Genocide Lately: J.J. McCullough & Our Native People ("American Indians", First Nations, etc.)

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imagine that you were born and raised on a first nations reservation in the united states and canada some of you watching this i have many fans from europe have viewers around you know i have more viewers in europe than i do in canada let's just be honest here all right you may not have a clear notion of what a reservation is or what that means suppose you were born raised on a kind of compound where from birth you're told that your people are sovereign there that your people constitute the government there but everyone knows it isn't really true everyone knows there's this other government that gives you your driver's license there's this other government that controls the schools especially the universities if you want to go to university if you want to have a group that sets all the standards including you know something you see right away as a child how the highways work you know your so-called sovereign reservation doesn't have its own system of stop signs doesn't have its own traffic lights doesn't have its own idea for how you know the standard should be for the electrical voltage when you plug in a lamp now this is when you're a child this is what you notice if you're a child you go on vacation in europe you know oh the street signs are different here oh when you plug in the lamp the plug is different right from a child's perspective that's sovereignty that's being a separate country oh people say on this reservation that we have sovereignty that in some sense we have self-determination that we have our own government that we're our own country it's broadly speaking the case in both the united states it can't and yet there's this other sense in which it's not really true and now ask yourself growing up in that circumstance would you want your own children to go to the best university in the united states of america or canada respectively would you want them to have access to the best education the same education that wealthy white people have access to or would you say no i would prefer to have sovereignty and i would prefer to have my child grow up only being able to go to school and go to university here on this reservation on this plot of land on this tiny country on this microscopy because that means so much to me that i'm willing to lose access to that university system medical care so what if it's your grandparents your grandparents are getting older and older they're needing more and more attention from doctors do you feel that the best thing for your future and the future of your people the future of your tiny country of your reservation is say look we need to close the door once and for all on having access to those hospitals in principle or theory the best hospitals in america the best hospitals in canada the same hospitals that white people use we need to rely entirely on our own hospitals that are staffed by people educated in our own universities to be our doctors and nurses so that we have sovereignty people don't want to think seriously about what sovereignty means and these concepts sovereignty rights they're regarded as self-evidently good things they're regarded as if they only bring with them advantages and not disadvantages as if they don't bring with them you know serious responsibilities that have serious consequences to people involved i just want to say this i studied at first nations university of canada if you can't guess from the name that is canada's one and only attempt to have a university that is sort of by and for indigenous people indigenous languages indigenous culture indigenous politics now i'm simplifying slightly shout out to anyone who might be watching this video from blue quills blue quills college uh well there was another one red crow college there there were a couple other tiny attempts to have little uh first nations colleges and universities across canada i could i could tell you about those too it's something that really interested me my point is i was on the only example in canada of a large well-funded university that was supposedly by and for indigenous people now when you say well-funded what do you mean again sovereignty it's really a distraction here it's really using the very misleading of course that university is paid for by white canadian taxpayers and of course it should be i mean if we're one country this is the reality and we should do much better we should provide them with much better university education but already this is starting to get at interesting questions of well do you really want to have a segregated system of university education do you want them to have separate quote-unquote separate but equal universities or do you want them to have access to the same universities we do and if you give them a choice what percentage of them will choose the segregated system as opposed to choosing the best system i can repeat this for health care right like even if the hospitals available to them on a segregated basis are just slightly worse what percentage of them will choose to instead put their grandparents into a white people's hospital to be brutally honest with the world here if we start to have segregated healthcare and a segregated education system and then you can also flip that around i was a white person who chose to go into their education system it's so incredibly rare that many people in that system insisted that i must be of first nations ancestry and i i know i don't look it but if you spend some time with these people the majority of them don't look like it either that's the reality in 2021 you can't really judge based on appearances because so many of them are the product of generation after generation of inter-marriage and so forth and in many cases some of them didn't look so different from europeans to begin with when europeans first arrived it's a very subtle difference in facial features so there were people there who assumed an assistant i had to say like no look i have no connection in terms of my bloodline of this i was a guy who had been living in cambodia and decided to shift gears and get involved first nation language first politics um so this is a this is that aggression but the point of the aggression to say is having spent time around a lot of people who cared about this passionately um i have never once heard or seen anyone talk through seriously the implications of sovereignty for first nations people and the word is used constantly it's it's wallpaper for political discussions of first nations people and and really it's not just wallpaper it's papering over big holes in the wall it's like oh we do have this history of genocide we do have terrible problems just in terms of like equality in the most basic sense economic equality or what have you we do have problems with who does and doesn't have access to clean drinking water you know there's all kinds of like unbelievably terrible things with the situation for our first nations people but we can just paper over that by saying that they have sovereignty isn't sovereignty an interesting concept to use instead of equality right instead of equal opportunity instead of even equal rights or instead of you know talking about equality with other measures like oh yeah their their actual quality of life is just how about equality of representation how about how many seats in parliament how many seats in the senate even within a province like saskatchewan where they're 10 of the population or 10 of the population is indigenous what percentage of the people in government are indigenous what percentage of doctors and architects are first nations people like talking about equality says oh no no sovereignty this kind of profoundly dishonest use of sovereignty becomes the wallpaper that you know really distracts us from the questions of of what has happened in the past what is happening now and what should happen in the future tremendously important questions let's just say when i was on that campus i never heard anyone talking about sovereignty seriously and i'll explain just a moment what i mean by talking about sovereignty seriously talk about what i mean in parts i never saw a youtube video from anyone i never read an article like on paper i never saw any discourse about what sovereignty would really mean if we really give it to them and they really take it and here's what it would really mean vatican city andorra san marino there's a tiny tiny little country in the south of france famous for its casinos monaco and the cote d'azur that sovereignty that's sovereignty it would mean that when you looked at the map of canada there would be a series of micro states that were sovereign and just like