Have you thought about Jesse Wente’s feelings today? If not, why not?
How this privately educated, ethnically ¾ WASP careerist feels on any given day should be a key indicator on how well the business of reconciliation is going
For my international readers, Jesse Wente is a very special career and cultural clout path available in Canada of the twenty-first century: someone who gets paid well and is given large institutional platforms to explain how bad things are for people like him, how unequivocally racist Canada is, how irreparably his ethnic group has been traumatized, and how any attempt at redress will never be enough. JW is a prophet of Canadian doom, comfortably propertied on this stolen land and sailing through managerial class jobs. That he himself has one Indigenous grandparent and three WASP ones does not complicate the gospel of Wente. He started off as a movie columnist on CBC radio, worked as a senior programmer at Toronto’s most powerful film organization (Toronto International Film Festival) for more than a decade, and platitudinised his way up and up to a book deal with Penguin Random House Canada, the position of the first Executive Director of the Indigenous Screen Office and the posting of the Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts. Canada Council is a terrible thing, he told us upon appointment. We, all together, have to defeat colonialism. What would that look like, I wondered enough to pick up his lauded-at-all-the-right-institutional-places memoir, which just won the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Non-Fiction.
“The move to East York was a big one for my family,” he writes of his childhood. “My dad’s mom, Barbara, and stepfather, Thomas, who were both executives and well-off, helped my parents with the down payment, meaning there was a house all our own, not a rental.” (P. 12) “My mom started as a clerk… my dad was a purchasing agent… Both would stay with the same company for more than three decades and retire as executives—a form of upward mobility practically unheard of today.” But all this is preceded by a bleak intro that tells us the book is about persistent, unavoidable and undiminished continuity of anti-Indigenous racism in Canada.
As a kid, once, while he was playing baseball, and taunting, he admits, is not unusual in sports, Wente says he heard the “wah-wah-wah” war-cry usually heard in old American Wild West movies and attributed to indigenous warriors. He found that, he tells us, traumatizing. And he would hear similar on Looney Tunes, and in old Hollywood movies, and as recently as 2018 in a hockey league in Quebec where an indigenous team was treated to same. (It’s this incident.) And here I expected some sort of analysis of why the most base ethnonationalism is so alive and well in team sports fandom everywhere around the world, or a film-historical analysis of representation of ethnic minorities and the mythology of the Wild West, but no. “The fact that the same sound is still employed to mock First Nations kids decades later indicates that little has changed around the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in media and education. This is still a sound that represents much of what people think they know about us, even if the cartoons don’t play on Saturday mornings anymore, and Hollywood now seldom makes westerns”. It’s all the same shebang: the Canadian project, Hollywood, Looney Tunes, hockey fans. The misrepresentation’s aim is “to undermine the value of Indigenous lives and the value of Indigenous claims to the land stolen from us… It is the narrative used to justify genocide and its tools…” There is a fascinating discrepancy in JW’s narratives here: a story of a well-off, prosperous family life in a politically peaceful part of the world, and a parallel story of hurt feelings. And the feelings are what matters, rather than the material life. Feelings are the correct indicator of what's really going on. (Wente and I, by the way, are same age.)
Wente’s maternal grandmother was born in 1927 on what is now the Serpent River First Nation reserve, not far from Sudbury. While her father had been chief and her mother a medicine woman and midwife, they chose to live off reserve and run a family farm. They mostly spoke Ojibwe but were open to English, or the way Wente puts it, “they believed that a certain degree of assimilation—including having their kids master English—would be a pathway to a brighter future.” Is Wente suggesting that Indigenous kids should not be learning English and having career paths that had been open to him? It’s unclear. In his great-grandfather’s view, he writes, “the government-designated reserves were dead-end places.” And I agree – does Wente, today? He doesn’t say. “They were devout Catholics… and they had achieved no small measure of success trading furs to the Hudson’s Bay Company. It was a classic story.” Wait. Was this success classic or unusual? Apparently classic. That’s what Wente writes.
All but one of their children went to religious residential schools, and to his credit, Wente admits that knowing the value they placed on education, his great-grandparents would have probably chosen to send their children even if they hadn’t been required by law. Wente’s grandmother told him about the instances of cruel disciplining methods meted out by the nuns but also told him that being taught English had served her well. “Whether she was spared other abuses or simply chose to shelter me from the knowledge of them, I don’t know,” editorializes Wente. Upon graduation, she decided not to return to her home town and move to Toronto. (It’s because every desire to speak Ojibwe was beaten out of her that Serpent River no longer felt like home, writes Wente, denying his grandmother any possibility of autonomous decision-making.) She stopped identifying as Indigenous when she was outside Serpent River, sometimes claiming to be Italian, and that is, says Wente, so she would avoid ridicule and state interference (not because she wanted to try a different kind of life—again, no autonomy). In Toronto she met his grandfather, a WASP veteran just back from the war. She worked as a domestic and cleaner, he drove a truck and together they raised their three kids in the Beaches. Eventually she was hired as a hostess at elite Albany Club, where she stayed for three decades. This is the book that I want to read: a book about Norma Meawasige’s life. But JW is the last person who should undertake it—can you imagine the self-aggrandizing and the editorializing—so it’s just as well that he didn’t even try.
Instead, the book we have is the saga of JW, the story of one man heroically fighting imagined slights and minor inconveniences on his way to some of the most powerful positions in the country.
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