The Endgame to Cultural Genocide: Cree, Ojibwe, Nez Percé (Languages).
05 October 2017 [link youtube]
Youtube Automatic Transcription
but whose yen that's the Parliament for
the province the Parliament did not employ a single translator for any native language for creative way or ordinary or any of the others and so whenever someone stood up and spoke in a native language in Parliament it was not recorded it was not transcribed it was not it was neither recorded history nor influence politics so that's the kind of very real erasure that's going on in a country where now when I put my my card into an ATM into a bank machine my choices are do you want English French or Chinese I don't have a choice for Korea Ojibwe or Mohawk so that's that's the question facing Canada from my perspective as a white person the question is are we going to sign off on the slow-motion genocide on suffocating the last life out of these languages are we going to be the last generation that has even any any memory of what our grandpa grandparents and great-grandparents could speak of this heritage disappearing forever or are we gonna take a stand and try to try to turn the situation around but if you put it this way in Canada if we close down every single Department of Chinese literature it would not make a goddamn that a difference it's not like people in China would be saying oh no what is the future of Chinese literature going to be now that they've shut down the great department that studies Chinese literature in Vancouver in Toronto but guess what this whole world of Cree a jib way mohawk it's hanging by a thread and if we don't take responsibility for it and step up in Canada nobody else is gonna do it about us Yin this is Jay costly so lately the host of cruelty free cosplay is that the channel they get it wrong okay it's not a name it's a thing it's an ideal but it is what the channel is called right so you could I mean you could you know we brand to a vegan zookeeper Club a vegan fox hunting Society you know we got it you guys people have been watching my channel for four years will remember that Jay came on and we talked a lot about the ethics of what I call wildlife management paradigm so animals in the wild animals in zoos the role of research the different conflicting factors and how zoos operate and you know I basically grew up in the museum field and museums like zoos of this really weird mix of for-profit tendencies you know just like in some ways museums are the same as Disneyland they just trying to make the most money possible out of a out of a crummy attraction in some ways their educational in some ways they're trying to be research-based or academic and likewise we talked about zoos both from this vegan perspective and just institutional and political perspective so if you guys think you recognize him that's where you know I'm from but he's also always been a cosplay enthusiasts and now his channel Bo cosplay and very often the overlap between cosplaying and vegan concerns so look this is an extraordinary day because you actually wrote down some things you want to talk to me about some questions let's start with no more than less do actually want to ask you a question about something that you would send on your videos specifically about the Creed I think I think it was about the Kree anyway sure but I'm I remember once I r1 video you had said that you had had the experience because you know you studied you studied those languages and you had the experience of you know talking to people within those tribes who it would not become so strong with the language and how they had to express the desire that they they basically wish that they had had more that training that they were more attacked with that part of who they were in a sense and I remember I just remember you had kind of that one little no I know but is there any particular aspect of languages with it well that that's basically the tragedy of the whole current generation for the create at the achieve way and I'd say most most of the large ethnic groups and native Canadians now there are exceptions so I'll just say so what what you've just said this is a huge sort of tragedy or struggle for this generation for the creative way not particularly for the Inuit being you it are up in the Arctic they have a different situation not for a couple of the groups on the far east coast so there are some exceptions but the the bulk of Canada that's the tragedy and the tragedy runs as follows they had both three generations that were put into these violent and demeaning forced assimilation schools where they were beaten if they spoke their own language then forced to speak either English or French by the way that's another problem all of them struggle with is actually English versus French than Canada you get First Nations people who are isolated even further because they can only communicate in French but because they were given French Catholic school masters because the Catholic the Catholic Church wanted those Souls let me tell you they were motivated they just wanted it more what the Catholics were out there you know with their well organized nuns and priests and there were a lot of rapes and a lot of mysterious pregnancies and a lot of mysterious abortions and a lot of mysterious anal sex you know all the things that come with the Catholic Church having unlimited power over poor and helpless people in those kinds of circumstances and yes that that's all documented and it's all been through the courts in Canada now so believe me it's not my imagination running wild anyone can google this and find a huge stack of legally vetted documents so this isn't peer review these have been through the court system they've been fact-checking it Accord a law and settlements have been paid for them it says not just my opinion but the first generation to go through that trauma they generally actually did continue speaking their own language amongst themselves but they did not pass on the language to the next generation and then the next generation would grow up monolingual either only in English or only in French but again speaking those languages poorly so there is everywhere you go in Canada there's a distinctive First Nations accent and it's very hard for them to get a job and you know there's already racism against them but it is true if you have a if you have a stereotypical First Nations accent in most of Canada that's regarded as a huge liability I think much more than having a Chinese accent or you know many other or an Italian accent let's say an Italian accent is or a British accent is no barrier at all in Canada but the First Nations accent this is definitely part and parcel of this kind of racism of this and his legacy and now we're now we're to a third generation that in many ways wants to recapture the culture and language and heritage that was lost maybe you know their grandparents or their great-grandparents maybe there's some memory of the family of what the the language was the language and the mythology in history because at the end of the day you know being creeping a Jib way being mohawk it has to mean more than the Scott color of your skin it has to mean more than your family tree and the all the ways for it to be more meaningful really are connected to the language you know did you give an example this is a very real example I'm not being snide you know I went to a political protest of where it was all creep evil you know it could have said there could have been a feud na there were all First Nations people but the vast majority of were Cree and you know they played the drums and they chanted but I was studying Korea as a language at that time and it was there with my my wife is now my ex-wife and I just pointed out to her they're chanting but they're chanting nonsense words they know what this song is supposed to sound like but none of them can actually speak the language enough you know at this at this protest to sing in the Cree language so I mean you can imagine that for any other language you know you can kind of make noises that resemble what's singing frivolous but I said to her look you know I've read about this in real peer-reviewed articles real anthropological research this kind of song used to have lyrics this these songs were all about something and we do have you know a very small number of them were translated and recorded for history