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.

lgli/Wab Kinew - The Reason You Walk (Penguin Canada).epub

zlib/Biography & Autobiography/Peoples & Cultures - Biography/Wab Kinew/The Reason You Walk_21271983.epub

Wab Kinew; OverDrive, Inc

Viking Children's Books

Ladybird Books Ltd

Penguin Books Ltd

Viking Canada

Puffin Books

Penguin US

United Kingdom and Ireland, United Kingdom

Place of publication not identified, 2015

United States, United States of America

Penguin Random House LLC, [N.p.], 2015

Unabridged, New York, 2015

Toronto, Ontario, 2015

3, 20150929

lg2083606

2022-04-06