Friday 12 February 2016

The Reason You Walk


I am the reason you walk. I created you so that you might walk this earth.

I am the reason you walk. I gave you motivation so you would continue to walk even when the path became difficult, even seemingly impossible.

I am the reason you walk. I animated you with that driving force called love, which compelled you to help others who had forgotten they were brothers and sisters to take steps back towards one another.

And now, my son, as that journey comes to an end, I am the reason you walk, for I am calling you home. Walk home with me on that everlasting road.
These are the four meanings of the title of The Reason You Walk, based on an Anishinaabe travelling song, as though the Creator himself were singing it to you. These four reasons-for-being also serve as a structure for this book, which is essentially a memoir for author Wab Kinew and, more in depth, a biography of his father Tobasonakwut. The life of Tobasonakwut Kinew (also known as Peter Kelly, or as Wab referred to his father, Ndede) starts from his childhood (when he was created), covers his horrifying years in a residential school (when the path became difficult, even seemingly impossible), his years as an activist and educator (when he was compelled to help others), and his decline and death from liver and pancreatic cancers (when he was called home). The details of Tobasonakwut's life – from the depths of despair and anger to a life of compassion and influence on the world stage – are more than deserving of a biography, and as Wab is able to to draw direct connections between what kind of a man his father was and the influence that had on his own personal and public lives, there's a pressing message here about the residential school system's lingering injurious effects throughout the generations, and about what reconciliation truly means. 

Tobasonakwut's transformation is really fascinating, and speaks of a man with a great capacity for forgiveness and understanding. As a residential school survivor, he entered adulthood as a very angry man; slipping into years of alcohol abuse, fighting, and an unstable marriage. And then he decided to stop. To stop drinking, to stop fighting, to stop pushing his family away. He became an educator, an activist, and a leader in his community. And he decided to offer forgiveness: he adopted the Catholic Archbishop of Winnipeg as his brother; he offered an eagle feather of forgiveness to Pope Benedict XVI; he stood on the floor of the House of Commons and accepted Prime Minister Harper's official apology on behalf of Canada for the residential school system. As his end approached, Tobasonakwut seemed serene and whole. 

Wab's own story is similar: with a father still at that point broken and angry from his years of abuse, Wab began acting out as a teenager; drinking, getting in trouble with the law, making babies with a woman he realised he couldn't make a life with. This is the real legacy of the residential school system: children who were stolen from their parents and raised in an abusive institution are then uneducated in the ways of parenting; they just don't know how to give the love that they were never shown. And yet Tobasonakwut was able to save Wab: by passing down his own war bonnet and making Wab a chief when he was still young, Tobasonakwut trusted his son to find the responsible center of himself and discover “that driving force called love”. With fascinating stories from sweat lodges in northern Ontario and sundances in South Dakota, it was through a reconnection to his Native heritage that Wab was able to find his own path towards reconciliation and his place in the public sphere; to break the cycle of abuse and be a loving father to his sons.

Overall, this wasn't a terribly well written book – many parts were overblown and some fantasy elements weren't quite pulled off – but it did feel honest. I enjoyed everything to do with the Ojibwe language: I appreciated that Tobasonakwut used his time in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to preserve his oral history in his native tongue: I agree that that was the act of a victor; I was fascinated by the notion of physicists learning from the elders – that the specific Ojibwe lexicon displays a deep knowledge of cosmology; I completely see the value of Tobasonakwut spending his last months working on an Ojibwe-language app with Wab. As an English speaker, it can be easy to misunderstand why the loss of languages is tragic – wouldn't a lingua franca ease understanding amongst different cultures? And wouldn't that common language, naturally, be English? – but, of course, language is culture, and I applaud Wab's efforts to keep Ojibwe alive.
The combined weight of the churches and the Canadian state had been set on crushing children like him when they were just little – barely five, six, or seven years old – but they did not break. They survived. They may have lost some of their friends, and may have been damaged along the way, but they did not give up. They kept speaking their language. They kept practising their culture. They kept praying the way their parents had taught them to. And they waited.
If I had a complaint about this book, it's that Wab still sounds angry – and is that in the spirit of his father's legacy? Even as his Ndede was soaking in the serene atmosphere of the Vatican, Wab was bristling at the institution that was responsible for St. Mary's Residential School and the abuses his father suffered there: if Tobasonakwut could offer forgiveness, why couldn't Wab? I appreciate that it was through Native culture that both Wab and Tobasonakwut found healing, but as Wab's mother is white, he is in a perfect position to act as a bridge between the two cultures, and yet, he seems to identify solely with his Native side, as though he himself were not half coloniser. As Wab Kinew is about to embark on a political career (soon to run as a candidate for the NDP in Manitoba) I hope he finds that balance: to be a strong Native voice, but to speak as a partner in Canada instead of its victim; isn't that what reconciliation is ultimately about?

More than any inheritance, more than any sacred item, more than any title, the legacy he left behind is this: as on that day in the sundance circle when he lifted me from the depths, he taught us that during our time on earth we ought to love one another, and we ought to work hard to make them whole again.

This is at the centre of sacred ceremonies practised by Indigenous people. This is what so many of us see, no matter where we begin life.

This is the reason you walk.

This is a short video of Wab, his father, and his son visiting the site of St. Mary's Residential School, a scene referenced in the book:



2016 RBC Taylor Prize Nominees


The Reason You Walk has a real chance of winning this award (as the most "important" of the finalists), but I give the edge to This is Happy. 

*Eventually won by Stalin's Daughter.
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