Review: Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance by Jesse Wente
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to get to this book for some months, but keep getting pulled away. In this book, Jesse Wente offers his story of being an Indigenous youth and adult living in Toronto in the 70s onward. In telling his story, Jesse Wente not only connects with the ambiguities and confusions of being an Urban Indigenous person, but also with the racism that underlies Canadian society. He also gives an insight into media and its attitudes to Indigenous issues and people, through is experiences with the CBC and TIFF. The result is a challenging read (for a middle age white guy like me), but a rewarding one.

What I appreciate about Jesse Wente's writing is his honesty and humour which pervade his writing. His discussion about his struggles with his identity, especially because he lived removed from his family's community, is nuanced and expresses the ambiguities of the move to the cities that many Indigenous people have made. His struggles to promote Indigenous voices in media are familiar to someone living through the 1990s and 2000s, but are painful, especially in retrospect. Wente's point is that Canadian society has to face up to the truth not only of what it has done, but what it is doing in respect to Indigenous peoples, and this book contributes to that challenge.

I recommend this book heartily for those who are trying to understand the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Jesse Wente is both poignant and funny, sometimes at the same time, and this is a really good read.

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