Casual racism experienced in Scotland sets in motion the twelve essays that comprise Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (Book*hug Press, co-published with Artspeak Gallery), in which the Canadian art critic and curator Amy Fung pieces together her heritage as an immigrant and settler, while questioning everything she knows about multicultural Canada. Fung immigrated from Hong Kong as a young child and grew up in Edmonton. In Canada, she looks for relationships between Indigenous and other racialized peoples, and finds only colonial narratives. While Fung sees that racialized immigrants initially lack white settlers’ sense of entitlement (and are willing to learn and adapt to new customs and laws), she suggests that immigrants eventually adopt a colonial mentality. While she delves deeply into colonizing mythologies and racialization from the point of view of a critic and theorist, Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being is a book of personal essays, rather than an academic treatise. The most successful essays employ a deft layering of narratives—personal, cultural, political—and combine lyrical writing with harsh realities. Other essays feel a bit flat, either due to over-intellectualization or predictable storylines. In “Treaties 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 1,” Fung takes a journey to her friend Donna’s family farm, and as the pair drive, Fung contemplates how post-war Modernist painters and sculptors were inspired by a perceived emptiness of the prairie landscape. She looks back on covering a prairie land-based art project that included no role for Indigenous nations, and then turns a corner to the 218 fatal shooting of Colten Boushie, a twenty-two-year-old Indigenous man, by a white farmer. Fung later learns that Donna grew up with two adopted Indigenous siblings, both of whom eventually ran away and were written out of the family’s history. Fung’s ruminations build to the conclusion that a just and honest Canada can only exist by acknowledging Indigenous sovereignty over the land—though it remains unclear what that really means.