How golf helped Anishinaabe writer Jesse Wente heal
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00:33This is a CBC podcast.Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast.When Jesse Wente started producing a documentary based on Thomas King's bestseller,The Inconvenient Indian, he was adamant that an indigenous screenwriter and director be involved.He approached Michelle Latimer, someone with a proven track record in the industry.And the production was humming along until August of 2020,and that is when Jesse got an email from a friend.Do you know what community Michelle is from that email asked?
01:03It set off a series of events that not only affected the film, but also Jesse Wente's own life, health, and sense of identity.Jesse has had a long career.As a writer, broadcaster, and arts administrator, his new book tells the story of what happened in the aftermath of that emailand how he eventually found a path toward healing in an unlikely place.The book is called Tough Lies, Indigenous Belonging and My Healing Through Golf,Jesse Wente is with me in our Toronto studio.Good morning.Hi, Matt.
01:31It's really nice to see you.It's nice to see you.We have done this a few times before.Indeed.Tell me about this email and how you reacted to that piece of communication.Yeah, I mean, the email came from Jeff Barnaby, who was a very good friend of mine at the time, who sadly is no longer with us.Very prominent, a migma filmmaker who made a string of classic films.And the email started out not at all talking about this.
01:59It was, you know, just a conversation between friends to start with.And then the chain was mostly about policy and like sort of what to do.And then he brought up this, this, that he had heard and had questions about.Questions about, do you know what community Michelle is from?Sure.And of course, I didn't have the answer for him in the moment.And, you know, going over the chain, there was.was certainly some defensiveness, mostly more about the indigenous screen office, which at the time
02:30I was ahead of, and just the policies that we were putting in place to deal with this.And there was some personal defensiveness. I mean, if you've read my first book, you know,that I have struggled with understanding or coming to terms with what it is to be on ashnabe here and now in the way I came into that community, you know, born in Toronto.away from my community, my language, my culture, born to mixed parents.And so I started with that.That's all what the first book is about.And so anyway, he brought this sort of up.
03:06And we went back and forth.And then in the midst of the exchange with the emails, I asked the question of Michelleand on a text.That's a big question, right?What community did you come from?It in some ways tells you.you who somebody is. It is, it is, it's both a big question and not a big question, Matt,uh, in terms of it's a question in the First Nations community. We ask each other all the time.
03:36Mostly to situate ourselves, you know, if you've ever, and I've been fortunate enough to be ingatherings where there's many people from many nations. And it's a really easy and quick way toquite literally know where someone is coming from. The CBC eventually did an investigation intoMichelle Latimer's background.Yeah.What was the, as you understand it, what was the crux of that issue?The crux of the issue was, I mean, she changed her biography to identify Kitagan Zeeby as her community.And then folks in Kitagan Zeeby did not appreciate that.
04:10And then in the CBC investigation, my understanding was what they found was that they did a genealogical sort of research and found that her connection was many hundred years.ago. And, you know, that was generally their findings.The Inconvenient Indian was a classic, this book by Thomas King. And this film wasgoing to be a big, I've seen the film. The film was going to be a big deal. What did youdecide to do about this film when those questions about the director's identity were raised?What did you decide to do about the film? So we decided to take a pause in terms of therollout. You know, movies go through a fairly standard rollout in terms of festivals and thendistribution and out into the world. We decided to pause that in order to consult with the
05:00participants in the film. The most of the movie is with indigenous artists on screen.And so we wanted to pause and talk to them about how they were feeling. And that took a year,Matt. A lot of, this was all during the pandemic. So a lot of Zoom meetings to discuss with themwhat they were thinking about.And then over time, we were able to come to a resolutionwhere the film, it didn't go into distribution.It didn't play any mother festivals.It played Tiff and Imaginative and then stopped.
