It gets the job done, and really I like the idea that the structure is something he wanted to codify for his children. I expected this to be a lot more about activism and the oil sands, but those are very minor parts of the memoir. It mostly feels, because of the non-linear structure, that when it gets to something I was personally interested in it would be fleeting because the structure reframes things fairly often.

I think it’s quite effective at conveying people as products of their environment and his struggle to change his life to where he is now. It makes the parts I was least into pertinent, which sometimes, because there isn’t a through line until further in, felt meandering and incongruent.

There’s some speaking on indigenous beliefs and culture and systemic issues continually being a counterforce to indigenous peoples’ trying to move forward from massive trauma inflicted for hundreds of years.

More than anything it is more like a traditional biography memoir in that it traces his life from childhood to where he is now. For people picking it up for a more granular look at activism and environmentalism, like me, there isn’t so much here. Though he is fairly upfront about his mentality, what worked and didn’t work, and his feelings on those issues—they are invariably tied up this unique structure, so you never know when a chapter will go into those topics.

The narration is fine, not great. And there’s some very heavy content, some of which you’d expect, other things, such as the sexual assault of a child, you may not see coming. Lots on physical and emotional (domestic) abuse, addiction, generational trauma.