Everyone Knew: Canada's Residential Schools.

the new york times
has now done in the year 2021 what canada's public broadcasters what canada's private sector broadcasters have failed to do for decades they have made the question of the 20th century's forced assimilation and genocide of indigenous people matter there's a detail in the midst of the new podcast the new york times put out just yesterday that i think will catch many american listeners by surprise many european listeners by surprise and so on probably many administrators at the united nations many people whose whole careers are in the field of human rights law a lot of those people live in new york city because the united nations across new york city a lot of them will be caught by surprised when they hear the anecdote of a newborn baby being incinerated in an oven oh well all of a sudden this starts to sound like the holocaust well of course scenario is much more different than the holocaust then that description might at first suggest the oven in question was a furnace used to heat a building wasn't a concentration camp it was a school you can get into all kinds of details to differentiate the two however the new york times has reported as never before that canada's so-called system of residential schools did involve putting people into ovens that it did involve putting dead bodies into unmarked graves that it did involve cutting holes in the ice on the surface of a river to stuff corpses into the water where they would never be seen again oh the title of this video is everybody knew and we're going to talk a little bit about what i mean by everybody and what it means to know when i was a child i remember my father frankly freaked out in response to a news story um hi guys so i am willing to uh chitchat with people in the audience but i do have a lot to say as you can imagine so welcome to the show and thank you for the donation anyone has a salient or frankly question i'll be i'll be happy enough to get to it um in due course i remember my father freaked out over what was basically a news story about a black and white photograph taken in germany during the nazi era and i forget what point of the photograph was i was showing some event or maybe just even a family posing in front of their shop or something but the photograph captured graffiti in the background so you know graffiti written on a wall of a city somewhere in germany and if you zoomed in on the details of graffiti you could see in german that someone had written that jews deserve to be put into a particular concentration camp that was written on the wall and my father flipped out at this because he said don't you realize this is evidence that they knew that the germans knew that everybody knew that whoever wrote this graffiti and whoever was seeing this graffiti going down the street they knew the significance of the name of that concentration camp they knew the significance of people being put into the concentration camp and so on now this reflects i mean my father grew up very much in the post-war era it reflects the very strange mix of naivete and cynicism he had his whole life but i remember saying to him you know barry i did not call him dad i called the vice versa said you know barry have you ever sat down and tried to work out an estimate of how many people were employed at these concentration camps and at these extermination camps and you have to go beyond just the staff who were on site like what about the people who were driving trucks back and forth to them to provide them with food and provisions you have to kind of work out your estimate a bit for how many people really involved on a day-to-day basis or on a once per month basis and have you looked at where the staff lived and where their kids went to school and so on like they weren't completely isolated from the rest of german society and of course beyond above and beyond that you can look at how these issues were actually represented even within the nazi party itself um i think it's a gross misconception to imagine that the holocaust was a secret it wasn't even a secret in a book written by adolf hitler called mein kampf it's just ridiculous to pretend how could people at the time have read mein kampf and voted for adolf hitler and supported this party and and they just really weren't clear on what what the plan was with these concentration camps like you know my father wasn't kidding i think his whole generation they grew up with this really sick justification for why we had switched from being such uh dire enemies of the germans to suddenly being their allies you know i mean like the alliance with west germany against east germany and russia it's so rapid and the convenient excuse was well they didn't know nobody knew like it was a secret i mean how again just you know what i challenged how can you be so naive and then conversely if you actually believe this was a secret like in the same sense that like a cia operation is top secret why would this why would this piece of graffiti you know put the lie to that now a totally different side of the world totally different episode totally different ethical issues involved i've dealt with that again and again when americans talk about the bombing of laos being a secret war you know american foreign policy in laos and cambodia it's like i can show you right now a film clip of richard nixon giving a press conference standing in front of a map of laos pointing to it same with cambodia see like i can show you the page in richard nixon's autobiography where he's talking with us how can you possibly perceive something that was openly presented and discussed at white house press conferences covered in the newspapers and so on how and you know something that was the the subject of public protest marches you know in new york city in washington and definitely in ottawa canada definitely toronto i mean to say we had them too how how can you say this was a secret a secret war what does that mean what are we doing ethically intellectually or even philosophically in disclaiming that we didn't know you know now this this latter issue uh this latter example relates back to the first one the main topic of this video in a dynamic way my parents knew all about vietnam my parents knew all about cambodia my parents knew all about the