that way anthropologists or other researchers actually you know wrote down the words but we now have a generation of you know Native Americans creative way etc where the drum is still powerful the sound of the music is still powerful in that context that we're doing it is an act of political protest but it's Hollow it's Hollow in a very real sense because the words have lost their meaning on the flip side of that you know I used I shocked ask yourself this guy Isaac ask yourself by pointing out that when I was in Saskatchewan the Parliament there so that's the Parliament for the province the Parliament did not employ a single translator for any native language for creative way or ordinay or any of the others and so whenever someone stood up and spoke in a native language in Parliament it was not recorded it was not transcribed it was not hidden was neither record of history nor influence politics so the words that were being spoken in Parliament I mean though everything being said in English was being recorded everything he said in French was being recorded but whenever native people stood up and spoke in Cree it was being deleted from history because the government couldn't employ two people five people to record that history you don't even have to translate it you just have to have to have someone knows the language well enough to listen to a recording and then type out the words right that's transcription not translation they didn't even have that so that's the kind of very real erasure that's going on in a country where now when I put my my card into an ATM into a bank machine my choices are do you want English French or Chinese I don't have a choice for Korea Ojibwe or mohawk so that's that's the question facing Canada from my perspective as a white person the question is are we going to sign off on the slow-motion genocide on suffocating the last life out of these languages are we going to be the last generation that has even any any memory of what our grandpa grandparents and great-grandparents could speak of this heritage disappearing forever or are we gonna take a stand and try to try to turn the situation around and you know for Native people as they say is very different the the Cree people I knew a lot of them were very emotionally people but they were very emotionally [ __ ] up of the loss of language and their desire to reclaim and recapture the language and yet from coast to coast in Canada you see different different attempts some successful and and many failures at language sure for use so for you if you wanted one if you wanted one to dabble in it would definitely be a jib way a jib way is also known as Anna Schnieder vanish now bit moyen but a jib way I'm going to refer to it as a Jew if it's calm conversation but you know so a jib way one of the advantages that it exists both in the United States and Canada it exists on both sides of the border whereas Cree is entirely in Canada so it's more of an option for you and so a jib way has some institutional support from the University of Minnesota um n University of Minnesota and they do have at least one course of Pimsleur type course audio CD core stuff you learn the language so a Jew boy has a shot in America and in Canada and so for someone like you that that would be an option and you know within Canada Cree has the best chance the problem with Cree has spread out over a huge area and it me Cree is absolutely it's within one generation of extinction I mean it's now or never for create but sure it's it's in the best treatment in those languages and again sir the exception is normal when I'm talking about First Nations I'm talking about south of the Arctic First Nations it is indeed a totally different situation for the Inuit and other groups that are entirely you know on the ice people who live that far north where there were no trees people who people who eat seal meat we actually had a musician who won an award in downtown Toronto who was Inuit and when she accepted the award you know there the situation like a like an Oscar Awards and why she stood up at the podium she stood there and she said white people should wear more seal fur and eat more seal me because you know my cousins want to make more money other hunting seals and shingles and what white people don't buy this stuff anymore you know it's become unfashionable you know wearing fur that was her acceptance speech she won she won for some album she recorded those he goes and that's a moving message you know yeah maybe I should start wearing more seal skin and and polar polar bear fur polar bear cave would look great on me so yeah I just mentioned this is not some kind of stereotype but yeah their situation is much different so with with that exception I mean if you were interested in going north of the Arctic Circle you know really the far north then basically yeah Kree in a jib way and there are very very similar languages Korean Ojibwe so they eat each of them as a shot within Canada we have a hybrid language which is called og Cree Oh ji - C REE and that's even closer so to give an example if you chose to work on og Cree you could very easily cope with both Ojibwe and Cree so again that's that's an appealing option for someone like me okay maybe I can get the best of best of both worlds in this kind of thing but if you put it this way in Canada if we close down every single Department of Chinese literature it would not make a goddamn that a difference it's not like people in China would be saying oh no what is the future of Chinese literature going to be now that they've shut down the great department that studies Chinese literature in Vancouver and Toronto nobody gives a [ __ ] Canada's second-rate imitation of Chinese literary studies is never going to matter and the same would be true of German literature and you know font about Buddhism it's just not the case that people in Thailand are going to be worried about the future of Buddhism if Canada were to shut down every single academic department studying Buddhist philosophy it's gonna have zero impact on Thailand or Sri Lanka they don't give a [ __ ] and objectively from a global global perspective we can say it doesn't matter but guess what this whole world of Cree a jib way Mohawk it's hanging by a thread and if we don't take responsibility for it and step up in Canada nobody else is gonna do it it's just not the case that the great universities in Berlin and Paris are gonna step up here we in Canada put all of our money both in terms of education and high high culture policy just something like you know museums and the Opera and the ballet in Canada the government pours money into all that crap so that we can have a second-rate imitation of European culture so we can have the Toronto Ballet and the Vancouver Ballet and the Montreal Orchestra and you know whatever the I don't know the a de wapis get you know music festival and it's kind of stuff it's all about imitating European culture but the one thing that we're always gonna be first rate at is actually our own indigenous culture you know even if we're terrible even we do a terrible job we've been doing a terrible job you know we've been driving this culture to extinction you know nobody else in the world makes you know Inuit statues you know if this unique tradition of statuary made primarily out of the tusks of you know walruses and the whale bone in this kind of material completely unique art form okay we're not imitating anybody we're the best at that we're the best always gonna be the best you know anything that's really uniquely rooted in or growing out it even if it's modern because though I'm not a traditionalist I'm all for you know First Nations culture taking on bold new directions but whatever those new directions are if they're really uniquely Canadian that's what we need to have academically and and politically you know and culturally the the support for that's all we can ever be excellent act and if we [ __ ] this up it's over it's genocide if though it's the end game to cultural genocide you know it's not like Cree literature is gonna continue in Berlin or Beijing or anywhere else you know it's it's here or it's nowhere and I'm sure I could say the same thing with only minor modifications if we were talking about native tribe south of the border in the United States but as you know that's not the summer I just worked on First Nations in Canada