05:29It disappeared.And then disappeared.I mean, it is, it's, it exists.And that was important to us both for, you know,the way movie funding works in Canada,you, for a documentary, you have to have a broadcaster attached to it.And you have to have the film broadcast.And that was important, largely for the,
05:47crew. We didn't want them to have this like four year or multiple year blank spot in theirCV where they're not working anything when they were working on this. So the film ended upairing on APTN and it still exists within the National Film Board, although you have to get permissionfrom their Indigenous Advisory Council to screen it. And that was the process. I want to come backto the impact of that. But one of the things you read about in this book is that over the pastseveral years, there have been what you call the Pretendian Parade.people whose backgrounds have been investigated,people who have said they have indigenous ties,
06:23that they are indigenous themselves,that perhaps there are questions raised about this.Why do you think people do that?Boy, Matt, I wish I knew.I mean, I've relied on the work of other academicswho do a lot of research in this to try to understand that,like Jean Taye or Dr. Kim Tallbert.We're both been on this program talking about that.
06:41And I think those would be better sources in terms of the...But from your perspective, like what do you think the motivation is?So to take away from, because individual motivations, I can't, just broadly.Broadly, I think it speaks to the scarcity built into the systems, colonial systems and how they structure.What do you mean?What I mean is that these systems, capitalism, colonialism, aren't built to provide for everyone equally.And so, and that's very obvious if you're a First Nations person living here, like, clearly that it doesn't provide for us equally.And so over time what we did was, and I was a part of this continuum,
07:18we advocated for spaces for us to be able to exist.And when you make a space in a place that is scarce,then of course it's naturally going to attract people.If you build a fire where they're in the cold,people will come to the fire.Correct.And maybe not just those that the fire was necessarily intended to build.So I think it speaks to the fact that we are living in a society that doesn't
07:42support, even the people it was built to support to benefit the most, and that those peoplelook for places where they can get support, even if those places weren't designed for them.Just the last point on this, and it's the wrinkle in some of the story around theinconvenient Indian, just last year. Thomas King himself wrote a piece in the Globe and Mailthat revealed a genealogical investigation into his background had concluded that, quote,no Indians anywhere to be found. As he said, not the Indian I had in mind, not an Indian atall. What struck you about that? Oh, many things. You knew him and know him well. I wouldn't say well. You know, Tom is someone I met through the movie, through the making of the movie. So I met him and he was already Tom King. And so it was a bit of a different dynamic.Maybe know him by reputation.
08:32Me, Dead Dog Cafe and things like that.Sure, of course.We're iconic on CBS.I'd heard that.I read all the books.And of course, I've sat with him many times.And I think a mixture of emotions, but I probably not surprised in shock.I mean, these were things we had heard, even during the production of the film, things I had hoped that maybe we would address, but we didn't.
08:54So I think I was, it was mostly disappointment and concern for those that would be affected bythat revelation, because of course, that's part of the story that I am very familiar with.By 2030, it's estimated there will be 10 trillionaires. That's a lot of power in the hands of a few.I'm Mary Link, a producer at Ideas. My series, The Billionaire Age, explores how today'shistoric levels of wealth inequality came about, the oligarch's very real threats to democracies,and how we can beat them back.Listen to all four episodes of the billionaire age on ideas wherever you get your podcasts.Coming soon, Part 5. How Much Money Is Enough?
09:41As you mentioned, in your first book, you wrote a lot about not feeling in your words, First Nations enough as a kid.And that you had become more secure as you matured.I mentioned that we had done these kind of things on the radio.We talked a lot about identity over the course of years.And you felt pretty secure in who.you were. And then the Latimer case, you write, brought up everything back to the surface.What were you worried about? What were you thinking about? I was thinking about the work that I had beendoing and whether that would be able to survive this sort of issue about the friendships and
10:18relationships that I had built over time. You also write that you were gripped with the fear thatyou would be somehow exposed. Oh, for sure. What does that mean?It meant that somehow I, it would, somehow I wouldn't be, that my thoughts about not beingAnishinaabe enough would somehow be confirmed.I mean, so much so that like I called my, the chief of my community to say, hey, themedia might, might call you.And thankfully, they laughed and said, sure.But did you think that there would be some sort of investigation into?
