Hail to the Chief

Kevin Chief, the former two-time MLA for Point Douglas, is very unusual for a politician. In casual conversations with Manitobans of various voting flavours over the past decade and change, this reviewer can’t recall one single person ever saying they didn’t like the guy. On two occasions, acquaintances mused that they would cross party lines (in opposite directions) to vote for Chief if he ever ran for office in their riding.

Granting that these observations are anecdotal, how does one account for such broad appeal?

It’s not charisma so much as sincerity. When Chief speaks about his experiences and his hopes for the world (and, as a public speaker and presenter, he has given a lot of speeches both in and out of office), it comes across as both heartfelt and thoroughly ruminated upon. The same is true, as it turns out, in his new book.

With a Name Like Chief, co-written with Stu Slayen, is not a political memoir. While Chief’s political career did the most to put him in the public eye, the five years he spent in the Manitoba legislature starting in 2011 make up only a small percentage of his life, and receive a commensurate page count. Instead, two of the major throughlines of the book are the intertwined roles of alcohol and Canada’s horrific colonization project, and how they impacted his life experiences.

Norman Chief was a residential school survivor who turned to alcohol to cope, even though it often made him violent and drove off his wife while his son was still small. Kevin Chief treats his father with kindness and forgiveness here. The man kept his pain inside to protect his son and raised him alone. The care he gave may not have been adequate, but there was never any question that he loved his son and did the best he could.

Chief’s father passed away just before his son’s high school graduation, so the younger Chief was left to fend for himself, although that’s not the way he frames it in the book. The focus is not his own resilience, but on all the wonderful people who helped take care of him over the years, both before and after his dad’s passing: Chief’s beloved Grade Four teacher, his middle school, high school and university basketball coaches, neighbourhood shop owners, his teammates and friends and sometimes their parents.

Basketball provided Chief with a focus to get through five years of university, to keep alcohol from taking over and help him avoid thinking about the grief of losing his father. But eventually these matters needed to be faced head-on, and well before he was elected to office, Chief took on his greatest challenge — stepping into his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and beginning the work of overcoming the pain and addiction that had killed his father. Sobriety, paired with the Seven Grandfather Teachings of the Anishinaabe, would provide a blueprint for the rest of his life.

While it might seem like this book should be fairly melancholic, every page is steeped in gratitude. Chief is grateful for the inherent goodness in people and all the things that particularly good people did for him when he was in need; grateful for the fact that his life was a little better than his father’s, and that his sons’ lives will be better still; grateful that we, as a species, are capable of making the world better rather than worse (paired with an apparently unshakeable confidence that, in the long run, we will do so).

This is not a difficult book to devour in a day or two, but it will likely linger in the minds and hearts of readers for days or weeks afterward. The heaviness of the subject matter is well-balanced by Chief’s positive tone, while the short, easy-to-read chapters and plain language belie the depth of his observations and life lessons. Credit is also due to co-writer Slayen (about whom Chief has many warm words) for his role in getting the book completed without affecting Chief’s voice.

A lot of people were sad when Kevin Chief chose to leave politics. Some of those same people may feel happiness, though, in reading this book, satisfied to see that a good man is living a good life.

Joel Boyce is a Winnipeg writer and educator.

Kevin Chief launches With a Name Like Chief on Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 7 p.m. at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location, where he’ll be joined in conversation by co-author Stu Slayen.