bombing of laos they didn't care about first nations why to my parents by the way my father ethnically white my mother ethnically jewish both of them born and raised in canada both of them university educated what would have been harder for them to know about and which issue would it have been harder or easier for them to make a decisive difference in public policy on sorry that's a convoluted sense like really from where my parents were living in canada what difference can they possibly make in the history of vietnam and history or cambodian history of laos right what does their opinion matter what can they do but what can they know about what can they do about the cree the ojibwe the mohawk the dna the inuit canada's first nations people and then think about also the span of my parents lives how many years did they care about vietnam was it five years was it ten years was it fifteen years i don't know maybe it was five years you know what i mean it's it should really matter the potential for them to make a difference you know for just one tribe or for all indigenous people again over 50 years over 70 years they live long lives right and those issues really are decided in ottawa to a lesser extent in toronto and montreal you know what cities in canada the fate of vietnam cambodia and laos right we have nothing to do my parents could have known about what was happening in canada's residential schools they could have known what was happening in our process of force assimilation and genocide right they could have known because i knew [Laughter] i could really say that and it was a huge divide between us they could have known they could have cared and they didn't and why share with everyone in the audience uh wicked energy thanks me for my response to foot soldiers video well thanks it's nice to know nice to know someone appreciate it um i'm happy to pause every so often and we'll respond to your questions if you guys have anything to say on topic it's also great if you guys want to hit the thumbs up we'll have more people join the audience while the broadcast is ongoing that is really the only difference that it makes more thumbs up means that basically my video gets advertised more to people who already subscribe to my channel or have already been to my channel anyway it doesn't really doesn't advertise it to complete strangers it's not the reality of how youtube works in 2021 so the new york times related an anecdote about a newborn baby being put into an oven and incinerated it's not the first anecdote of that kind i've heard this is a practice that happened at first nations residential schools indian schools operated by the government to my knowledge again and again i remember a detailed account which came from one of the women who put the baby in the oven so she was there as a direct witness at that moment and she stated that the particular baby she put in the oven was the product of one of the teachers raping one of the students that's the kind of thing you'd have to live with for quite some time presumably the student gets pregnant and she's then on the school campus continually for something like nine months you know like it's not really something that can be hidden in the crowded social context of a school where everyone is sleeping and eating their meals on the same campus and then one day the baby is born and then the baby disappears and from the perspective of this particular woman she knows what happens to the baby because she was in the furnace room uh when that event transpired i don't think there ever was an order given out from the government of canada and i don't think there was a plan by either the catholic church or the anglican church where they sent out orders saying yeah yeah yeah go ahead rape the students and if they get pregnant incinerate the babies i don't think so i think that what you had was a culture that developed amongst the teachers and administrators where certain practices certain coping methods came to be known came to be accepted and came to be shared whether those were in whispers or conversations or written letters from one campus to the next from one administrator to the next the use of chains the use of metal shackles the use of whipping in public the use of forced labor for long hours the use of starvation the use of intentional transmission of disease killing students by locking them in a room where they would die of a contagious disease where they would contract the contagious disease perhaps nearly die but in many cases actually die the use of eugenic procedures to render students permanently infertile okay all of this has been documented all of it has been known by people like me who have no inside source information i'm going to talk about how much i knew as a child in the 1990s in just a moment but nine years ago i was more involved with first nations politics than i am now i was studying cree in ojibwe at a university it's called first nations university supposedly the best place to do this in canada it's an absolutely terrible place to do this don't study there it's a disaster of institution but anyway i was studying the languages and i was involved with and following the politics the significance then and there was this guy real eccentric who went out with a dosing rod to try to find dead bodies on the campus of one of these residential schools now if you don't know what dosing means i don't blame you we have several people here for whom english is not their first language so i will put this in quotation marks d-o-w-s-i-n-g this is some ancient ancient english slang so dosing is do you know what does it mean well dosing is an old-fashioned kind of it's an aspect of witchcraft i suppose um where people would hold a stick a wooden stick normally a y-shaped stick from a tree and they would close their eyes and walk holding the stick and they would be able to feel for example where water was passing beneath the surface of the earth so someone in the audience knows the term dosing it really it just depends how much like 17th century literature you've read or something yeah it goes back a few centuries so dosting was a technique used for different kinds of supernatural shall we say now in this case they they were dousing for dead bodies so this guy and he was i mean a genuine advocate for an activist for first