andorra if you've never heard of andorra before you can google it real quick by the way okay just like andorra just like vatican city they would have a seat at the united nations and no matter how tiny they were even if they were as tiny as andorra as as tiny as vatican city and canada has a lot of land to give away and if you look at the map really they could be huge in terms of territory but the population would be tiny there's not that many people involved here okay but even if you give them a lot of land all right that micro state would have a vote at the united nations equal to canada it would have a vote at the united nations equal to india with more than a billion people and guess what the vatican has that right and the vatican uses that to great effect the vatican lobbies for consider a conservative christian perspective even though we all know there are many ways in which the vatican isn't a real country there are many ways in which no offense and dora isn't a real country i mean andorra doesn't have to maintain an army the same way other countries do but if you really give first nations people sovereignty if they really have their own countries no matter how tiny and no matter how nearly symbolic their military might be because probably they would not take their limited tax dollars and pour it into building up a mighty military to defend a tiny state that's enclosed by canada on all sides right they would lose access forever to the benefits of being a canadian citizen because they would not be canadian citizens anymore they would be members of their own sovereign state now um you guys if you've heard of this you've probably heard of it because of a few american gangster movies it's an interesting footnote in history that vatican city has its own banks right and those banks are not governed by italy and they're not governed by france or anyone else they only answer to the pope because they have their own government they're sovereign so in theory they can be as corrupt as they want to be they can be as criminals they want to be they can be involved in all kinds of international banking transactions that other countries banks wouldn't engage in let's put this away if you think swiss banking is corrupt vatican city is able to take on the contracts they're able to go places that the swiss would fear to tread right ultimately switzerland has a democracy they have a government that the the economic side of things has to answer to right um in reality i don't think the scale of illegal banking and black market economics in vatican city is so tremendous as people think it is uh there was one particular gangster a real historical figure still alive and still giving interviews there was one american gangster who was a courier for vatican city and who was personally friends with one of the popes during his lifetime and did favors for them and he personally got involved in the making of several hollywood movies he's credited in different ways but he met and spoke with the people who wrote and directed those movies and actually he was an actor in several of them too playing small parts i think to recognize and reward him for his role and kind of adding authenticity to american gangsters because of this one guy we now have this view of the corruption of the vatican city banking industry as if it dwarfs switzerland as if it dwarfs hong kong you know and i i just say i'm very skeptical about that this is one of the effects of of hollywood movies right um however you know there's a seed of truth here right like there's a kind of necessary warning about what sovereignty means if you grant sovereignty to microstate within canada everyone knows that the one thing everyone talks about casinos and maybe these microstates are famous for their casinos what is uh surround in the southern france what is monaco famous for what is monte carlo famous for casinos right oh well other countries make casinos illegal but here's the small country that feels they don't have a lot a lot to lose and they become a casino destination other microstates may be famous for prostitution okay well they can also do whatever they want to on the internet they can do whatever they want to in banking they can do whatever they want they can have their own stock exchange they have their own stock market they can do all these things and they don't answer to you they don't answer to anyone but themselves because they are sovereign that's what sovereignty means so if we are going to pretend and we are going to sign united nations declarations stating that our indigenous people have sovereignty that the solution that the way out of our history of genocide is to grant them sovereignty autonomy and self-government what you are talking about is secession now again we probably have some some europeans uh in the audience here and those of you hey guys i can see most of the comments the font is not so good today i gotta say um and we shout out to shout out to richie shout out to another person named richard shout out to moondog shout out to everyone uh if you want to hit thumbs up while you're here guys it'll help more people discover the stock just discovered the live stream joined the conversation while it's still ongoing which is fun it's nice to have stuff for me too you know to to reply to you spontaneously you know as i'm as i'm going here we have a great question from the audience why is his shirt so wet this is june 28 uh 2021 and we don't just have a heat wave here in victoria we've set a record yesterday was the hottest day ever recorded here and i think today is again going to be a record-breaking day i'm used to it i used to live in cambodia already mentioned i'm used to i think it's a bit ridiculous but right now there were government warnings and the government like they shut down the university they shut down a bunch of public parks say oh stay inside you're going to collapse from heat exhaustion maybe somebody will um but yeah so right now we're recording uh on you know it's as hot as a normal day in los angeles or south texas or something i mean it's not it's not cambodia hot but yeah it's um it's a real it's a real issue oh we have another great question from the audience why does jj mccullough say the sound so strangely he is from the genocidal east coast of canada my accent i used to get compliments on this it's been a few years now probably probably showing the way people's attitudes change i used to get compliments all the time for people i mean in real life not on the internet real life people who talked to me who who complimented my accent and they they said uh i remember and these these women were not trying to sleep with me they really weren't flirting with me but i can remember women saying wow you sound like a movie star and i can remember men more often saying wow you sound like a news broadcaster and what i said back every time was that's because i'm from exactly the neighborhood in downtown toronto where all of the news broadcasters and tv actors in canada come from and so in the united states they don't call it a toronto accent it's normally called a great lakes accent so i have a great lakes urban accent and for no particular reason this is also the accent and the way of speaking that is over represented on american news and i would say among american movie actors it's over represented so my my style of pronouncing vowels it's not represented in the united states as a whole this is not the way people talk in georgia this is not the way people talk in texas the again you know actually if you look at the map the united states it's quite a small area of the united states but it's a huge percentage of population of canada just in this small area because canada's very sparsely populated country so i have this i do have this distinctive but very familiar accent that people regard as standard or default for the united states canada but it's really not and yeah um within canada jj's accent is considered the distinctively canadian accent whereas my accent is again it's familiar from watching news and tv i point out actually sorry a good point of this is my accent is not the new york accent a great indication of that how do you pronounce the word floor f-l-o-o i say floor so this is the great lakes standard accent right the new york accent is flaw they pronounce it like f-l-a-w flaw there was a nail in the floor right this is new york okay how do you pronounce church c-h-u-r-c-h church standard new york accent choice now let me ask you even if you watch the news from new york city even if you watch an action movie set in new york city will you hear people pronouncing the word floor as flaw you know i i would say today in 2021 probably not i think you mostly hear this kind of standardized uh great lakes accents