so yeah say this like you talked about you know can this being particularly noteworthy for some of the architecture and artwork from native First Nations people and things like that is that something also that you find that the current generations are disconnected from you know whether you know I keep it a hundred percent real I'm not I'm not gonna [ __ ] you you know so our native people never built the the pyramids you know they never built a great monument like this like the pyramids of ancient Egypt I'm not someone who wants to exaggerate the glory of their of their of their architecture let's just stick with that example but architecture being used here as a shorthand for other forms of material culture I'm not something to a slide either way interestingly you know when my father was much younger probably when my father was was my age he did I remember I read one of his old books one of his books he wrote when he was relatively young and it was full of this really an insincere exaggeration of the greatness of the accomplishments of native Canadian art basically well my point is you know what is Canadian architecture historically if it's just an imitation of European architecture it's nothing then there is no Canadian architecture and for the most part that's true when you're talking about white people in Canada imitating European architecture there is no Canadian architecture if you even have a hybrid culture if you have a culture where it's European technology but working with native culture and need of culture appropriate in European building methods you could have a distinctive Canadian architecture growing out of that and that's basically what you had in in Mexico and that's actually the national pride of Mexico is there mixed culture is there culture that is neither indigenous European butt is a hybrid taking advantage of elements from from both sides of the ocean now there's also mythology about that the Mexicans want to make it seem like everyone was equal and of course the reality of colonialism and genocide and the Catholic Church has a lot more brunet however you can't take away this it is genuinely true Mexico has there is Mexican art and it's not Spanish art there is Mexican cuisine there's Mexican food and it's not Spanish cuisine and there is Mexican architecture and absolutely none of those things is true of Canada because the British Empire in Canada was not based on on a hybrid culture or a cooperative culture finding any of those things the the the culture in Canada was based on on absolute genocide I just mentioned as one example of that there were historically a few newspapers printed in Korea Ghibli Mohawk and these in these native languages they normally didn't didn't last very long and our National Archives you know destroyed them didn't even keep them you know our government didn't keep a copy and they disappeared from history no I did not look into every single example but I think I looked into every example for both Korean a Jib way at least I went I went to the archives you know looking into this of course you can do you can do a partial over the Internet but I also did a visit archives in person and talk to professor's so is there any trace of the newspapers that were published these languages no there's not why because the white people who control those institutions saw their role as the extinction the progressive extinguishment of those of those cultures and languages so it's not an accident you know those books were actually burned or thrown in the garbage and so on those newspapers were destroyed they were not kept for history because they thought the future of Canada was a was a whites-only future and again Mexico as bad as it was Mexico also had slavery and genocide and terrible things but there at least there was a vision of of a mixing of an inclusive and hybridizing cultural tendency and again another disaster is Brazil but you know in Brazil also they they basically assume the people were now we're going to intermarry so I'm there were alternatives to this outright this conversation like remember 2 to 3 light conversations that were like buried in that the archives that Matt Colombo's you know failed zookeeper you know history but um there's this one conversation that I've never thought about before now I I reflect on a completely different way and it was literally like like a fragment of like a five minute like conversation but um we were basically discussing you know we had we had basically rescued five new wolves from this place that got close I was like a big operation whether he like sees hundreds of animals but they had five great wolves like somehow and basically what the organization want to do is they wanted what what they were thinking about doing was they were on they were exploring the idea of because they had numbered this before but allowed allowing the try to I named the Wolves as kind of gesture of respect and I remember the conversation we were having was basically how the meander didn't think that was a good idea because he felt like you know literally if we asked them to vote this is exact quote what I want to name all the Wolves chief justic it was like some leader historical figure his tribe um he was like he was like what we should do is we should just picked the Native American needs ourselves and offered up and just like will will decide what native culture is and then in their interests right yeah yeah yeah no I mean in some ways that's the that's definitely the tragedy of maybe the nineteen 1980s attitude in a nutshell yeah we had a situation that my wife started researching and then she never she never got that far in the research but a bizarre situation on one reservation where the the Indian agent that was the term used in Canadian government so that the man who was basically the the dictator he had total power over the given plot of land and all the natives living on it the Indian agent decided to take a tribe and perform a eugenic experiment where he separated the members of the tribe whom he considered genetically superior and had them interbreed and gave them better education and did intelligence tests and this kind of thing and as you can imagine his idea of genetic superiority he boiled down to how much they resembled white people as opposed to resembling native people and still to this day that tribe is divided by that experiment the people who were genetically superior are one plot of land and the people who were genetically inferior on another you know next to each other and they still have a legal dispute over who owns what farmland you know some of the you know some of the losers and that eugenic experiment want more of the land back that was taken away from them because the best land was given to those people so I mean these are the games that that white people played we have this kind of stupid saying in English you know power corrupts and you know sort of infinite power absolute power corrupts absolutely human reality is a lot more complicated than that I think the the greatest tragedy is that that guy he probably really sincerely believed he was helping those people we did it and you know it's not that well-known but it's if you google it you'll find evidence confirm this that the famous left-wing economist John Maynard Keynes he wasn't that left-wing but he's claimed the left-wing claimed him as left-wing now but anyway he was let certainly left-of-center John Maynard Keynes famous economist he went to his grave preaching eugenics he felt the science of eugenics was going to be the salvation of mankind so yeah obviously he wasn't he wasn't Adolf Hitler or may hell but it's amazing that very often those people it's not that absolute power has corrupted them absolutely it's that they're sincere believers in ideals that are in a word evil banished in the first captive management places I worked at was in Winchester Idaho which is on a Nez Perce good I remember I think there was a more accurate French pronunciation out there but um their facility was actually on their land and you know I think growing up you know especially reading books and watching movies you get this idea that Native Americans are specifically interested in conservation efforts regarding like native animals and things like that right you know specifically highlighting things like you know a background a tradition that like incorporates them in