Voice for change
New Canada Council chair aims to reshape the arts funding body.
If you know Toronto, you know his voice: Jesse Wente was a fresh film school grad when he became a regular film critic on CBC’s “Metro Morning,” and is still an occasional columnist on the radio program.
Two decades later, he’s one of the city’s — and country’s — most outspoken Indigenous cultural leaders, since 2018 the executive director of the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO), which funds and promotes Canadian Indigenous stories through film, TV, gaming and apps.
This month, Wente, who is Anishinaabe with roots in Chicago and the Serpent River First Nation, takes on yet another role in the Canadian culture sector and this one has some complicated strings attached. He is now chair of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA), a Crown corporation and the country’s top arts funding body — the first Indigenous person ever to hold this prestigious post.
During this year’s Wet’suwet’en protests and the RCMP arrest of Tyendinaga Mohawk activists, Wente said on social media that “Reconciliation is dead and it was never really alive” — the most recent example in his many years of holding government, state bodies and other institutional powers to account for inequitable treatment of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people.
What would lead this cultural gadfly to seek out the Canada Council job, which comes with minimal financial compensation and considerable responsibility for governance, while continuing in his day job at the ISO, finishing a memoir and producing his first documentary, Michelle Latimer’s “Inconvenient Indian,” which will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this fall?
The Star met Wente in a park near his Etobicoke home to find out.
You’ve been on the board of the Canada Council for the Arts since 2017. What made you want to deepen your involvement in the organization?
It took me a while to decide to even apply. It is a Crown corporation and there’s absolutely some discomfort with a First Nations person being the chair … But I also knew that this Crown (corporation) was trying to start down the path to living in right relations, which is a challenge for Crowns and this country in general.
So I felt that if I was ever going to do something like this, this seemed like a reasonable enough fit and there was an opportunity to really move things. And so, why not?
You’re well-known for being critical of institutions such as this one. How did that factor into the process?
I said, “You should just go look at my Twitter feed and google me. I regularly speak against the Canadian state. Go read all of that. And if you’re still comfortable, come back.” When they called to say, “Hey, we would like to appoint you,” there was, frankly, another discussion with my circle to decide whether to actually accept. What were your concerns? The work I’m doing with the Indigenous Screen Office is actually very different. There I’m trying to build an Indigenous-led, Indigenous-controlled organization that is not colonial in the way it operates or its viewpoint … We don’t report to (the government), but we do advocate for direct funding from the government. I’m a big believer that a lot of the money that sits with the government does belong to First Nations, Métis and Inuit people, so we have every right to ask for it. So that’s quite opposite than the Canada Council, which is me going to work for a colonial institution. How much change are you looking to make? The way I view work now within colonial structures and institutions is harm reduction. Ultimately, the goal for me is to reduce the harm the Canada Council causes, not just to my community, but to any community that suffers under colonialism, which is really all of us on some level, and to make it somewhat easier to exist, work, live and participate.
This moment feels like a groundswell of equality movements and, as you say, there are so many more people who are harmed by colonial systems than we realize.
The fight for Black liberation is an anti-colonial fight. These are very intertwined things, but they’re not the same. One of the challenges for societies and their subsequent governments and whatnot is that there’s a desire to lump these struggles together, but you actually can’t do that. When considering the position, what about the responsibility you’d have being the first Indigenous chairperson of the CCA, to be one person representing this community?
I wouldn’t even say I speak for Serpent River, let alone the broader Indigenous community. My place, if anything, is to help the organization connect to the community and figure out how to do that better than it already has. This is an organization that, when I started on the board, had just launched its Indigenous arts stream, which was a historic thing. When the Canada Council started, Indigenous arts were not considered art, they called it craft or primitive, and it was not eligible. So that’s just an indication of how far the organization has come. The pandemic is changing a lot of minds about the way we’ve been doing things and what’s possible beyond that. It doesn’t feel like an accident that you have taken on this role right now.
I ultimately believe it’s not fate, exactly, but that your life is a path. Your ancestors help guide you. And I’ve certainly listened to them through this whole thing.
Working within institutions while resisting them at the same time is a tricky balance.
When I consider my life, I see the opportunities that have prepared me for this. I grew up in Toronto, separated from my community other than the family that lived with me in the ’70s and ’80s. There was an
Indigenous community in Toronto, but it was not nearly as prominent or well-organized as it is now. And I ended up going to private school, the sort of private school that the usual heads of Toronto corporations tend to go to.
So you straddled very different experiences.
I grew up with the children of the people who would lead this country. I saw what it is to be that privileged, to be that entitled … It was always made very clear to me by my mother that there would come a moment when I would know that it was time for me to turn and take everything that I had learned and put all of it back into helping my community. I think in the last few years, I figured out what that actually looks like. I’m very much the Indian that Canada has always wanted to produce, the one that was disconnected from their community and had to reconnect and learn their language, and yet can speak English, live in their world. I like to think that I’m taking all those tools to then help my community defeat colonialism. You’re the chairperson of the arts council, not the director. What can you influence in that role?
I mean it’s not as much as people think, but it’s probably not as little either. The two big things that will happen in my term is we’ve just launched a new strategic planning process. There’s a big survey out that every Canadian can go respond to in terms of what they would like to see out of the arts council. The other big thing is Simon’s term (director Simon Brault) will wrap up. So there will also be the opportunity to replace the CEO, which is something that the chairperson works in concert with the government to advise. Those are two really important legacy pieces for me. It’s quite an interesting time to undertake a strategic plan for the next five years. What are your priorities?
The major considerations for a strategic plan for any organization right now should be: What does the new world look like? How do we support that? How will we be nimble enough to be comfortable not knowing and yet developing policy around not knowing? With artists and the cultural sector, even though we’ll be among the last to restart, I think we have a fairly significant role to play in helping to define what recovery and restoration look like.
What’s a final word you want to leave with the Star readers?
I often call Canada a baby country because it is. One hundred and fifty-three years, or whatever we’re in now. From a historical point of view, it’s an infant of a nation. I do wish it could get into the selfreflective teenage years … I do worry deeply that we’re not grappling with things in the right way. We’re too sensitive. What is really under threat? No one’s going to take Tim Hortons away. The NHL will still be a thing. And maybe even now, because of the pandemic, we can realize that a lot of the stuff we held as central to Canadian life, it turns out is not. It’s good that we’re in a park, for me anyway, because I think this is Canada in so many ways. What is the defining thing about Canada? The land itself. There’s no place like it ever. I’ve now been all over the world. There’s no place like this.