Rachelle McKay Reviews Jesse Wente's Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance
Jesse Wente. Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance. Allen Lane (Penguin Random House). $29.95, p. 208 ISBN: 9780735235731
Jesse Wente’s memoir Unreconciled offers an astute critique of the current era of reconciliation politics in Canada. Wente himself prefers truth over reconciliation and his memoir provides a necessarily honest account of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples.
As Wente writes, “‘reconciliation’ is the wrong word for both the situation and the goal. To reconcile in this context would be to repair a once functional relationship. No such thing has ever meaningfully existed between Indigenous nations and the state of Canada, so reconciliation is impossible here, as it is impossible in any colonial settler state.”
The author generously shares his experience of growing up as a young Anishinaabe man in Toronto and later, throughout his lengthy career as a self-professed “movie geek” immersed in Canada’s film and art sectors, all of which formed his understanding of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state.
Canada was formed on the premise of terra-nullius: to colonial powers the Indigenous inhabitants of this land have never been seen as fully human. As such, dehumanization remains central to the issue of police brutality, the missing and murdered women epidemic and to the many other forms of violence that Indigenous peoples face. Wente draws this out in Unreconciled and expresses how despite fitting archetypes of “the Acceptable Indian … the exact type of Indian that residential schools were designed to produce,” he has been denied full personhood in a myriad of ways due to his Indigeneity.
He observes that, “My long hair was a magnet for white attention in a way my personhood never was. Strangers rarely approached to ask after my thoughts and feelings, but they felt comfortable asking to touch my hair or surreptitiously snapping a photo of me.”
Wente also points out how the Indigenous inclusion now being promoted, unlike earlier forms of colonialism that barred Indigenous peoples from gaining access to many spaces and institutions, is not unproblematic. Much of the inclusion that’s being offered is conditional on Indigenous peoples’ abilities to fit into certain moulds.
As Wente explains, you can get your dream job at the Toronto Film Festival and work there for over a decade. As the only Indigenous person on staff, you can even write the festival’s land acknowledgement but that will not stop them showing films displaying Indigenous characters with “no agency, little humanity, and little purpose beyond advancing the story of white characters” on the screen.
Wente’s involvement in public “debates” on cultural appropriation are also thoroughly detailed in this debut work. Unreconciled describes how colonial mentalities, like those held by the members of Canada’s media elite who pledged financial support for the “Appropriation Prize” in 2017, are nothing new. In his subsequent defence of Indigenous authorship on the CBC, Wente “reminded Canadians that appropriation is the foundation on which our country was built, and that it’s not just cultural appropriation but appropriation of all things Indigenous—our lives, our land.”
Instead Wente calls for self-representation and self-expression as acts of narrative sovereignty which he defines as the “the idea people, communities and nations should control their own stories and the tools used in the storytelling.” This could be seen as a reversal of the Indian Act, which has deprived Indigenous peoples from controlling their own lands and communities for too long. An Indigenous sovereignty through narrative sovereignty.
Unreconciled points the reader towards championing Indigenous creative production because, as Wente puts it “one of the simplest ways [for Indigenous peoples] to decolonize is to create.” Too many stories go unwritten, unproduced, and unscreened in favour of colonial caricatures of Indigenous peoples while the true variance of Indigenous experiences in Canada go largely unheard.
In Unreconciled, Wente proves to be a skilled Anishinaabe storyteller and political commentator, offering a sharp critique that is clever, vulnerable and honest. His memoir is a personally and politically rooted text, written by an Indigenous film-buff who is disillusioned with Canada’s newfound commitment to reconciliation and who found Avatar (2009) to be profoundly racist despite its widespread success. As such, Unreconciled is itself an act of narrative sovereignty, one that calls for more Indigenous-created works to be produced and upheld alongside it.
Rachelle McKay (Anishinaabe) is a former Hamilton-resident now living in Halifax, NS. She has a MA in Indigenous Governance.