nations people but eccentric goes out with the dowsing rod and a team of people they walk through one of the orchards that's on the campus of one of these residential schools now the orcs cells are more significant than you might think look at the actual schedule these kids were living on being woken up in the morning and forced to do hard labor very often the orchards so on that was a big part of their quote unquote education was that they were really being starved and worked in this way with forced labor anyway so they're going through the orchard with this dosing rod and through whatever preternatural cognition you know the person holding the dose drone says there big there they get out the shovel in the spade they dig through the earth lo and behold there is the body of a child tried to make a news story out of this and aside from very small very obscure first nations publications and websites nobody wanted to carry it you know it's not on the nbc news it's not on cbs it's not on the bbc it's not on the cbc it's not on local canadian workers this was i wouldn't even say it was buried but at that time just nine years ago any discourse of this kind was not being covered by the mainstream press at all it was in a really obscure political publications that i was following but almost nobody else was nine years ago and i think also just the eccentricity of this this guy this activist probably freaked out some of the major girls now i did not respond to this by becoming a true believer in the magical practice of dowsing my comment on the time pardon me my comment at the time partly cynical reflecting the fact that i'm an atheist and a skeptic and so on and partly just well informed by my knowledge of historical circumstances was have you considered the possibility that if they put down the shovel and the spade anywhere in that orchard they would have found another dead body we just had the finding of over 200 dead bodies on one of these school campuses and there is a not so supernatural explanation for the fact that they knew where to dig because they were told just in terms of the oral history they were told by people who lived there and worked there whereabouts generally the dead bodies were buried because again just like you have a witness to who put the baby in the oven the kids themselves were doing all this hard labor right the priests were lazy you know the church leaders these schools were lazy they weren't going to dig the grave they'd forced these kids to dig the rift so there's some memory of where the bodies have been uh have been buried um the residential schools you know partly have to be remembered for what they did and they partly have to be remembered for what they failed to do what they did was you know forced assimilation attempted genocide murder rape torture genuinely by the strictest definition i've read accounts of torture in the most literal sense of these but what did they fail to do you know they utterly failed to provide these first nations kids with an education that would prepare them to succeed in canada i mean let's be blunt in this in white western 20th century society or whichever century you want to talk about and on the contrary of course they did also traumatize these kids but they also just raised them in a deeply dysfunctional situation where they were separated from their own parents and they weren't provided with some kind of loving family to replace those parents they were raised you know in this very very uh strange and psychologically damning set of circumstances that explains to a great extent the mass drug addiction mass gang affiliation mass anti-social and self-destructive behavior that that generation went out to do even even for people who were not victims of rape you know or torture or something being taken away from their family at such a young age and subjected to such extreme and bizarre conditions they failed to provide an education that any of us would voluntarily enroll our own students it's going to mention a circumstance now as an imperfect parallel all comparisons are odious all parallels aren't perfect we have 31 people in the audience guys if we could get 31 thumbs up more people will join us we'll get some more questions in the recording i make zero money out of this but if you're here you can hit the thumbs up if you change your mind later you can do the thumbs down instead especially in third world countries it is quite common to have a prison with a kindergarten attached so women are sent to prison does that happened in wealthy countries also but it's especially common at their owners women are sent to prison and they're pregnant at the time they happen to get sentenced or while they're in prison somehow one way or another they managed to get pregnant maybe during a visit from their husband or loved one maybe with one of the prison guards whatever the situation may be pregnancy in prison is a reality and 20 percent so a lot of these prisons will then set up a kind of kindergarten so the women are not immediately separated from their children now you might have another situation what if a woman is is nine months pregnant at the time she sentenced to go to prison or maybe she's just given birth at the time she's she completes her case do you want to separate this child's that has to be raised by its grandparents or some remote relative maybe there are no remote relatives maybe this child is going to become a total orphan if you separate from his mother or do you want to have some facilities in the prison so the woman can serve her jail sentence and the child can go to kindergarten or the child can can go to school okay what happens if the prison guards are sending their children to a separate kindergarten to a separate school and what happens if you pass a law if you pass a rule that you know what the prison guards the prison administration everyone all the way up to the top grass we all have to share the same kindergarten we all have to share the same school you know there will be pressure there will be the most positive part of me the most powerful pressure imaginable to improve conditions at that school at that kindergarten right if the prison guards themselves have to put their own kids in the same classes with the children of the prisoners and if not if you decide that no no no we're