so yeah that's there's an intro sorry talking about uh talking about cultural genocide um there is there is something um you know there's something uh significant there so another great question from moon dog shout out to moon dog moondog he says quote eisel have you read the book disrobing the aboriginal industry question mark what do you think about her writings on the revival first nations languages so moondog i have never read that book and i have never heard of that book i've never seen the title before i can guess something about it you know from the title it's an important issue that there's definitely more than one you know perspective on i think i'm going to go on now to talk about languages probably the next basically it's the next thing i'm going to talk about in some in some depth and how that relates to questions of sovereignty and why have sovereignty at all and questions about rights and why have rights why does any of this mean what's the point all these concepts ultimately are means to an end right like it's an instrument held in human hands to serve a particular purpose sovereignty does not exist as an end in itself rights are not and itself has to be for something right and i've already pointed out there are real disadvantages to having sovereignty so if you are really going to take on sovereignty you know it has to be for a purpose um you know in this same way you know first nations activism of any kind it really has to exist for a purpose it has to have motivations and outcomes that they're pursuing now i you probably guessed i'm sympathetic to many of the objectives when there are objectives but i think i mean just respond to the title of this book you mentioned sometimes there are no objectives at all so i knew a guy really sweet lovely guy i really liked him as a person a first nations guy in um in saskatchewan and you know i'm i'm not naming him for a reason here i liked him i really did like this guy as a person but he was one of those guys he was a chain smoker he was real thin i don't know if he has a history of drug addiction and alcoholism but uh having spent time with him with his man and so on that's that was my impression or my suspicion maybe he's just a chain smoker who's real thin and you know he's kind of hunched over that is the kind of guy was but i really liked him he was really i personally liked him and you know he wasn't a close friend of mine but i felt it he was a friend of mine to some extent lovely guy and you know he started and okay okay i'm gonna be honest here i really wonder if he started doing this because of me when i knew him i would point and say why is that stop sign in english why is the no smoking sign in english and you know i'd say look everyone knows what the no smoking sign means like just the symbol like would it kill us as canadians would it be so hard to have the no smoking sign and then have it increa or in ojibwe to have a first nations language have a native language below it and you know like if you're a white person you're not going to feel oppressed by this you know oh yeah there's it's a no smoking sign you can have english also but it's not like oh this is a totally new concept of no smoking right like would it be too much to ask when we're in like the tiny little piece of land that is in theory sovereign that is in theory first nations land and it's supposed to represent them couldn't the no smoking sign be in crete um and you know again if you want to use other native languages we have dna in canada with some other languages that are not necessarily going to be extinct and you know now again obviously he sympathizes with me he's on my side but it was shocking and unfamiliar he'd never heard people talking to him okay talking to him and talking to many other people there it seemed like everyone i said this to was very surprised and they never heard anyone say this before maybe i'm wrong maybe they were surprised and 10 years earlier they heard someone like it's not something people were commonly saying anyway so a couple years after i knew this guy um something reminded me of him and i googled his his name and it looked like like maybe one year after we had that conversation like not not a real long time but he started a a little political movement a little micro political move to try to get public signage in the cree language now it's totally possible that's something he'd had on his mind for 10 years and then meeting me and hearing me complain about it you know i mean he got motivated like i'm not taking all the credit for probably thinking oh is that maybe i you know maybe i said that much and um you know i remember at that time i didn't know what came but i assumed it in failure i mean but this is an example that doesn't cost the government millions of dollars right this is peanuts you know space program costs a lot of money invading afghanistan costs a lot of money putting up no smoking signs this is not a lot of money you know to support these languages not going extinct but i remember the official excuse from the government and this is so canadian was oh well if we do it for one indigenous language then we have to do it for all so whether you are in toronto or whether you are in vancouver or whether you are in victoria you can go to a neighborhood called chinatown and there are all kinds of signs up put up by the government in chinese not from business owners by the government and there are signs that say no parking and there are signs that say public parking one hour and there are signs that give you the name of the street in chinese right because this is fun this encourages tourism oh it's chinatown the government put up street signs in chinese and we're like proud of that right we take pride in packaging and promoting the chinese identity of chinatown oh i'm sorry where's kree town oh i'm sorry where's ojibwe town oh i'm sorry where's den a town where's inuit really really oh oh well you know if we if we do it for one native people we have to do you know so this is the state we're at this is 2021 looking at genocide lately and looking looking ahead to the the future of these languages and of these political questions so i can take it in a few different directions now i mean i'll speak briefly about j.j mccullough's own video some of you will be here for that reason by the way it's great it's great having you guys here obviously it's a totally unplanned video 31 people in the audience if we can get 31 thumbs up like if more of you hit the thumbs up button more people will join the conversation i can respond to some more questions comments um and also uh all right that's not that i was just gonna say look 24 minutes into the broadcast you can change your mind later if you give it the thumbs up now and you decide this is later you can take the thumbs up back and also you can change your mind and give it a thumbs down i'm totally totally in favor people can come in here and disagree with everything they have to say and to themselves but i think if you hit thumbs up now it helps more people discover the broadcast well we are delving into this shadow band area of political discourse which it certainly is here on youtube had quite a series of videos lately that are banned on youtube incidentally all right look jj mccullough plays a very strange game with his public messaging here on youtube he makes intentionally political statements that members of his audience are free to interpret any way they want to his video only the first half of it is about first nations the video you just put up today called why can't it's a failure his video allows a conservative or right-wing member of the audience to listen to what he says and then presume that his real point his real conclusion is in agreement with their own assumptions or with their own agenda a centrist or a liberal or even quite a far left-wing person could watch the same video and come to the same sort of self-deluded conclusion that he's on our side and what he's doing is not refusing to take a position what he's doing is very carefully positioning himself in a studiously ambivalent way and we use the word ambivalent with different meanings in english it is more than one of valence it's ambivalent it's presenting the presenting the audience with a sort of striking and yet ambivalent you know political doctrine and then the audience is free to take it one way or the other um i appreciate that he finally came out and made a statement on this at all i appreciate that he came out and took a stand and obviously in terms of what he says explicitly there are things there that are to be praised just in that he's willing to say genocide is bad in 2021 it's not you know a huge leap forward or something but it's interesting that now at this point in history he's