a big way I can especially think of one movie that was directly tied to this captive management place that I had were a big part of the movie was talking about you know working with them this one tribe you know to come up with you know they were supposedly integrally a part part of like natural program that they were running they're making decisions about the pack and things like that and some of the ceremonies and things like that they held surrounding bringing those wolves onto the land but that was kind of like what I was coming in there with and the experience that he had with them from the experience from the perspective of a 21 year old person biology student who care deeply about conservation and it honestly never seriously met a Native American person in his entire life is completely negative I mean we had you know all the people I think can cause problems there were First Nations people of that tribe who we had rules like they were they were basically allowed to kind of sort of do whatever they wanted on the land because it was their land but um we did have people who would you know they would completely go off the path and completely go into places where they would actually scare the wolves and things like that that we had to deal with and that was there was some like pushback with management and not and ask the people on the ground as far as what to do about that and things like that the one thing I remember those like it was my first time experiencing like someone with a name like Bob white eagle remember that name specifically that was that was absolutely fascinating to me some of the names like um BS in like I remembered stories from other people about you know you know a particular Nez Perce person upbringing his grandchildren on the site and basically walking through the entire visitor center and basically just talking like a number of times mentioning oh I hope that I hope they made the white men pay a lot for this and things like that I remember one experience particularly where I'm we had a we had a green outhouse basically on site and one of the things I don't know why we did it but we basically dumped it out on the land like at some point and I remember specifically on the manager said if any Nez Perce people come here don't tell them that we did that who said we don't like what we don't want white man [ __ ] on our land but um so I had so I had this and you know basically from my perspective like a lot of stories from when I talk about the management weren't actually true about them being involved and stuff and from know the wolf misleading of itself they weren't really respectful from that so that was really interesting to me to see that kind of contrast what I run you know well okay I think I think that Congress wins you you kind of in your mind a bit blown the first time we talked about this so I remember we didn't it wasn't like we had a hostile conversation but I was really saying to you look you know like First Nations people Native American people they're they're fundamentally people like you know they're not elves they're not you know they're not guardian spirits of the 4s they're you know I remember so for you at that time you were kind of putting together reflecting on this experience in your past and my very kind of political realist view of saying look you know for a lot of them the land they've been they've been given finally you know normally after a legal battle with the federal government the land they now own that's the only way they have to make money and they're looking at all the ways to try to earn a living out of that land whether it's forestry or other you know economically and ecologically exploitative practices for the most part you know they're normally not looking at running the land as a non-profit National Park and if they were you know it would be a national park it wouldn't be it wouldn't be their land so those are tensions I was really familiar with from Canada I remember the first time you and I talked about that you were a little taken aback you know just just like it's a different perspective you think about everybody saying yeah you know I think about it but yeah it's a very strange kind of a very strange kind of moral presupposition that white people demand that First Nations have you know a code of ethics that white people themselves have never had they say okay this is your land this is how you're supposed to earn a living now don't earn a living instead to be self-sacrificing and live in poverty for the sake of habitat conservation and that's that's not what that land is for you know we have that problem even with you know endangered well yeah I guess endangered is the word but endangered sea creatures on the west coast of Canada was a real question well why why don't First Nations people have the right to eat abalone abalone is this kind giant clam like creature at the bottom of the ocean it's like well the government decided that it's better for the government if native peoples land is reserved for abalone but if it's actually their land why don't they have the right to eat their own abalone the same way you know white people have been taking away all the abalone all this time and hiding them at the edge of extinction so these are the these the contradictions inherent in the situation but sure you know if it's their land if they own it then it's you know it's not a national park and if it's a national park then it's not their land they don't own it so they're mutually States yeah it was so weird you wanna go yeah well the first thing I thought about like I remember the first thing I thought about after that was kind of your reflection yeah you're right I didn't I hadn't expected that on a big level but I remembered the manager the manager who worked there one of one of his big heroes stories was come basically coming back at night and finding a person ations person of that tribe on the land basically cutting down trees like on our site you know cuz logging logging is a big big thing down in Idaho man I remember like you had this whole story about being at gunpoint and stuff like that and talking the guy down and you know it was this completely negative like you know hear over his bill in the situation that let you know that particularly die inflection completely put another spin on right who owns the tree anyway right yeah I remember uh we my wife and I now my ex-wife divorced my ex-wife and I we we bumped into this guy in Taiwan who had a PhD I think it was a PhD in anthropology and he was still a true believer in this idea that somehow Native people are not real people he really regarded them as elves or spirits of the forest and you know when we were talking about deforestation I really blew his mind who's talking about it both in Latin America and in Southeast Asia and I said look you know the deforestation you're talking about when Native people aren't driven off their land when they're not driven off the land genocide aliy or what have you then they are the source of the deforestation they're the ones the trees and and making money out of it and I said you know what what part of this don't you understand he really did have a view and it's it's it sounds ridiculous when you explain it so clearly he was a white man from an American University with a PhD he really did seem to think that cutting down trees and making money out of it is somehow something that only white skinned people do and not brown skinned people in asia and not put skinned people in South America and I guess it's just not true now conversely you know I mean I've also had some really surreal conversations with with Native people for as native people where I've had to say to them you know you're not the only people use bows and arrows like in the history of England using bows and arrows is a huge part of history do you know where to say look I know you think about this as if our culture is so different from yours but you know really I'm not joking that's that's quite a tense conversation because I remember particularly one one woman who was at my university she seemed to regard the bow and arrow as if it was a unique symbol only of Native Americans I was like no you took the whole history of Europe and most of of Asia of East Asia was also there was a major part of warfare right up until we had gunpowder so anyway yeah some of these things we have in common making money at a deforestation killing our fellow man with bows and arrows you know venison
