Jesse Wente is one Canada’s most respected Indigenous voices. For more than 20 years, he was a regular commentator on film and pop culture for the CBC Radio program. In 2018, he became the first director of the country’s new Indigenous Screen Office. Appointed to the Canada Council for the Arts in 2017, he became its chairperson in 2020.
Q: You’re widely known as a film critic and political commentator, but here you’ve written a memoir. Why?That’s a complicated answer but it begins in 2017, a time when there were a lot of conversations happening. That year was, of course, Canada’s 150th birthday, but it was also the time of the special edition ofmagazine that was supposed to feature Indigenous writing.
Q: You argue in the book for something called “narrative sovereignty” in Indigenous arts. What do you mean?All my life as a film critic I’ve been asked about appropriation and why taking Indigenous stories or replacing Indigenous voices is bad. I’ve addressed this in film and literature so many times I can’t remember. Frankly, I’m sick of it. I’m far more interested in how Indigenous peoples hold their space, resist and make space for everything our communities have to say.
If we look at the history of most of the storytelling industries in Canada and the ministries and industries that hold up those stories, Indigenous people tend to be the burden, the foil, with the problem with our land claims, nations and sovereignties being in the way. This results in a battle over stories, with laws passed against our stories, our storytellers being arrested and killed, and our storytelling artifacts stolen.
Wente joins in on the colonial identity politics using a settler to determine Indigenous nations. We dont need settlers to source/back us to be taken seriously anymore Jesse. neocolonialism 💯%