come out and made this particular statement that he's made he does not comment on whether or not this concept of sovereignty being applied to first nations is a good thing or a bad thing he does not comment on what the implications of that are short-term or long-term he does not comment on the implications of this concept of of rights and how it would apply to them what that would really mean it was taken seriously he states that the conservative party which he's a member of opposed canada signing this u.n declaration that in theory commits canada taking the course of granting sovereignty rights and self-determination to native people he doesn't say that he agrees with the conservative party he doesn't say and the conservative party were right and that it would avert terrible problems now in the future and you know a recurring problem not just with him but i feel with all conservatives is that he does not make any statement about what is the future we want or desire what is the end point that we are moving towards now with that having said he does say some critical things about uh different delusions we had about what the endpoint should be in the past there are some positive things we said with the video i i i would not summarize the history of first nations at all in the same way he does doesn't mean i'm offended by it it doesn't even mean that it's like factually wrong but no i'm not entirely comfortable sitting through the way in which he summarizes the history of colonialism genocide and government policy falling after nevertheless an educational video and it is jj mccullough taking a stand on an issue that up to this point he's been loath to take any um any clear stand on all right now you know talking about the future that way really matters i mean talking about what is desirable what is the end state we're moving towards okay so bring this back to sovereignty give the example of hobima alberta so i'm just going to type that in so you guys can google it if you don't know where i'm going so habima alberta plenty of land it's this is not some tiny island it's not some case would be really difficult for the government of canada to draw a circle around it and create a separate country there's no question this is this is a viable solution oh sorry shouldn't say it's a solution it's an option it's it's possible all right what situation do you want to be in 100 years from now do you want the people of hobima alberta and this by the way i'm saying ho bema because actually there are several different first nations reservations clustered around it it's not jurisdictionally all that simple but you could make it simple you can change the legal situation do you want them to have their own parliament do you want them to have their own democracy do you want them to have their own hospitals do you want them to have their own universities do you want those universities to be taught in the cree language in an indigenous first nations language do you want children to be going to school in the native language do you want them to be learning math and science in the native language do you want to have for the first time in the history of the world a biology textbook printed in that language do you want them to be able to study biology in their native language and then go to a university where they train to become a nurse in their native language and then they're employed in a university with that language is that the end point we're moving towards now if you look at other contested cases of sovereignty in the world um in southeastern spain still to this day there is an ongoing political struggle for catalan independence people say catalonia that was referred to in more than one way there were people who would say with absolutely no hesitation that the future they want for catalonia is to have universities where the catalan language is spoken where instruction in schools is in catalan where children grow up with this is their identity this is their language that they want in this sense a completely separate country with its own tradition now to my knowledge if you poll them with that question it's not an overwhelming majority if you get into some of those hard questions that catalan independence it's not some kind of open and shut case where 99 of the catalans want independence there are a lot of catalans who have a different view of it or want to take a middle path and say well we can be we can be like quebec is within canada and have a special status within spain but you know there are people who want to take a middle course on that but there's no doubt if you talk about who are the supporters of the catalan independence movement and many of them resent having to learn spanish they feel spanish is a useless language or that it's inferior and that the spanish literature isn't worth reading and they would really prefer to have catalan language now all right i care about all these issues if you google my name plus catalan you're gonna find evidence that i've studied the catalan language myself okay briefly to a very shallow and limited extent guess what there's evidence on the internet of that okay um the catalan language is very similar to french the idea that there's something really distinctive and really important about preserving catalan as a language under itself and catalan literature and so on as opposed to reading the same literature in french or the same literature in spanish it's a difficult delusion to sustain all right just because the languages are so closely related now some of you you know some of you may be able to relate to this and some of you may not in eastern europe one of the sources of constant hostility and tension is that some people feel that a language like ukrainian really is a separate language with its own history and its own literature and its own destiny right but a lot of people feel that these eastern european slavic languages whether ukrainian or any of its neighbors that really they are not different enough from russian to be worth taking seriously in this way that there is no merit in sustaining what's really just a slightly different dialect or a slightly different way of speaking russian within japan there are dialects of japanese that from an outsider's perspective are a totally different language like they're so phonetically different from standard japanese so phonologically different and so they are really different they have mutual incomprehensibility right and you have to ask are you committed to preserving this separate language within japan and here obviously sovereignty is not an issue here you're not talking about a separate country or are we going to accept that in the future there's really one dialect of japanese that it's one language and that that's the future of japan and that maybe there isn't something special or worth preserving about this dialect within japan even if it has thousands of years of history and it may have some of its own literature but people can read that literature in translation they can read it translated or even just transcribed into uh into modern standard japanese now it's very hard for people to deal with these kinds of questions when it's their own ethnicity when it's their own language okay how about israel how about palestine how about the gaza strip how about ireland all right so let me say something to you deeply shocking if you're irish if the irish people continue to speak english there's no reason for them to be a separate country from england what's the point okay how about scotland scottish independence is still something that polls are taken about and they've had referenda about it sorry sorry they've had referendums about it in english the plural of referendum is referendums not referenda they've had referendums about they'll have more of them what is the point of giving sovereignty to scotland and having a separate country if they're just going to speak english right and what are you doing if you put up a wall between scotland and england you're saying hey every child in scotland has to go to school in scotland and you have to go to university in scotland you have part of our education system you have to go to our hospitals if you commit a crime you go to our courts and you go to our prisons not theirs right and if everyone's speaking the english language you know what is it that you're trying to preserve or promote what really is the point of having sovereignty now in ireland some people some see the future of ireland 100 years from now as not being an english-speaking colony right they see the future of ireland precisely as being the preservation promotion and promulgation of their indigenous language that their indigenous language their indigenous identity and that literature and that cultural tradition