going to have two separate schools we're going to have two separate candidates we're going to have separate but equal education systems you are going to get separate but very unequal education systems in part because the parents of the children in those two systems education have very unequal abilities to leverage influence in the government they have very different abilities to advocate on their own behalf on behalf of children the very different abilities even to stand up and complain to the teacher now i just say i have dealt many times in my life with well-intentioned left-of-center people who do not imagine themselves to be racist and who will say that they think it is just fine and dandy for different ethnic groups and different religions to have separate schools to have separate institutions to have separate political representation they have separate political organizations and they don't realize to what extent they are actually endorsing the politics of segregation um they do not realize to what extent they are recreating the racism that for many years the united states america was excused under this doctrine of of separate but equal all right separate never means equal the only way we can be equal is by being equal together the simplest way to have guaranteed that our first nations people received the same quality of education as the most elite white english speaking people in the country would have been to send them to the same schools anyone who would make excuses for sending out six-year-olds again actually malnourished actually starving out to do hard labor at the crack of dawn on this farm we're on this orchard having this kids do all the yard work uh having the kids clean the bathrooms i mean these seem like small things but they're not right at the school for white people the children weren't doing that kind of hard life right at the school for white people children were being fed by their own parents not by the not by the teachers not by the the priests and nuns right if you just put this in the comparative focus of saying okay well what if it was your child what if you as the prime minister of canada what if you as a senator in canada what if you as a member of parliament account what if your kids actually literally were to attend the same school as first nations children okay we can't be separate but equal the only way to be equal is for all of us to endure the consequences of the same political decisions together and we still don't have this in canada in canada we have separate schools for the rich and poor we have separate schools for the english and french for anglophones and francophones we have separate schools for catholics we have separate schools for italian catholics and portuguese catholics we have separate schools for muslims we have separate schools for jews we have separate schools for first nations people which schools do you think are the best schools which schools do you think are the worst by any metric by any evaluation right um i was born in 1907 so i was 12 years old approximately the year 1990 going through my teenage years in the 1990s i knew i knew all this stuff i knew what had happened to our native people at the residential schools i wasn't some brilliant independent researcher i wasn't publishing a book you know i i didn't have connections to the cia or any secret source information i knew right everybody knew coming back to this imperfect comparison to the holocaust in germany i hinted at two very different routes for the transmission of that knowledge of what was going on the supposedly secret labor camps supposedly secret death camps that weren't weren't a secret at all right on the one hand what about the people who actually worked there now the people who worked in canada's residential schools they weren't ashamed of themselves they didn't treat it as a secret they were proud we had a really weird controversy with a guy who had been a gym teacher at the residential schools he taught physical education and he had gone on to be one of these shady bureaucrats in the olympic committee system so you no matter what country you live in the world you've had some scandals about this the corruption and what is this olympic committee and how does it work and who are these people who become administrators and bureaucrats it's really weird and there's there's money involved money fame power respect sometimes sex right so this guy had gone from being a gym teacher in the residential schools to be and you know nobody looked into his background and nobody looked into what he did but you know the point is this was openly proclaimed on his resume this was his you know he was proud he had worked at a school with so many hundred students he had been the gym teacher he had been part of you know the number of people employed at these schools and for the vast dream it wasn't a job for life right they had another job before they went on to another job afterward and they were connected to larger and larger social units through the greatest megaphone that canadian society had to offer at that time and still the most powerful unit for social organization in canadian politics today the church i was in victoria the last time we had elections when was that four years ago i i don't want to know and we were here almost four years ago i think it was like three three and a half years ago a long time ago now we were here for elections some time ago and you know i wanted to run i wanted to stand for office i went and looked at the paperwork i needed to be a candidate in the elections we allegedly have new elections coming up in canada now allegedly just a few months from now we don't know yet it's still uncertain you know and let's say i needed 150 signatures you know it might have been as little as 70 signatures but you needed a certain number of signatures all provided to you by people who live in the same little area of canada the same writing legally speaking so this is walking distance like when we walk a short distance from where we live uh west or south we cross a boundary into a different writing so you had to know it let's say it was 70 people you had to know 70 people willing to sign a piece of paper to say yes you should be a candidate you should stand in elections let me just say i have no delusion that i would win if i were