Jesse Wente discusses diversity on International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Serpent River’s Jesse Wente highlighted an Anishinaabe teaching about the diversity of a forest during his March 24 virtual presentation at Diversity Thunder Bay’s 15th Annual Celebration of the United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Wente, a writer, broadcaster, executive director at the Indigenous Screen Office and chairperson at the Canada Council for the Arts, delivered his presentation on New Understandings: Diversity, Inclusion and COVID at the 15th Annual Celebration, which was presented by Diversity Thunder Bay in partnership with the City of Thunder Bay and the Anti-Racism and Respect Advisory Committee.

“If we consider the forest in our mind, we can know that there’s more than one type of tree in that forest,” Wente says. “There’s more than one type of plant, one type of insect, one type of bird, animal, and that scientists will often refer to this as ecological or biodiversity, but we can drop the prefix and just call it diversity, because that’s really what it is.”

Wente says the important teaching to keep in mind is that diversity is the natural order of the world.

“Even if you go to places like the North Pole or to deserts, there’s actually a remarkable amount of diversity even present there,” Wente says. “And that when you find yourself, for example, in a forest that some of us may have seen where they are all one tree and maybe they are all planted in rows, if you’ve seen a forest like that, I know I have, well we know that humans created that.”

Wente stresses that nature does not create forests with trees of one kind in a row.

“So what we can take away from that is when you find yourself in a space that isn’t diverse, whether that be a forest or a boardroom, especially a place like a boardroom which of itself is of human construction, but even any place, humans created that,” Wente says. “Humans made it ultimately not diverse and not inclusive. Humans are the reason many parts of the world or many segments of it aren’t diverse now, it’s human intervention. The good part of that is if it’s human intervention that created spaces that don’t have diversity or aren’t inclusive, human intervention and human decision-making can actually make the opposite decisions to make those places diverse and inclusive.”

Wente says the challenge is the forests that thrive may all seem to be standing as individuals, but if one looks just beneath the surface they will see that their roots are intertwined.

“That’s because the forest lives in what we would call relationship or right relations or a reciprocal relationship or in a mutually beneficial relationship or an interdependent relationship,” Wente says. “What keeps these individual trees strong is their interconnectedness below the surface of the ground. That does not happen in one year, in one moment — that actually is years of interrelationships between these trees, between the animals they shelter, between the animals that fertilize the ground, bees that pollinate, all these various systems that allow the forest to thrive.”

Wente says a non-diverse space has gaps in its interdependence.

“That’s because you’re not living in relationship,” Wente says. “And when we’re now trying to undo spaces that aren’t diverse, that aren’t reflective of the community, what we have to try to do is get back to this [interdependence], but it’s very hard and it will take time and it will take resources and it will take just as much effort to be inclusive as it was to be exclusive. And it did take enormous effort in Canada to create exclusivity.”

A video of the 15th Annual Celebration is posted online.