that is the justification for sovereignty right but i ask you today in ireland is that 10 of the population is that 20 or what and i'm not i'm not saying what percentage population have a passing acquaintance with the indigenous language but what percentage of the population of ireland actually read a newspaper in the indigenous language or have even read one book in the last five years in that language a very i'm not going to claim the percentage a very large percentage of the population of ireland today drag their feet through the process of getting a basic smattering in the native language in their in their school system as children and then never use it again you know they're kind of oh yeah right the lyrics are the national anthem there's some symbolic presence for the language right so just say this is something that has deep and disturbing implications for everyone involved now i want to ask so look i am i'm open to the possibility with hobima alberta they have enough land they have enough population they have a terrible history and their current situation is terrible we can do it we can make hobina alberta into the next micro state and they can have their own seat at the united nations and they can have their own army and their own police force and their own courts and their own prison and they can pay their own taxes to their own government and elect their own representatives they can do it you know tiny tiny countries within europe do it there are all these examples of microstates within europe and then they can be responsible for their own sewage system and their own electricity lines and everything else right but if they don't speak their own language what is the rationale for that what is the reason for putting up that wall and taking on board all those disadvantages of becoming a foreign country right and you have to ask yourself is it just racism like do the people of ireland feel that their genetic identity is different enough from the english that they should have a nation state just on that basis for me racism will never do it i don't think racism justifies it i just fundamentally do not think that that makes sense right there has to be some meaning and i said this before sovereignty is a means to an end it's a means to accomplishing something right there has to be a purpose to sovereignty and if the purpose is just racism right i don't relate to arguments in favor of of sovereignty and i'm also not supposing that this is some very easy opening decision for the people of catalonia or for the people of israel or the people of ireland or what have you uh and and right now it's very much a question for the people of ukraine i this dropped i don't know how this drops off the news it's one of the greatest military crises of the last century you know in france and germany and everyone else in western europe should be deeply involved in it but everyone seems to want to pretend that the invasion occupation and vision of ukraine is business as usual or something it's it's a deeply disturbing example and language politics and identity politics and questions of sovereignty they're they're deeply you know deeply involved okay i'm just gonna pause one sec to you uh look at your your comments guys okay so so richard i see you have a series of questions here okay so richard says that would add so much depth and significance to the north american culture that is dwarfed by every other continent so look richard you're hinting at a really interesting question that i have covered on my youtube channel a long time ago you know when german tourists come to canada they want to see first nations culture they want to see native american culture indigenous culture it feels good they want and they pay to see it they want to see performances they want to see dances right and you know like white canadians don't think this way what do you think they want to see like do you think german tourists want to come to canada to see a second-rate imitation of european culture a second-rate imitation of american culture what culture have you got canada what culture have you got that's distinctively yours and no one else has got and that you can be proud of right and white canadians don't have this attitude we're not proud of you know first nations culture white canadians have been engaged in a process of extinguishment towards their indigenous culture they've forced assimilation extinguishment of land claims and forced integration and so on it's been this assimilationist attitude where white canadians have been raised to think the greatest thing in the world is to be a second-rate imitation of european culture and then to some extent what competes with that is the idea of being a second-grade imitation of american culture i mean sorry like i grew up in toronto toronto has a hip-hop scene toronto was a reggae scene toronto is a punk rock scene but it's all derivative none of it is canadian i'm sorry but like the idea of canadian rap music is a joke like obviously it's a satellite to american rap music and american culture canadian rock and roll too i'm sorry it doesn't have to be yeah any of these examples canadian country music you know we do we do have canadian countries but it's there is no canadian culture of country music it's a chapter of it's a satellite to you know american culture um so look you know it is an interesting question but we're not talking about a parallel universe or if we could travel back in time and make a different decision here all right the reality of canada today and i would say this for the reality of the united states of america at least the lower 48 states today like maybe leaving hawaii is a slightly different history or something uh yeah let's leave it hawaii and alaska i think that is significantly different actually but canada and the bulk of the united states of america we are not in a situation of having a hybrid culture in the way that mexico does mexican culture is not the same as spanish culture right and all of them will tell you why because it's a mesisto culture fi someone's going to correct me i've never studied spanish i'm probably mispronouncing that name it's a mixed culture but they have this word for it that they regard positively as mixed in a positive sense right um in canada and the united states we don't have a mixed culture we don't have a hybrid culture of indigenous and european influences if you go to a mexican restaurant they can explain to you how mexican food is different from spanish food and it is it's different there is no canadian food there isn't you can't go to a canadian restaurant and have them explain to you how our cuisine is different from british cuisine because of the influence of our indigenous people or because we intermarried with our indigenous people or appropriated their customs and habits and their ingredients it doesn't exist and i've got to tell you if you're talking about the lower 48 states of the united united states america there is no american cuisine in this sense right there is no cuisine the americans can point to in the same way so this is a very one-sided genocidal culture now again i think the only exception you could probably talk about hawaiian culture in a different i think hawaii is actually a counter example we can talk about mestizo culture so there's someone someone who is himself mestizo uh is correcting me and it's inevitable hey guys number one for correct pronunciation of pali sanskrit chinese i've always studied japanese too i've studied quite a few languages but never spanish whether or not i can pronounce french worth a damn is also a fascinating topic talk for another video we'll see how much world french has this channel right um okay the situation we are looking at is not one of having a hybrid culture that's the product of that long history of uh colonialism right we're looking at a post-genocidal culture right and where even if you go to the res as someone usefully says in the in the comments you go to the reservation right what are you looking at the vast majority of first nations reservation the people wear blue jeans and cowboy hats it's sorry i'm not saying the stereotype many especially the older people that listen to country music and wear cowboy hats there were younger people who wear baseball caps and listen to hip-hop music of course they play the same video games we do they live in the modern world and they go to school and apply for jobs the same as everyone else you know the extent to which they are integrated into and of course of course it's the product of a history of forced assimilation right but you know it's not the case that you can even you can't even go to hobima alberta and see some kind of you know alternate culture alternate society unless it is a carefully staged