Unreconciled, by Jesse Wente
I enjoyed and learned a lot from Jesse Wente’s memoir, read by the author on audibook. Wente tells the story of his own family background, childhood, and youth, and his involvement in the Canadian arts scene, starting as a film critic for the CBC (he is now chair of the Canada Council for the Arts as well as the first director of the Indigenous Screen Office). As an Ojibwe person of mixed Indigenous and settler heritage who did not grow up on a reserve, he reflects on the lifelong self-doubt about whether he was “Indigenous enough” or “the right kind of Indigenous” to be able to speak for and about Indigenous people in the Canadian cultural landscape. I found it really insightful that he places this self-doubt in the context of the realization that he is exactly the kind of indigenous person that the Canadian state was trying to produce through the residential school system that Wente’s grandmother attended — assimilated and distanced from his people’s culture and traditions. As someone who has worked hard to reconnect with his heritage, Wente is a good position to be able to talk about the impacts of generations of abuse by the Canadian government against Indigenous people and the Indigenous resistance to that abuse.
He’s also well-poised as a film critic to talk about portrayals of Indigenous people in the media, and I learned a lot from those parts of the book. I particularly learned from his thoughts about being “tokenized,” with the example of what happened to his role at the Toronto International Film Festival, and to his reflections on cultural appropriation. As a settler-writer who thinks about these issues a lot, I now have a lot more to think about thanks to Jesse Wente.
While this memoir doesn’t pack the literary or emotional punch of something like Alicia Elliot’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, it is a clear, straightforward and thoughtful story of one Indigenous man’s journey to understanding his own identity and applying that understanding to our culture. It’s well worth a read (or a listen).