the province the Parliament did not employ a single translator for any native language for creative way or ordinary or any of the others and so whenever someone stood up and spoke in a native language in Parliament it was not recorded it was not transcribed it was not it was neither recorded history nor influence politics so that's the kind of very real erasure that's going on in a country where now when I put my my card into an ATM into a bank machine my choices are do you want English French or Chinese I don't have a choice for Korea Ojibwe or Mohawk so that's that's the question facing Canada from my perspective as a white person the question is are we going to sign off on the slow-motion genocide on suffocating the last life out of these languages are we going to be the last generation that has even any any memory of what our grandpa grandparents and great-grandparents could speak of this heritage disappearing forever or are we gonna take a stand and try to try to turn the situation around but if you put it this way in Canada if we close down every single Department of Chinese literature it would not make a goddamn that a difference it's not like people in China would be saying oh no what is the future of Chinese literature going to be now that they've shut down the great department that studies Chinese literature in Vancouver in Toronto but guess what this whole world of Cree a jib way mohawk it's hanging by a thread and if we don't take responsibility for it and step up in Canada nobody else is gonna do it about us Yin this is Jay costly so lately the host of cruelty free cosplay is that the channel they get it wrong okay it's not a name it's a thing it's an ideal but it is what the channel is called right so you could I mean you could you know we brand to a vegan zookeeper Club a vegan fox hunting Society you know we got it you guys people have been watching my channel for four years will remember that Jay came on and we talked a lot about the ethics of what I call wildlife management paradigm so animals in the wild animals in zoos the role of research the different conflicting factors and how zoos operate and you know I basically grew up in the museum field and museums like zoos of this really weird mix of for-profit tendencies you know just like in some ways museums are the same as Disneyland they just trying to make the most money possible out of a out of a crummy attraction in some ways their educational in some ways they're trying to be research-based or academic and likewise we talked about zoos both from this vegan perspective and just institutional and political perspective so if you guys think you recognize him that's where you know I'm from but he's also always been a cosplay enthusiasts and now his channel Bo cosplay and very often the overlap between cosplaying and vegan concerns so look this is an extraordinary day because you actually wrote down some things you want to talk to me about some questions let's start with no more than less do actually want to ask you a question about something that you would send on your videos specifically about the Creed I think I think it was about the Kree anyway sure but I'm I remember once I r1 video you had said that you had had the experience because you know you studied you studied those languages and you had the experience of you know talking to people within those tribes who it would not become so strong with the language and how they had to express the desire that they they basically wish that they had had more that training that they were more attacked with that part of who they were in a sense and I remember I just remember you had kind of that one little no I know but is there any particular aspect of languages with it well that that's basically the tragedy of the whole current generation for the create at the achieve way and I'd say most most of the large ethnic groups and native Canadians now there are exceptions so I'll just say so what what you've just said this is a huge sort of tragedy or struggle for this generation for the creative way not particularly for the Inuit being you it are up in the Arctic they have a different situation not for a couple of the groups on the far east coast so there are some exceptions but the the bulk of Canada that's the tragedy and the tragedy runs as follows they had both three generations that were put into these violent and demeaning forced assimilation schools where they were beaten if they spoke their own language then forced to speak either English or French by the way that's another problem all of them struggle with is actually English versus French than Canada you get First Nations people who are isolated even further because they can only communicate in French but because they were given French Catholic school masters because the Catholic the Catholic Church wanted those Souls let me tell you they were motivated they just wanted it more what the Catholics were out there you know with their well organized nuns and priests and there were a lot of rapes and a lot of mysterious pregnancies and a lot of mysterious abortions and a lot of mysterious anal sex you know all the things that come with the Catholic Church having unlimited power over poor and helpless people in those kinds of circumstances and yes that that's all documented and it's all been through the courts in Canada now so believe me it's not my imagination running wild anyone can google this and find a huge stack of legally vetted documents so this isn't peer review these have been through the court system they've been fact-checking it Accord a law and settlements have been paid for them it says not just my opinion but the first generation to go through that trauma they generally actually did continue speaking their own language amongst themselves but they did not pass on the language to the next generation and then the next generation would grow up monolingual either only in English or only in French but again speaking those languages poorly so there is everywhere you go in Canada there's a distinctive First Nations accent and it's very hard for them to get a job and you know there's already racism against them but it is true if you have a if you have a stereotypical First Nations accent in most of Canada that's regarded as a huge liability I think much more than having a Chinese accent or you know many other or an Italian accent let's say an Italian accent is or a British accent is no barrier at all in Canada but the First Nations accent this is definitely part and parcel of this kind of racism of this and his legacy and now we're now we're to a third generation that in many ways wants to recapture the culture and language and heritage that was lost maybe you know their grandparents or their great-grandparents maybe there's some memory of the family of what the the language was the language and the mythology in history because at the end of the day you know being creeping a Jib way being mohawk it has to mean more than the Scott color of your skin it has to mean more than your family tree and the all the ways for it to be more meaningful really are connected to the language you know did you give an example this is a very real example I'm not being snide you know I went to a political protest of where it was all creep evil you know it could have said there could have been a feud na there were all First Nations people but the vast majority of were Cree and you know they played the drums and they chanted but I was studying Korea as a language at that time and it was there with my my wife is now my ex-wife and I just pointed out to her they're chanting but they're chanting nonsense words they know what this song is supposed to sound like but none of them can actually speak the language enough you know at this at this protest to sing in the Cree language so I mean you can imagine that for any other language you know you can kind of make noises that resemble what's singing frivolous but I said to her look you know I've read about this in real peer-reviewed articles real anthropological research this kind of song used to have lyrics this these songs were all about something and we do have you know a very small number of them were translated and recorded for history that way anthropologists or other researchers actually you know wrote down the words