performance now i just give you one example of this um what you know touched me personally there were a series of i would say radical first nations protests while i was in saskatchewan and it was its own little movement that frankly started on facebook and eventually petered out um but i did sympathize with it i mean i did it was uh you know what what what do you say what is the purpose of this movement to say hey first nations people really matter i mean ultimately that's kind of what they were saying you know and um they they were kind of responding to what was fashionable at that time on the internet which was the flash mob phenomenon nobody can remember flash mobs this is 2021 so i think in the past right but they would share messages on on facebook with one another and this is also part of what makes it interesting is until they showed up and joined in the protest most of these people you wouldn't be able to tell they were first nations they looked like and dressed like but including their facial features many of them look like white people and and again that's also part of why they thought i was one of them and i have to say again again no i'm i'm not indigenous myself i'm not a native person if i showed up in one of these events but they would come together at one place in one time and they would play the drum and they would chant in in their native language this kind of traditional music performance i forget along with last 10 minutes or something it wouldn't it wouldn't really disrupt like you know should be like a shopping mall they come together they do this and they disperse this is like the flash mob idea all right and it was it was a powerful and kind of harmless demonstration you're saying hey you know we exist we matter we have our own political demands and the government has been ignoring them for decades they're going to keep on ignoring you know it's just this kind of message you know and you know and also aesthetically it was kind of beautiful it was kind of nice yeah so i went to one of these with my my first wife today my ex-wife you know one of those and you know it is just kind of moving and it's just kind of it comes together you have this sound that fills the room and so on and everyone on the ground is chanting and i said to her i'm studying the cree language at that time obviously i'm not remotely fluent in the language but i've gotten to a level where i've got the basics now and i said to her nobody knows the lyrics like this may seem to you like a powerful demonstration of cultural continuity or kind of political revival but guess what this is the equivalent of a bunch of us coming together and deciding to celebrate french heritage but all of us are just chanting blah blah blah blah because none of us knows a single word in the french language all right like in reality this demonstration it's demonstrating more than one thing it's demonstrating how far down the path we are to language extension because nobody here can actually sing a song in their own indigenous language now why do i even say that that's partly geography if you went up to the far north of saskatchewan at that time you could meet people who really spoke the language you could be people who could really sing a song into a language and they wore this is another thing about the history of hybridity and colonialism and genesis the language wasn't completely extinct almost without exception the people who really spoke the language in the far north were christian fundamentalists they were they were not just a little bit christian they were extremely christian and they read the bible in translating to their native language and preached in the native life so again you might think the people who speak the language are kind of the natural defenders of the cultural continuity and heritage zone but no it's paradoxical as so many things in uh in history and and politics are so all right a comment from edgy intellect that's suitably edgy quote i don't believe in culture the term as it's used today is an event in the late 18th century in the historical context of the emerging nation state um here's my counter argument to you edgy intellect culture is the cumulative mass of all the questions we do not ask ourselves it is an accrued quantum of assumptions um [Music] that we only have to defend when they're violated you know when you walk into a corner store to buy something you have a whole mass of cultural assumptions and you don't even question them or think of them or assert them but in some other country or you go into a corner store here that's run by some with very different cultural assumptions all of a sudden you realize how much this matters so i don't know how much you've traveled edgy intellect but the the more you travel the more you live in circumstances that challenge your cultural assumptions you will realize just how how real and meaningful and important this concept of of culture is um so give you one example you go into a corner store that has a cash register right at the front by the door when you go in and out okay and the woman who's standing behind the cash register comes out and follows you and stares at you as you go from isle to aisle picking out things you want to buy in some cultures that's normal right one reason that would be obviously the fear of theft right in in my culture that's totally unacceptable and anyone this happens people will shout out and denounce and cuss out the owner say look i'm never coming back here and i'm telling they'll even accuse them of being racist or whatever you know i mean like they'll be real it can escalate the conflict that we assume deeply in this culture that i'm gonna walk in and i'm gonna have the freedom to stroll around and pick things off the shelf and look at them and you know and you could shoplift you could steal and quite a lot of theft and shoplifting is tolerated just because of this cultural norm that in that shop you should be given your space and you shouldn't be hassled and you shouldn't have to answer any questions as a as a customer and if you have questions you have to walk up to them not the other way around like for the other culture you know maybe for for some other culture somewhere maybe the assumption is hey i shouldn't have to walk up and ask you you should be standing here next to me you know so no um you know culture is this cumulative unexamined mass of questions we don't ask ourselves if these assumptions built into a situation and i again this is why i don't say belief right you don't even believe you should be able to walk around the the corner store this way or the convenience store or the shop it's not a belief it's not a creed it's not it's not a political principle right so yeah we we lean on and live within culture in this way we inhabit these uh these these assumptions someone's encouraging me to study spanish imagine imagine how different my whole life would be if [Laughter] [Music] different politics different history different options everything would have been different if i'd gone into spanish if i'd gone into portuguese too um once in a while it crossed my mind and as was just mentioned i briefly did um uh i briefly did study catalan so someone in the audience called david says that he is catalan and the dichotomy between spanish spanish and catalan is getting greater by the day not because the language is suppressed like france does to its indigenous minority languages but because of some intricate factors so david i'm i'm aware of that um i lived in a region just over the border uh from spain in what's called french catalonia and we had different groups who spoke catalina from different centuries which is interesting what's called lingual isolates or linguistic isolates um just means people are isolated so they keep speaking the language the way was spoken 300 years ago or something this this happens it's a phenomenon that happens all over the world uh to give an example there were some germans isolated within russia who kept on speaking german the way it was 300 years ago or 500 years ago now i forget because they were they didn't have any contact with the larger linguistic culture there this phenomenon is fairly widespread but this is what i would say if you go back and read pre-modern catalan literature so we could call it renaissance literature i don't really care what period but if you go back and read catalan literature that's from before the modern era of the radio and the cheapness of the printing press producing newspapers catalan is really not that different from french it is fundamentally just not that different a language so you know no i'm not saying this to insult you but you know with a language like cree or ojibwe there is a whole different philosophy of life built into the