to stand an election if i were to participate in election it would be a platform where i could address some of these political issues talking about right now including first nations you name it you know are there a lot of political issues i would like to speak on and if only a few hundred people hear me that's a worthwhile use of my time same comment about this video a few hundred people will hear and appreciate this video it's worth my time it's worth my efforts my small way of making the world a better place so i wanted to stand up for election it would have been completely impossible for me with an audience of 10 000 subscribers on youtube i forget 200 supporters on patreon some of this i'm not some huge success it would have been completely impossible for me to get the signatures i need at that local level from people living within milwaukee distance myself whereas some eccentric religious fundamentalists who will never get 10 000 subscribers on youtube who will never get 200 supporters on patreon some local wingnut at the church any church he can get 70 signatures he can get 150 signatures and stand for election right it's very powerful the church still today in 201 as a unit of social organization without digressing into this too much but it's let's let's be real look at black lives matter black lives matter is a concept black lives matter is a hashtag when you look at the people who are actually making a difference in those police brutality cases case-by-case basis example example almost every single time you find that in reality there is a local church pastor who started talking about the issue that like the particular police officer or the particular event the particular problem and he started doing fundraising on the issue and if you can just turn to a congregation of 500 people at your church and say look guys i need everyone to donate 10 so we can pay this lawyer and probably for the lawyer also the the fame and promotion he gets through your church is significant like the lawyer won't do this completely anonymously but oh okay this church group supports it i'm gonna get on the news maybe the lawyer will lower his fees something for this reason pro bono okay this church can motivate a lawyer this church can do a fundraiser and get five thousand dollars to pay the lawyer this church can take the issue to the state government the city government the police department right the the church and specifically the united states america we were talking about like black african-american protestant churches getting organized all right black lives matter is an abstract concept it's a hashtag yes there's a very small number of marxists who technically controlled the organization such as it is right but the reality is with most of these cases the real political activism the real difference is being made by by church groups okay so the people who worked in the residential school system i grew up in the 1990s i can remember them phoning in to radio talk shows with pride and talking about the work they did in the forcible assimilation of our native people this stuff wasn't a secret it wasn't covered up people didn't think it was an atrocity okay part of the reason i was able to know about it was that it was so open okay and these people were connected to communities they were connected to a larger audience everyone put it through the church the catholics to the catholic church the anglicans to the anglo church many of them their career was in the church and just one part of their career was in first nations education in residential schools you know others had careers as teachers okay public school teachers are very highly paid in canada public school teachers are leaders of political opinion they're prominent members of their community people have a captive audience they talk to parents they talk to kids some of them were career teachers and they just had a period of their life as teachers in the residential school system everybody knew everybody knew partly because this is a small country and a significant percentage of the affluent population people like teachers people like leaders of the church choir shall we say right were actually employed in this project directly or indirectly this is one way and the other way that people knew just like i was saying a minute ago about adolf hitler writing mein kampf is that the policies themselves were openly and actively proclaimed by the government can we stop pretending that this was a secret right like there was propaganda to promote this project there was recruitment i mean for every one person who gets a job like that there are other people get interviewed for the job right this was a huge coast-to-coast transformative project the government did plenty of open propaganda about and another wrinkle this links to what is referred to in canada as the 60s scoop if you don't know the slang don't worry about it the 60s scoop okay they actually wanted to motivate you like the average person in the audience to get involved with forced assimilation by adopting a first nations child that had been taken away from its parents right this is associated with the decade of the 1960s but it went on and on all right when i was a kid the prime minister of canada had adopted a first nations child forcibly taken away from his family because they weren't orphans this is not worth describing those three it was a form of force assimilation to separate children from their parents and have to have them raised by which one and the deputy prime minister also had a child who was in this way separated from the family these people they were directly tainted by they were directly touched by this experience and in both of those cases um you know i don't want to defame these guys but i followed it and and it was not in the newspapers the newspapers in canada are all tightly controlled by the government you had to go to alternate sources of of information like frank magazine there's a cultural reference and we were frank magazine you had to go to either frank magazine or the actual first nations publications themselves um to find out this kind of stuff because you wouldn't get in the mainstream press but you know um those kids that were adopted by politicians they had very troubled lives let's put it that way they had criminal charges against them