Richard Wagamese: Hi, my name's Richard Wagamese. Wagamese is an Ojibwe name. By itself, it doesn't mean anything. The reason it doesn't mean anything is because when, in the late 1800s, the treaty commissioners came to Northwestern Ontario to sign all the Ojibwe people on treaty, they couldn't pronounce a lot of the names. Wagamese is part of a longer phrase. The longer phrase means, "man walking by the crooked water." But because they couldn't pronounce all of the name, they only wrote down in the register what they could pronounce. What they could pronounce was Wa-ga-mese. And they wrote that down and we became Wagamese. The man walking by the crooked water that my name describes is my great-great grandfather who had a traditional trap line that ran from 40, 50 miles along the Winnepeg River in northwestern Ontario. The Winnepeg River curves and winds and wends it's way from Lake of the Woods in Ontario to Lake Winnepeg in Manitoba. And that's the crooked water that formed our name before it got chopped and became Wagamese.