language there really is it's profoundly philosophically different and i can say this to you you guys know i don't um i don't glorify any form of book learning i was you know this comes up all the time with my girlfriend and stuff i say look i don't glorify reading aristotle i don't glorify reading thucydides i've got some books here that are really great books i've got uh sallust here with this horrifying color i think we've got happy in here oh no i don't appian is in the bedroom oh no it's under the mic sorry appian's off camera another ancient ancient uh roman author but look uh appian and machiavelli are here under my microphone can talk about how these books are meaningful to me but i never say if you read this book it's going to be philosophically meaningful to you too right i'm very skeptical about that i'm very skeptical about what kind of learning is useful or or uh important to what people but i can tell you no matter who you are if you really learn cree or you really learn ojibwe you really learn an algonquian language it is philosophically profoundly different it's profoundly meaningful it's profoundly interesting it'll change your life it'll change the way you think it'll change the way you dream you know learning a language like that a totally alien language from an alien language family and thinking in those words and the way the words connect to one another and the meanings that are there and yes of course it has its own poetry and it has its own literature it has its own mythology you know i you know you can get into korean ojibwe mythology these stories about magical animals and things i've read my share of it you know um and yeah that really is something profoundly meaningful and it could be meaningful for you and you and you in the audience no matter who you are saying i don't do that with aristotle even though i'm a fan of aristotle i think it's important for the right people to read aristotle i don't say that about thucydides you know i don't say that about everything or anything right and you know my my girlfriend right now is studying chinese and it's quite hard work for her you know a completely alien language like chinese it's also rewarding in that way now to give a really low kind of down-to-earth example of that though you know but but that's how chinese comes into your life that way you know um recently there was a diplomatic struggle between joe biden's representatives and the representatives of xi jinping so the united states and china and i was able to watch that even though there were subtitles in english some actually some of the videos i didn't have english translation um some of it had something i was english someone just add subtitles in chinese and you know the english translation will never really capture the mood and spirit and in a low-level sense the philosophy built into what they're saying in chinese you know like there's there's something there even with some this is relatively meaningless this is the government of china like saying to the united states hey don't cross us we can we can really you know we can really make you regret it or something but whoa there's something really meaningful and really rewarding you know about hearing that in chinese and and obviously you have to have the level of education to appreciate what's what's going on in chinese or whatever you know um can you have that experience with cree today can you have that experience with ojibwe today can you have that experience with mohawk or danny today will you ever you know will there ever be a situation where a politician stands up and says about the prime minister of canada or could be a provincial leader says about the premier that's in canada that's the equivalent to being the governor of the state but stands up and in their own language is denouncing and criticizing another politician and you've got the subtitles in english and it's being broadcast in the native language but where if you study the native language you can appreciate something that's going on there you know philosophically and emotionally that there's no no for some for some countries in south america that's totally easy to imagine because their indigenous languages are not that close to extinction they have the numbers of people speaking it they are elected representatives of sonia um i think an interesting contrast would actually be new zealand is it possible that in the future of new zealand that the study of the native language is rewarding and fall in this way right but even to have such a kind of humble set of expectations or questions we're talking about the native languages in canada it's very hard to see the way forward to to a situation that's just even that positive where we're not perpetually on the cusp of total irretrievable genocide and you know the disappearance of the language the disappearance of the culture in every meaningful sense obviously it has already disappeared from politics and that's you know that's the most important thing to disappear from at all they do not have a presence in our parliament in our city halls and so on and so forth you know they have been silenced in the most important way possible uh for all these decades for all these years for all these all these uh centuries so we get some more thanks guys thanks for the contribution some more intelligent comments about uh catalonia and a question from lilac cloud welcome back to the show lila cloud has such a memorable name i remember he or she went over there because of this name uh lilacloud says quote do you think the canadian movement interesting choice of words do you think the canadian movement should implement integration programs for the indigenous people and non-natives okay so this brings us back to the question of sovereignty and rights in a in a big way right okay immigration do you think that people who immigrate to canada from pakistan have any respect for our indigenous people and culture and language whatsoever have you met and spoken to some pakistani immigrants about how they feel about our indigenous people how are you do you think that immigrants from south korea have any respect for our indigenous people or their natives their language is pardon me our indigenous people their native languages native culture i think there's any positive connection there whatsoever take a look with the south koreans there is one interesting footnote which is that some of them come over as christian missionaries and some of them go out to live with the native people to preach jesus to them i've spoken to one of those people right how about vietnamese immigrants how about chinese immigrants how about immigrants who just got off the boat from sweden somewhere in europe okay most of these people come over and they have a very clear notion of what they want canada to be for them and what the role of the english language is in their lives less often it might be the french language it's very rare that people come over here because they want to live in a french language context and they have absolutely no sympathy and they have no positive engagement whatsoever and they tend to have an incredibly negative set of attitudes and engagement with people okay if you give them sovereignty then they can solve that problem on their own territory where they can say hey this is the sovereign state of masquez or whatever they want to call it um you know they might use a completely original name they might use the name that's already used for their tribe or for their uh reservation right whatever they choose but again i'm not talking about one microstate throughout canada you could have a bunch of microstates the same way that throughout the european union they're a bunch of microstates and then they could say look we get to decide whether you're here on a short-term work permit whether you're here as a tourist like what your legal status is here or whether you're allowed to immigrate and you know if you had a requirement for immigrants just to learn a 500 word vocabulary in cree or ojibwe of course that would transform everything change everything in canada and if you had that requirement for the last 200 years everything would be different today and of course if they had the ability to do that on their own territory say look if you want to live here if you want to be part of our life and society you know naturally you're not going to require total fluency we don't require total fluency in english we have literally millions of people in the united states and canada who come here from korea and they just speak korean their whole lives they never learn english come here from china come here from pakistan whatever and they either speak very minimal english or never learning english dolls it's very common so obviously you're not