The Reason You Walk
A Memoir
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4.5 • 67 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A moving story of father-son reconciliation told by a charismatic aboriginal star
When his father was given a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Winnipeg broadcaster and musician Wab Kinew decided to spend a year reconnecting with the accomplished but distant aboriginal man who’d raised him. The Reason You Walk spans that 2012 year, chronicling painful moments in the past and celebrating renewed hopes and dreams for the future. As Kinew revisits his own childhood in Winnipeg and on a reserve in Northern Ontario, he learns more about his father's traumatic childhood at residential school.
An intriguing doubleness marks The Reason You Walk, itself a reference to an Anishinaabe ceremonial song. Born to an Anishinaabe father and a non-native mother, he has a foot in both cultures. He is a Sundancer, an academic, a former rapper, a hereditary chief and an urban activist. His father, Tobasonakwut, was both a beloved traditional chief and a respected elected leader who engaged directly with Ottawa. Internally divided, his father embraced both traditional native religion and Catholicism, the religion that was inculcated into him at the residential school where he was physically and sexually abused. In a grand gesture of reconciliation, Kinew's father invited the Roman Catholic bishop of Winnipeg to a Sundance ceremony in which he adopted him as his brother.
Kinew writes affectingly of his own struggles in his twenties to find the right path, eventually giving up a self-destructive lifestyle to passionately pursue music and martial arts. From his unique vantage point, he offers an inside view of what it means to be an educated aboriginal living in a country that is just beginning to wake up to its aboriginal history and living presence.
Invoking hope, healing and forgiveness, The Reason You Walk is a poignant story of a towering but damaged father and his son as they embark on a journey to repair their family bond. By turns lighthearted and solemn, Kinew gives us an inspiring vision for family and cross-cultural reconciliation, and for a wider conversation about the future of aboriginal peoples.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kinew, a prominent Canadian journalist, musician, and Ojibway leader, turns his immense capacity for storytelling to his own life. He begins with the story of his father, Tobasonakwut, including a childhood spent on traditional Anishinaabe lands in Ontario, abuse in an Indian residential school, his later life as an elder and elected leader, and a search for peace that takes his family across the Americas and even to Rome. The journey is familial, political, and spiritual for both father and son, spanning drug and alcohol use, failed relationships, births, adoptions, bureaucratic battles, constitutional questions, sundances, sweat lodges, and visions. In this powerfully written memoir, pivotal moments are delivered in short sentences, a style that is brilliantly clear but retains enough opacity to engender serious, fruitful thought. Kinew's father taught him that there are four meanings to the book's title phrase, all of which are "from the perspective of the Creator: I have created you and therefore you walk... I am your motivation.... I am the spark inside you called love, which animates you and allows you to live by the Anishinaabe values.... I am the destination at the end of your life that you are walking towards." By the end, readers will feel honored to know why Kinew walks, on all four levels.
Customer Reviews
A Must Read!
Young and old can learn so much with this beautiful book.
Amazing story teller
I first learned about Wab Kinew when I watched 8th Fire. The Reason You Walk is an amazing book. I loved it. I think Wab did amazing about telling his story and that of his father. It's such a beautiful story of family and culture and reconciliation. I would definitely read it.