10:47I thought that was potential.I mean, it's, it's clear to me that this is of investigative interest to media outlets.So it wouldn't surprise me with other.prominent First Nations people that you decide to pursue this sort of story. I mean, I thinkif you did for so many of us, it ends rather quickly and is a non-story. But I think you have toconsider Matt at the time, I was going through quite a lot. And so my thoughts may not have beenperfectly rational in terms of those sorts of outcomes. What were you going through? You describeanxiety, despair. You would break down in sobs at your dinner table in front of your kids.
11:24you call it an emotional tornado.Yeah, I mean, I call it many things.A nervous breakdown or however you want to put it.I mean, I went to a very dark place because it felt like my worst fears were all being sort of confirmed.Fears.About like myself and where I belonged and how I belonged.And it had taken me so long to try to find any comfort.And this made all of that seem much more difficult.
11:52And so, yeah, I went to the darkest places.you could possibly go in the in the the years after it you turned to food you would orderthese boxes crates of junk food yes you smoked a lot of weed yeah um and you went right tothe edge you contemplated suicide i did yeah for for several years tell me about about these lettersthat you wrote you wrote what there are four letters i wrote so i wrote four uh letters explaininguh i what would have been my death to um to my wife uh as you dowhen you're doing those things.And I wrote four of them in that, you know,
12:28there was different stages when I would write these letters.Like the first one,um,was very emotional and just sort of,uh,just a scream into the night.And then by the time I got to the fourth one,it was very reasoned because this,
12:41by this time we're a couple years in.And so it was mostly just a list of where she could find,you know,the account numbers,what the art was worth,you know,that sort of stuff to be able to handle,uh,
12:52uh,uh,that.Um,so,yeah, and I made all the preparations and I did all of that.I mean, one of the things with this event that has taught me about trauma and the thingsthat we go through, Matt, is when something new happens, what you end up dealing with
13:08is all the stuff that you haven't really dealt with previous in your life.And so it just triggered for me a whole host of things.And one of them is that I've had those thoughts.I can't remember when I haven't.You know, it's been a little voice in the back of my head for as long as I can remember.and this was a moment where what happened was I decided to invite that voice to really speak its mind and have a pretty, a lot of space to dictate what I thought I should do.Did you understand in the moment what was happening?No, I did not. It required therapy. You know, as someone, I mean, we've known each other and worked together for quite a long time.
13:46I mean, I think it would be safe to say I was someone who was very wrapped up in the intellectual side of things.previously doing a lot of thinking and talking and writing and all of those sorts of things.So I hadn't really paid a whole lot of attention to emotional, spiritual, physical elements of how we exist.And yeah, that all sort of caught up to me in that moment.You put these notes in drawers, is that right?Like, where did you store them?They were stored in the...This is an important part because eventually you go and you take writ that you, you
14:21burn these notes to tear them apart.Yeah, I have a, like a, in our basement in our house, I have like my desk and like the,where I do my writing and where the work is.And so they were in the bottom drawer.It's my grandfather's old desk.So it's in the bottom drawer of my, my grandfather's desk.And that's where I would store them.The idea being that I would pull it out when I would need it.
14:42But they never, how would I put it at?There was a couple times where they got to the desk, but they went back to the drawer.You had a heart attack.as well. I did. Christmas Day, 2023. This is kind of where everything comes to a head, right?You could say that. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad you, I mean, there's a lot of things I'm gladthat you're okay through. But tell me about the heart attack and what that did to you. Yeah, it wasChristmas Day. I went to walk the dog before we opened the presents. And while I was walking the dog,I had a heart attack and like drove, I lived very close to my parents. So I drove back to my parents.