going to be expecting you know perfection from people but sure it would change everything if you had language requirements for immigrants and if people regarded this as something that they were proud of this was something that's like hey you know what canada is not like other countries you know canada is not just another secondary imitation of europe or a second-grade invitation of some that happen united there's something really special there's something really distinctive here and we get to be a part of it even if it's by learning these these 500 words you know in this language okay um sovereignty comes at a price sovereignty comes at a terrible terrible price okay if you really want to have a sovereign country for the native people of canada that means they've got to rely on their own tax money it means they've got they've got to build their own universities and they've got to say to their children no you don't get to go to that university you have to go to this university it means they have their own court system means they have their own police it means they have their own prison it means they have their own responsibilities and if you studied political science then you will be familiar with the canard from first year political science you might learn this in high school you might learn at the university that there is an important relationship between rights and responsibilities i think we learn this concept so early in life that we forget what that relationship is or why it matters at all it's the easiest thing in the world for the united nations to make a proclamation on paper saying that our native people have rights i think the whole concept of rights is a really dangerous and self-defeating distraction okay major city in the united states and canada this is probably true in europe too and most you know most of the democratic world most of the world that has elections and newspapers and you know the other kind of cultural assumptions that come along with having elections in newspapers that criticize the government okay in large parts of the world there are no formal rights granted to the inhabitants of the city of new york or to the inhabitants of the city of toronto they don't get to stand up and say hey it's our human right that if we don't want a highway built there and we don't want a train line built there that we can prevent it you don't have a right you have a mayor you have a government you have a democracy that can contend these issues okay it is pretty common in the world that a higher level of government the federal government or the state government or the provincial government that a higher level government wants to build a highway or wants to build a train line that would be convenient at a large scale at a national scale or an international scale but that there are local people who have for some reason right or wrong say no no no don't build that highway don't build that train line don't build that project okay and they don't rely on rights they don't rely on sovereignty they don't claim that the city of new york is sovereign they don't claim that the city of new york has an inalienable right they don't rely on human rights hey we have a human right to not have a highway or a train line built here okay they have a mayor who can stand up in the newspapers and stand up in his own government and who can argue the case and say no no no we have some really important set of reasons why the highway should be over there and not over here and that's normal politics this is exactly what our indigenous people have been utterly lacking in the united states and canada for their entire history down to and including today many of my viewers are europeans as mentioned i have a lot of viewers from australia and new zealand too so i know you may not be able to write this so he said okay i promise you people in texas know the name of the mayor of new york they do people in california know the name of the mayor of new york city sometimes they know the name of the mayor of detroit too because the mayor of detroit gets into the news a lot right do you think people in california can name the leader of the lenape do you think people in california can name the leader of the ojibwe any anyone just one one leader for one group of native people who is ever on the news standing there speaking on behalf of the issue of the day even if it is something as trivial as whether the highway is built here or the train line is built there okay do you see what a dangerous distraction it is to speak in terms of absolute rights or absolute sovereignty that's not what you need what you need is a working political system all right and when i use the word working advisedly because it's not going to be perfect sometimes like you know the mayor of new york may stand up and say there's no way we can allow this highway to be built you know what it's you know what once the kind of public discussion goes on and it's covered in the newspapers it's covered in the press you know what it turns out that there are just a few rich people who own some property and their property is going to be destroyed by building this new highway but really that's where the highway needs to be really millions of other people are going to benefit and you know what maybe those rich people have been paying donations to the mayor you know like this this is common again i don't know when you whether you're in europe or australia you've probably heard some stories like this one particularly it could turn out that you know what once you do the research once you really think about it you know what local democracy is not always right maybe you know on balance some people don't like it but you know what we should build that highway anyway or you know what we should extend the train line through that neighborhood whatever the case may be right politics has trade-offs it has hard decisions right it has compromise it has negotiations it is public discourse and journalists in the press criticizing you politics does not proceed on the basis of human rights claims ever ever it's a complete dead end it's a complete cul-de-sac it's completely counterproductive to pretend native people have sovereignty when they don't and pretend that they have rights over these things when they don't and pretending more is not going to solve the problem what will solve the problem is really giving them really granting them their own mayors really granting them their own provincial premiers their own governors their own state senators however you want to think of it or put it where they really have a voice and again that voice is going to be wrong sometimes and i think it's a very telling measure everyone in the united states of america knew the name kwame kilpatrick sorry if you're european i realize you won't know this name i know if you're even canadians all knew this guy's name kwame who was kwame kilpatrick he was the mayor of detroit what did he accomplish what did he even have conflict with the federal government nothing he didn't call me anything great you know but he was a powerful voice on numerous trivial issues of just being real of course there are mclaughlin he didn't build the pyramids he didn't accomplish anything great in his time in office you know he had his controversy you know everyone in the united states of america knew this guy and they perceived him rightly or wrongly as a great leader for a great representative for [Music] african-americans he's still alive you know what i actually think that history isn't over with climate coverage you know what it's possible it's possible he'll end up vindicating his name and he'll be remembered as a great leader for detroit or great leader for african-americans i doubt it it's looking pretty bad in terms of how the history books are going to be written on comic book patrick but at that time before he went to prison before he was kind of denounced and and what have you sure that's what kwame kilpatrick was symbolically and actually okay we don't have one we don't have one kwame kilpatrick for native americans okay we have we haven't had one in the united states during my lifetime we haven't had one in canada during life and if you just look at the map obviously there has to be more than one obviously you can't have one guy who represents new york and california and the whole all native people in alaska and hawaii both right there is no tribune for them right there is no seat in parliament there is no seat in the senate there is no mayor for them there is no system of government for them and it's not an accident it's not a coincidence it's a direct consequence of it is the direct legacy of a colonial system of government that aimed at quite intentionally their extinguishment their eventual disappearance