A review by maplesyrupcoffee
"Indian" in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power by Jody Wilson-Raybould

5.0

To me, and evidenced by how I kept wanting to dive into the next chapter, "well-written" gives nowhere even near the praise this book deserves. I really admired hearing her experiences, from her insights as an Indigenous minister under the Trudeau government to the escalation faced upon resigning.

Here are some parts that stood out to me:

"Dialogue can be weaponized to stop change and maintain the status quo"
"I, like so many women, had to tolerate a certain level of ignorance in order to get to the outcomes I wanted to achieve"
About important issues, a rhetorical question: "they are also hard to sell, hard to explain, and hard to understand. So why do them?"
"There has always been a direct connection between silence and injustice. Silence in the face of injustice is a self-interested form of cowardice. Silence sustains and ultimately feeds harm, while speaking out can drive progressive change"
About (settler) colonialism and the process of making a government in Canada, while excluding Indigenous people: "the costs and challenges of that exclusion are massive"
"The path of justice and equality is not advanced or achieved through half-measures, good intentions, or lofty rhetoric"
"As a leader, you are only as strong as those around you"
"We live in a Twitter world, and people needed to know what I was saying immediately, with absolute clarity and alacrity"
"To address the legacy of colonialism in this country, the colonizers are going to need to learn a lot from those they sought to colonize"