The Reason You Walk: A Memoir

A full decade before Wab Kinew took office as Manitoba’s first Indigenous premier (the equivalent of governor in the U.S.), he said a long goodbye to his Ndede, Tobasonakwut, his beloved father. In this captivating, page-turning memoir, Kinew tells the story of a father and a son and the careful, hard-won reconciliation that healed them both before his father died in 2012.

It’s hard to read some of this book, which details Tobasonakwut’s childhood in Lake of the Woods, Ont., and the traumatic experience of being taken from his family and raised at a residential school by people who did not love him and, in fact, abused him physically and sexually. It’s a gutting story at the core of an untold number of Indigenous families in Canada and the U.S. This story left a terrible mark, and countless people still wrestle with the dark legacy of the schools. Yet many reach for hope and try to live their lives as healing individuals. Tobasonakwut did. Will non-Indigenous people walk with them on this hard but meaningful path?

Though he adopted the Catholic faith of the residential school he was in, Tobasonakwut was left with scars visible and invisible. Even after getting sober from alcohol use, he grappled with rage that threatened to consume him, and which affected his children deeply.

This complicated man’s journey to find healing and to reconcile with a painful history and with the Creator who allowed the pain of the residential schools but also was with him throughout is moving to read. Kinew is an exceptional writer whose prose is lit through with poetry, wisdom, and humor, but he never glosses over the traumas and mistakes of the past.

Raised by Tobasonakwut and a non-native mother, both academics, Kinew braids his own story within his father’s. At one point, he fell into the destructive, violent, and addictive way of life that almost destroyed his father. But becoming a young father himself turned him around, as did the input of Anishinaabe elders who spoke into his life and saw goodness and potential.

The book, a bestseller in Canada, is good reading for Native American Heritage Month or any time a reader wants to learn more about Indigenous culture and the ongoing efforts to reconcile the sins of the past with the reality of the current day. Christian readers will be affected by the book’s themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, restoration, and hope.

One part that moved me was when Tobasonakwut ceremonially adopted the Catholic bishop of Winnipeg as his brother, an act of pure grace and brave hope, inspired by the Creator whom he followed and loved. From that day forward, the two men were real brothers in every way but DNA.

Warm, eloquent, wise, and visionary, The Reason You Walk crafts a beautiful bridge between a damaging past and a healing future. (Penguin Random House Canada)