Book review: Lessons of hope

You might consider Vernon Roote a lucky person. He didn’t attend residential school but he couldn’t escape the narrow colonial box in which First Nations youth were “educated.” Roote grew up in Saugeen First Nation. After attending a one-room school house near his community, he was sent to nearby Owen Sound. In this slim, but very important book of Anishinaabe men’s teachings,  Roote writes about the daily bus ride home when students “would mostly compare the racism we would encounter; the way people would talk to us and make fun of us.”

The experience got him thinking about the way ‘Indian people’ were looked at. “When I saw that, I saw an opportunity.”  Roote would become the best carpenter and then the top draftsman in high school. He thrived in the challenge and shut racist stereotypes down. This understanding – of knowing he had much to give and that there was much to challenge –would eventually have him serve two terms as chief of Saugeen and for six years as Grand Council Chief of the Union of Ontario Indians.

Drawing partly from challenges including a father who died early of cancer and a mother who could not really mother, courtesy of her residential school experiences – but mainly from traditional teachings, Roote gives profound but simple teachings for young men in a comprehensive manner. Divided into the Good Red Road, Love, Honesty, Responsibility, Health, Bravery, Humility, and Wisdom, each chapter gives lessons, examples, and most importantly, hope.

M’daa Kendaaswin: To Look for Knowledge, Vernon Roote and Cindy Davidson;  Ningwakwe Learning Press, 20012, 36 pg, ISBN 978-1-897541-45-6

– Reviewed by Laura Robinson