15:19I couldn't shake the numbness in my left arm.I couldn't clear my throat.That's what it felt like I had to do.And so I said to my wife, Julie, I think we should go to the hospital.I think I'm having a heart attack.Turns out I did.For me, it was the way I would look at it now, Matt, is I would say it was my ancestorstapping me on my chest saying, slow down there for a second.
15:45Because I had just signed the book deal for this book.And I had it in my head.I'm going to write this book about healing and about healing from this incident and what it has,what I've learned and what it's meant for me.And for me, it was my answer to saying, before you go off on about healing, young one,maybe you should pay attention to this other part that you also have to heal, which was my body,which I had treated terribly throughout my life.You know, I treated it as a vessel for the intellect or whatever.
16:14And by that time, I was over 300 pounds, Matt.I was just deeply, deeply unhealthy and sick.And this was my ancestors saying,there's another part to healing and let's do that part too.And then you can do this.You had also, and I want to talk about what happens after,but in the list of people that you had spoken with,one of the things that you read about is that you spoke with an elder
16:34who told you to stop trying to be Amishnabe, you are.What does that mean and what did that mean to you?It was, it meant that it tied into something I write a lot about in the book about the difference between being and doing.How do you see that difference?I think that before I was trying to do Anishinaabe, which I think is what a lot of people who misidentify for whatever reason also do is they work for the community.They do all this things thinking that will be what secures them in their belonging.and what I had not fully comprehended or dealt with was what it is to be Anishnabe.And what this elder chief elder Duke Redbird said to me was, you just are that.
17:29Like you need to stop trying to do it.And you can need to just accept that you are.And in fact, what I see you do is what I would see an Anishnabbe person do.And so, you know, he's trying to get to the being.And that he was one of many voices who that drove.that home and I have a much clearer idea of that. And that was the point of the book,was I wanted to write the book because I came out of this experience. I went in very unsettled,very unreconsiled to go back to the title of the first book. I sit before you, Matt, very
18:01reconciled, very comfortable with who I am and how I belong and realizing that all the thingsthat I did were never going to help me belong. Those, I don't, those were a good thing. A lot of themwas really good stuff.As a film programmer,well,sure.The indigenous screen office.Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:16And the,the segments you and I used to doand all that sort of things,those were good works,but they weren't what was going to allow me to belong.I already belonged.And in many ways,those works were just fulfilling that belonging.
18:29You've done some therapy.Lots of it.You also, as we do,you went to Costco.And you wander around at Costcoand they have all sorts of things.The thing for your pool,you don't have a pool,
18:40but the thing for your pool,they have a snowblower and they have golf clubs and for some reason you bought a set of golf clubsI didn't know they had golf clubs at the time I'm sure I was there for a far too much candy uh you knowum because they sell if you want a lot of chocolate gospel so you're a lot of chocolate um but it turnsout yeah they did sell golf clubs and golf balls and a whole bunch of stuff and i played golf wheni was a kid with my dad it was something that that we did uh on the weekends and i had not playedsince I moved out because it turns out when you move out of your house, your dad stops paying for your rounds of golf.And so I had not played in 30 years, had done everything else in my life.
19:21And I thought, you know, I'll get these wedges.I'll chip some shots in the backyard.And anyone who's ever played golf knows that's foolish because you're going to immediately want to go play more.And that's what happened.And now I play as much as I can.You say, and anyone who has golfed understands this, you say that you were attracted to the gamein part because mediocrity is virtually baked into the game.Why was that a good thing for you at the time?
19:48Because I think a lot of people get nervous.You don't want to be bad at things.And it had been a while since I was bad at something, like publicly.And I was coming off something where maybe I thought I'd been bad, you know, I'd done.That your reputation was taking a hit.Yeah, that I had, you know, I had, by poor performance, I put it into the bunker for sure and was trying to get my way out.And so I went to the driving range.Luckily, there's a driving range really close to our house, and I went and watched, just watched people.