but we now have a generation of you know Native Americans creative way etc where the drum is still powerful the sound of the music is still powerful in that context that we're doing it is an act of political protest but it's Hollow it's Hollow in a very real sense because the words have lost their meaning on the flip side of that you know I used I shocked ask yourself this guy Isaac ask yourself by pointing out that when I was in Saskatchewan the Parliament there so that's the Parliament for the province the Parliament did not employ a single translator for any native language for creative way or ordinay or any of the others and so whenever someone stood up and spoke in a native language in Parliament it was not recorded it was not transcribed it was not hidden was neither record of history nor influence politics so the words that were being spoken in Parliament I mean though everything being said in English was being recorded everything he said in French was being recorded but whenever native people stood up and spoke in Cree it was being deleted from history because the government couldn't employ two people five people to record that history you don't even have to translate it you just have to have to have someone knows the language well enough to listen to a recording and then type out the words right that's transcription not translation they didn't even have that so that's the kind of very real erasure that's going on in a country where now when I put my my card into an ATM into a bank machine my choices are do you want English French or Chinese I don't have a choice for Korea Ojibwe or mohawk so that's that's the question facing Canada from my perspective as a white person the question is are we going to sign off on the slow-motion genocide on suffocating the last life out of these languages are we going to be the last generation that has even any any memory of what our grandpa grandparents and great-grandparents could speak of this heritage disappearing forever or are we gonna take a stand and try to try to turn the situation around and you know for Native people as they say is very different the the Cree people I knew a lot of them were very emotionally people but they were very emotionally [ __ ] up of the loss of language and their desire to reclaim and recapture the language and yet from coast to coast in Canada you see different different attempts some successful and and many failures at language sure for use so for you if you wanted one if you wanted one to dabble in it would definitely be a jib way a jib way is also known as Anna Schnieder vanish now bit moyen but a jib way I'm going to refer to it as a Jew if it's calm conversation but you know so a jib way one of the advantages that it exists both in the United States and Canada it exists on both sides of the border whereas Cree is entirely in Canada so it's more of an option for you and so a jib way has some institutional support from the University of Minnesota um n University of Minnesota and they do have at least one course of Pimsleur type course audio CD core stuff you learn the language so a Jew boy has a shot in America and in Canada and so for someone like you that that would be an option and you know within Canada Cree has the best chance the problem with Cree has spread out over a huge area and it me Cree is absolutely it's within one generation of extinction I mean it's now or never for create but sure it's it's in the best treatment in those languages and again sir the exception is normal when I'm talking about First Nations I'm talking about south of the Arctic First Nations it is indeed a totally different situation for the Inuit and other groups that are entirely you know on the ice people who live that far north where there were no trees people who people who eat seal meat we actually had a musician who won an award in downtown Toronto who was Inuit and when she accepted the award you know there the situation like a like an Oscar Awards and why she stood up at the podium she stood there and she said white people should wear more seal fur and eat more seal me because you know my cousins want to make more money other hunting seals and shingles and what white people don't buy this stuff anymore you know it's become unfashionable you know wearing fur that was her acceptance speech she won she won for some album she recorded those he goes and that's a moving message you know yeah maybe I should start wearing more seal skin and and polar polar bear fur polar bear cave would look great on me so yeah I just mentioned this is not some kind of stereotype but yeah their situation is much different so with with that exception I mean if you were interested in going north of the Arctic Circle you know really the far north then basically yeah Kree in a jib way and there are very very similar languages Korean Ojibwe so they eat each of them as a shot within Canada we have a hybrid language which is called og Cree Oh ji - C REE and that's even closer so to give an example if you chose to work on og Cree you could very easily cope with both Ojibwe and Cree so again that's that's an appealing option for someone like me okay maybe I can get the best of best of both worlds in this kind of thing but if you put it this way in Canada if we close down every single Department of Chinese literature it would not make a goddamn that a difference it's not like people in China would be saying oh no what is the future of Chinese literature going to be now that they've shut down the great department that studies Chinese literature in Vancouver and Toronto nobody gives a [ __ ] Canada's second-rate imitation of Chinese literary studies is never going to matter and the same would be true of German literature and you know font about Buddhism it's just not the case that people in Thailand are going to be worried about the future of Buddhism if Canada were to shut down every single academic department studying Buddhist philosophy it's gonna have zero impact on Thailand or Sri Lanka they don't give a [ __ ] and objectively from a global global perspective we can say it doesn't matter but guess what this whole world of Cree a jib way Mohawk it's hanging by a thread and if we don't take responsibility for it and step up in Canada nobody else is gonna do it it's just not the case that the great universities in Berlin and Paris are gonna step up here we in Canada put all of our money both in terms of education and high high culture policy just something like you know museums and the Opera and the ballet in Canada the government pours money into all that crap so that we can have a second-rate imitation of European culture so we can have the Toronto Ballet and the Vancouver Ballet and the Montreal Orchestra and you know whatever the I don't know the a de wapis get you know music festival and it's kind of stuff it's all about imitating European culture but the one thing that we're always gonna be first rate at is actually our own indigenous culture you know even if we're terrible even we do a terrible job we've been doing a terrible job you know we've been driving this culture to extinction you know nobody else in the world makes you know Inuit statues you know if this unique tradition of statuary made primarily out of the tusks of you know walruses and the whale bone in this kind of material completely unique art form okay we're not imitating anybody we're the best at that we're the best always gonna be the best you know anything that's really uniquely rooted in or growing out it even if it's modern because though I'm not a traditionalist I'm all for you know First Nations culture taking on bold new directions but whatever those new directions are if they're really uniquely Canadian that's what we need to have academically and and politically you know and culturally the the support for that's all we can ever be excellent act and if we [ __ ] this up it's over it's genocide if though it's the end game to cultural genocide you know it's not like Cree literature is gonna continue in Berlin or Beijing or anywhere else you know it's it's here or it's nowhere and I'm sure I could say the same thing with only minor modifications if we were talking about native tribe south of the border in the United States but as you know that's not the summer I just worked on First Nations in Canada so yeah say this like you talked about you know can this being particularly noteworthy