different from Will, who is more reserved and less resolute. The contrast is further reinforced by the fact that James travels the world while Will settles in Medicine Lake. Will’s apology for once losing a ball that was precious to James, which came decades after the fact, is an indication of Will’s personal growth and ability to move on from the past. To this end, James is a flat and static character who acts as an impetus for Will’s self-improvement.