20:19And they're just, they were all, and I don't mean to be mean, but they were, they were awful, right?And I realized that the nervousness I had about failing publicly, which I've always had, that golf might be something where, oh, you get to go practice being good at failing publicly, pretty much every swing.And that everyone else is also doing that same practice.So why don't we all do it together and we don't have to get too concerned about my embarrassment if everyone else is also not that great?How did you think about the baggage that can come with golf?Complicated.I mean, it's a game that I not only did not play, I probably would have thought very differently about as an adult.Like this is a game that has deep colonial roots.
21:03It arrived here through colonialism.It occupies the land in a way that can be very discomforting.Okay.there's the Oka crisis, there's the musquium case out in BC.There's all this history of our conflicts with golf courses.But it was interesting.What I found, Matt, was that there's a lot of First Nations folks who golf.It's actually quite a large community.
21:23Yeah, you talk about this.Much larger than I would have thought.There's more people, it's a very diverse, very different sort of people playing golfthan when I was a kid, 30 years later, thankfully.And so I got to start thinking.And then when you play it, Matt, this was maybe the big.thing is when I went actually out to do it as an adult, not as a kid, I found things in the gamethat I think are always there for people. But for me, they were suddenly what the point was.
21:49Like what? About being on the land, about being mindful, about being able to put into practicesome of the things that I was, some of the tools that I was gaining through therapy, golf requiresthem. Like, you can't be good if you're not centered and sort of grounded and present and all of thesesorts of things. You know, I see lots of people get mad at golf that ensures that you will play poorly.And so I just found in it and a respect for the land, you know, that you repair your divot,that you fix your pitchmark, which was a lesson my dad taught me, but actually took on verydifferent meaning for me as an adult in terms of you're meant to play this game on the land,but leave the land in better condition than when you started. And that's a lot, there's a lot of
22:36Anishnabhi teachings that you can find when you're playing around a golf.And for me, that's what I found.How has everything, just finally, how has everything that you have been through?And you talk about this at the end of the book, made you rethink what matters.What is, like, when you go through the ringer like this and you come out the other side,where are you?In a different place, I feel like, like that feels like a different life, a different person in some, some ways.Yes.
23:04I have I can struggle toto rememberand yet I have all these photos of me likeyou know on stage with Jackie Chan or Tim Burtonand all the and it's like I don'tI struggle to fully recognize that personAnd what matters now to you?What matters now to me is
23:22experiencing life in its fullestbeing here, being presentand I think being able toyeahI think be, like investing in the ability to just be and enjoy that as really what the whole point of this is.That the doing is great and I will continue to do all sorts of things.But mostly I just want to be and be in relationship with the world around me.And do you, it's obvious a question, but do you feel comfortable in who you are?
23:54And your skin now, do you know what I mean?So much more comfortable than I've ever been.I don't, to me that was a big motivation was to say that you,You can go through this particular piece of colonial hurt because it's, it's, it is entirely an issue of colonials.There's questions about who you are.Yeah.And you can go through that and end up being, oh, I'm actually way, I know way better now who I am.And I know way better how I belong and what that, what that means.
24:21And I know way better sort of what the future lays for me.And that I don't have to work.I don't have to go at that pace in order to be the what I want to, you know, how I want to be.I can actually just accept myself and be comfortable with myself and be able to be that in the world.What a fabulous place to be in.I mean, it's a lousy way to get there in some ways to have to go through something like that.But you're forged in the fire in some ways.I believe, I trusted my ancestors that they felt that those experiences were necessary for me to go through to fully understand and for me to be here now in this way.
24:59I'm glad you're here and I'm glad you're well.Me too, Matt. It's so great to see you.It's great to see you. Jesse Wenty, his new book is Tough Lies, Indigenous Belonging, and My Healing Through Golf.If you know somebody who is struggling, if you yourself are struggling, you can call or text Canada's suicide crisis helpline.The number is 988. That is 988.For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.
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