for some of the architecture and artwork from native First Nations people and things like that is that something also that you find that the current generations are disconnected from you know whether you know I keep it a hundred percent real I'm not I'm not gonna [ __ ] you you know so our native people never built the the pyramids you know they never built a great monument like this like the pyramids of ancient Egypt I'm not someone who wants to exaggerate the glory of their of their of their architecture let's just stick with that example but architecture being used here as a shorthand for other forms of material culture I'm not something to a slide either way interestingly you know when my father was much younger probably when my father was was my age he did I remember I read one of his old books one of his books he wrote when he was relatively young and it was full of this really an insincere exaggeration of the greatness of the accomplishments of native Canadian art basically well my point is you know what is Canadian architecture historically if it's just an imitation of European architecture it's nothing then there is no Canadian architecture and for the most part that's true when you're talking about white people in Canada imitating European architecture there is no Canadian architecture if you even have a hybrid culture if you have a culture where it's European technology but working with native culture and need of culture appropriate in European building methods you could have a distinctive Canadian architecture growing out of that and that's basically what you had in in Mexico and that's actually the national pride of Mexico is there mixed culture is there culture that is neither indigenous European butt is a hybrid taking advantage of elements from from both sides of the ocean now there's also mythology about that the Mexicans want to make it seem like everyone was equal and of course the reality of colonialism and genocide and the Catholic Church has a lot more brunet however you can't take away this it is genuinely true Mexico has there is Mexican art and it's not Spanish art there is Mexican cuisine there's Mexican food and it's not Spanish cuisine and there is Mexican architecture and absolutely none of those things is true of Canada because the British Empire in Canada was not based on on a hybrid culture or a cooperative culture finding any of those things the the the culture in Canada was based on on absolute genocide I just mentioned as one example of that there were historically a few newspapers printed in Korea Ghibli Mohawk and these in these native languages they normally didn't didn't last very long and our National Archives you know destroyed them didn't even keep them you know our government didn't keep a copy and they disappeared from history no I did not look into every single example but I think I looked into every example for both Korean a Jib way at least I went I went to the archives you know looking into this of course you can do you can do a partial over the Internet but I also did a visit archives in person and talk to professor's so is there any trace of the newspapers that were published these languages no there's not why because the white people who control those institutions saw their role as the extinction the progressive extinguishment of those of those cultures and languages so it's not an accident you know those books were actually burned or thrown in the garbage and so on those newspapers were destroyed they were not kept for history because they thought the future of Canada was a was a whites-only future and again Mexico as bad as it was Mexico also had slavery and genocide and terrible things but there at least there was a vision of of a mixing of an inclusive and hybridizing cultural tendency and again another disaster is Brazil but you know in Brazil also they they basically assume the people were now we're going to intermarry so I'm there were alternatives to this outright this conversation like remember 2 to 3 light conversations that were like buried in that the archives that Matt Colombo's you know failed zookeeper you know history but um there's this one conversation that I've never thought about before now I I reflect on a completely different way and it was literally like like a fragment of like a five minute like conversation but um we were basically discussing you know we had we had basically rescued five new wolves from this place that got close I was like a big operation whether he like sees hundreds of animals but they had five great wolves like somehow and basically what the organization want to do is they wanted what what they were thinking about doing was they were on they were exploring the idea of because they had numbered this before but allowed allowing the try to I named the Wolves as kind of gesture of respect and I remember the conversation we were having was basically how the meander didn't think that was a good idea because he felt like you know literally if we asked them to vote this is exact quote what I want to name all the Wolves chief justic it was like some leader historical figure his tribe um he was like he was like what we should do is we should just picked the Native American needs ourselves and offered up and just like will will decide what native culture is and then in their interests right yeah yeah yeah no I mean in some ways that's the that's definitely the tragedy of maybe the nineteen 1980s attitude in a nutshell yeah we had a situation that my wife started researching and then she never she never got that far in the research but a bizarre situation on one reservation where the the Indian agent that was the term used in Canadian government so that the man who was basically the the dictator he had total power over the given plot of land and all the natives living on it the Indian agent decided to take a tribe and perform a eugenic experiment where he separated the members of the tribe whom he considered genetically superior and had them interbreed and gave them better education and did intelligence tests and this kind of thing and as you can imagine his idea of genetic superiority he boiled down to how much they resembled white people as opposed to resembling native people and still to this day that tribe is divided by that experiment the people who were genetically superior are one plot of land and the people who were genetically inferior on another you know next to each other and they still have a legal dispute over who owns what farmland you know some of the you know some of the losers and that eugenic experiment want more of the land back that was taken away from them because the best land was given to those people so I mean these are the games that that white people played we have this kind of stupid saying in English you know power corrupts and you know sort of infinite power absolute power corrupts absolutely human reality is a lot more complicated than that I think the the greatest tragedy is that that guy he probably really sincerely believed he was helping those people we did it and you know it's not that well-known but it's if you google it you'll find evidence confirm this that the famous left-wing economist John Maynard Keynes he wasn't that left-wing but he's claimed the left-wing claimed him as left-wing now but anyway he was let certainly left-of-center John Maynard Keynes famous economist he went to his grave preaching eugenics he felt the science of eugenics was going to be the salvation of mankind so yeah obviously he wasn't he wasn't Adolf Hitler or may hell but it's amazing that very often those people it's not that absolute power has corrupted them absolutely it's that they're sincere believers in ideals that are in a word evil banished in the first captive management places I worked at was in Winchester Idaho which is on a Nez Perce good I remember I think there was a more accurate French pronunciation out there but um their facility was actually on their land and you know I think growing up you know especially reading books and watching movies you get this idea that Native Americans are specifically interested in conservation efforts regarding like native animals and things like that right you know specifically highlighting things like you know a background a tradition that like incorporates them in a big way I can especially think of one movie that was directly tied to this captive