Jesse Wente - Unreconciled: Family, Truth, and Indigenous Resistance

I remember the exact moment I learned I was an Indian.

It was a summer afternoon when I was about ten. My softball team was playing in Topham Park, just around the corner from our home in Torontos East York, and I was coming up to bat, crossing the infield dirt to take my place at the plate.

Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.

The league was a local one, both teams made up of kids from the neighbourhood. Id played in it from the time I was five, starting out in T-ball on the smallest of Tophams three diamonds and working up to the big field, which had dugouts, a scoreboard with an announcers booth, grandstands, and makeshift bullpens where the pitchers could warm up. Id walk over to watch when the mens teams played there at night, the big lights turning everything a bright, washed-out yellow. The ball would almost glow when hit into the air, and, if it carried far enough, would fade into the darkness as it sailed beyond the reach of the light poles.

Baseball was big for our family then. My dad, whod grown up a Cubs fan in Chicago, had embraced the Blue Jays when the franchise was born in 1977. Hed listen to games on a transistor radio he carried while doing work around the house, or watch them with me on the little Zenith TV in the living room. Occasionally hed buy the cheap outfield tickets you could get at the grocery store during the summer, and wed see a game at Exhibition Stadium in seats that were angled a little bit off so that you had to turn slightly to take in the action. Dad played third base and some outfield in a slo-pitch league for a while, too, and would later coach both me and my sister. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of spending time with him at the batting cage or playing catch at the park.

In our softball games it was common for players to make cracks at the opposition, refrains that tended to max out at the We want a pitcher, not a belly itcher level. That bruising psychological warfare was mostly directed at the better players because, hey, they were good. I would classify myself as just okay all around but bordering on good at the plate; Id make consistent contact and was patient enough to take a walk if the pitcher couldnt find the zone, which happened regularly. And when I did catch hold of one I could hit it far, a combination of decent technique and being fairly big for my age. So getting jeered at wasnt unusual, and was maybe even expected. It was something you laughed off or ignored, just a part of the game.

What I heard that particular afternoon was something different, though. Not one of the rhymes or cracks, repeated to the point where they lost all meaning, that rang out when other kids went up to bat. This was a sound reserved for me.

Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah.

It started all at once, as if theyd met up to plan it before the game, all the opposing players flapping their hands in front of their open mouths to make the noise: Wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah. They were war whooping.

It was a sound Id heard before, but I couldnt place it immediately, or maybe I didnt want to. Later, when I was old enough to get stopped by the police, Id become more familiar with that pattern of thought: pushing aside the certain knowledge of why this was happening to look for some good reason, some reason other than the fact that my identity alone could incite in another person a desire to do harm. That my simple existence could be seen as a provocation or offence.

I knew the noise, though; I knew what it meant, and that understanding could be delayed for only so long. I knew it from Saturday morning cartoons, watched from behind a bowl of cereal, the last of the milk disappearing to reveal the sugar clumped at the bottom. It was the noise made by the Indians Bugs Bunny killed, counting them off on a chalkboard and singing as he went: One little, two little, three little Injuns. Four little, five little, six little Injunsoops sorry, that one was a half-breed, scrubbing a mark in half as he corrected himself. It was made in the movies I watched on TV by the savages that besieged the good settlers on their journey of destiny, the savages who had to be vanquished to set the world right.

The kids on the other team knew what it meant, too. Theyd seen the same cartoons and the same kind of movies. Their parents, who would have known my parents, also understood. As did the coaches, though no adult stepped in to put a stop to it. It meant I was an Indian. The bad guy. The savage. The loser.

Now, it certainly wouldnt have been news to me to be identified as Anishinaabe or Ojibwe. I had known myself as both for as long I could remember, not unlike the way I knew that my dad was American. My family didnt drape itself in our ethnic background, but it wasnt hidden. It was just what we were. Its why we occasionally ate frybread and corn soup. Why sometimes we drove for hours to visit our family in Serpent River. Why I had a middle name that no one else did. Thats what being Ojibwe was to me at the time, a collection of unremarkable and ever-present givens. I had never known anything else.

But Id never thought of myself as an Indian in the way it suddenly seemed everyone else did. Nor had I imagined that my Indianness made me significantly different from any other kid in the neighbourhood. It did, though, and those kids wanted me to know it. They wanted me to feel what it was like to be reduced to a caricature in less time than it took me to step to the plate. To feel what it was like to have my interests and passions, my love of baseball and movies, my familys history and my hopes for the future stripped away and replaced with a sound Id never made, a sound Id never heard