management place that I had were a big part of the movie was talking about you know working with them this one tribe you know to come up with you know they were supposedly integrally a part part of like natural program that they were running they're making decisions about the pack and things like that and some of the ceremonies and things like that they held surrounding bringing those wolves onto the land but that was kind of like what I was coming in there with and the experience that he had with them from the experience from the perspective of a 21 year old person biology student who care deeply about conservation and it honestly never seriously met a Native American person in his entire life is completely negative I mean we had you know all the people I think can cause problems there were First Nations people of that tribe who we had rules like they were they were basically allowed to kind of sort of do whatever they wanted on the land because it was their land but um we did have people who would you know they would completely go off the path and completely go into places where they would actually scare the wolves and things like that that we had to deal with and that was there was some like pushback with management and not and ask the people on the ground as far as what to do about that and things like that the one thing I remember those like it was my first time experiencing like someone with a name like Bob white eagle remember that name specifically that was that was absolutely fascinating to me some of the names like um BS in like I remembered stories from other people about you know you know a particular Nez Perce person upbringing his grandchildren on the site and basically walking through the entire visitor center and basically just talking like a number of times mentioning oh I hope that I hope they made the white men pay a lot for this and things like that I remember one experience particularly where I'm we had a we had a green outhouse basically on site and one of the things I don't know why we did it but we basically dumped it out on the land like at some point and I remember specifically on the manager said if any Nez Perce people come here don't tell them that we did that who said we don't like what we don't want white man [ __ ] on our land but um so I had so I had this and you know basically from my perspective like a lot of stories from when I talk about the management weren't actually true about them being involved and stuff and from know the wolf misleading of itself they weren't really respectful from that so that was really interesting to me to see that kind of contrast what I run you know well okay I think I think that Congress wins you you kind of in your mind a bit blown the first time we talked about this so I remember we didn't it wasn't like we had a hostile conversation but I was really saying to you look you know like First Nations people Native American people they're they're fundamentally people like you know they're not elves they're not you know they're not guardian spirits of the 4s they're you know I remember so for you at that time you were kind of putting together reflecting on this experience in your past and my very kind of political realist view of saying look you know for a lot of them the land they've been they've been given finally you know normally after a legal battle with the federal government the land they now own that's the only way they have to make money and they're looking at all the ways to try to earn a living out of that land whether it's forestry or other you know economically and ecologically exploitative practices for the most part you know they're normally not looking at running the land as a non-profit National Park and if they were you know it would be a national park it wouldn't be it wouldn't be their land so those are tensions I was really familiar with from Canada I remember the first time you and I talked about that you were a little taken aback you know just just like it's a different perspective you think about everybody saying yeah you know I think about it but yeah it's a very strange kind of a very strange kind of moral presupposition that white people demand that First Nations have you know a code of ethics that white people themselves have never had they say okay this is your land this is how you're supposed to earn a living now don't earn a living instead to be self-sacrificing and live in poverty for the sake of habitat conservation and that's that's not what that land is for you know we have that problem even with you know endangered well yeah I guess endangered is the word but endangered sea creatures on the west coast of Canada was a real question well why why don't First Nations people have the right to eat abalone abalone is this kind giant clam like creature at the bottom of the ocean it's like well the government decided that it's better for the government if native peoples land is reserved for abalone but if it's actually their land why don't they have the right to eat their own abalone the same way you know white people have been taking away all the abalone all this time and hiding them at the edge of extinction so these are the these the contradictions inherent in the situation but sure you know if it's their land if they own it then it's you know it's not a national park and if it's a national park then it's not their land they don't own it so they're mutually States yeah it was so weird you wanna go yeah well the first thing I thought about like I remember the first thing I thought about after that was kind of your reflection yeah you're right I didn't I hadn't expected that on a big level but I remembered the manager the manager who worked there one of one of his big heroes stories was come basically coming back at night and finding a person ations person of that tribe on the land basically cutting down trees like on our site you know cuz logging logging is a big big thing down in Idaho man I remember like you had this whole story about being at gunpoint and stuff like that and talking the guy down and you know it was this completely negative like you know hear over his bill in the situation that let you know that particularly die inflection completely put another spin on right who owns the tree anyway right yeah I remember uh we my wife and I now my ex-wife divorced my ex-wife and I we we bumped into this guy in Taiwan who had a PhD I think it was a PhD in anthropology and he was still a true believer in this idea that somehow Native people are not real people he really regarded them as elves or spirits of the forest and you know when we were talking about deforestation I really blew his mind who's talking about it both in Latin America and in Southeast Asia and I said look you know the deforestation you're talking about when Native people aren't driven off their land when they're not driven off the land genocide aliy or what have you then they are the source of the deforestation they're the ones the trees and and making money out of it and I said you know what what part of this don't you understand he really did have a view and it's it's it sounds ridiculous when you explain it so clearly he was a white man from an American University with a PhD he really did seem to think that cutting down trees and making money out of it is somehow something that only white skinned people do and not brown skinned people in asia and not put skinned people in South America and I guess it's just not true now conversely you know I mean I've also had some really surreal conversations with with Native people for as native people where I've had to say to them you know you're not the only people use bows and arrows like in the history of England using bows and arrows is a huge part of history do you know where to say look I know you think about this as if our culture is so different from yours but you know really I'm not joking that's that's quite a tense conversation because I remember particularly one one woman who was at my university she seemed to regard the bow and arrow as if it was a unique symbol only of Native Americans I was like no you took the whole history of Europe and most of of Asia of East Asia was also there was a major part of warfare right up until we had gunpowder so anyway yeah some of these things we have in common making money at a deforestation killing our fellow man with bows and arrows you know venison