and then their parents got involved in evading the criminal charges and they had drug problems and sexual problems there were scandals attached to those kids that were in canada completely successfully suffocated the news but the point is not only was this not secret it was something the government at that time was not ashamed of it was something that was actively propounded and proclaimed as being a positive government policy and it was a government policy they were trying to motivate you to join in that you should join in this great effort that united all of white canada in forcibly assimilating the native people okay and i just want to say i didn't just know about the government [ __ ] right i knew about the failure of that program to achieve its positive goals like sorry living in downtown toronto have you ever had an ojibwe person as your dentist oh gee i've i've seen korean dentists i've seen chinese dentists we have g we have dentists from all around the world we have medical doctors from india and pakistan why do you think we have no medical doctors who are ojibwe why do we have no medical doctors who are mohawk why do you think that is you know talk about nurses or dental hygienists we have swedish nurses we have russian nurses we have filipina nurses nurses some places like portugal someone you know within europe gee is isn't it funny isn't it funny that we just don't have any first nations people whose education is prepared to take on that role and let's be clear a job like that as humble as it may be to become a nurse it eliminates poverty in one generation okay you can you can go think of these things ancestrally right you can go from being a poverty stricken family to being an affluent family in one generation if the transitional generation either the mother or the father or both are employed as a nurse it is simply a highly paying enough job to make that transition out of poverty that's one of the reasons why it is such an important form of employment for new immigrants you know they know if this generation works as a nurse the next generation is going to have every opportunity imaginable to do whatever they want to do not that you're going to be rich but you will definitely not be poor if you take on the uh take on the path of being a nurse in downtown toronto i'd had every ethnicity imaginable interact with me over the counter of a bank as a bank teller jamaicans never once never once did i have a bank teller who was cree ojibwe mohawk danny first nations i knew about the rape i knew about the murder i knew about the disappearances in the 1990s i knew about all this stuff all right i knew my parents before me if they didn't know it was a choice what we're left to deal with in 2021 is the question of why so many people made that choice including you know supposedly well-intentioned left-wing people like my parents by the way if you look at my father's formal publications he published many books it says all this positive stuff about first nations people it's there in print you can quote him saying kind of anti-racist pro-first nation stuff it's there on paper but it's paper thin homie the whole episode you know tells you a lot about what canadian culture was and what it is let me just get the year on the rcap uh it's definitely been more than 20 years oh wow so there you go that's perfect for my analysis um so the royal commission on aboriginal peoples rcap i'd i'd forgotten the year i thought it would have been about 1995. so that got started in 1991 and it finished but when it finished uh was significant that when it started i'll just say why in a moment in 1996. okay wow so great i was just going to say the royal commission on aboriginal peoples rcap okay so this is 1991 to 1996. if you wanted to know about the rapes if you wanted to know about the murderer if you wanted to know about the torture if you want to know any of those details that was all set down for you real clearly by the world commission for aboriginal peoples so you know how could you not know how could you not uh care okay so an interesting question here from almighty om so almighty ohm says quote i may have helped you at your bank i could not put my proper name on my business card or say i was fluent never mind having a grandmother who gave up her status to marry we had to hide so this was someone who had some aboriginal ancestry and some claim to legal status i'm presuming this is someone who did not grow up actually with indian status on an indian status card that was the term guys sorry i'm saying indian wasn't racist that literally for the government represented it was called the indian agent the department of indian affairs you know indian was the it was though it was the word um so this is someone who didn't have status and someone who who in effect you know disguised themselves well i knew people with the opposite story too where they looked first nations they looked aboriginal they looked indigenous and they were treated as indigenous by the cops you know like they were insulted for being averaging with cops but within their own family there was no story there was no explanation for this they didn't know where this came from and they didn't know themselves if they were the products like one generation back of the the 1960s scoop the 60 scoop this kind of um forced adoption program or what where it really it really wasn't clear so almighty oma is getting at an interesting question what about indigenous people who can pass for white um so i had a friend in saskatchewan and her name was osawa i just mentioned that's how she pronounced it herself she was not crazy she was soto so there is more than one way to interpret soto and in modern english put it that way so her name was osognu and i was with her when she phoned a taxi company and so at that time i don't think this has changed that much but these days more and more of it is done through an app she called for a taxi and they asked for her name so can we get your first name for when the taxi arrived and she didn't use a nickname she didn't use a whiteboard and she said oh no now we we have a culture here in white english speaking canada that's tremendously understanding when people want to use a chinese name or a pakistani name or something but it's remarkable how little patience we have for uh for first nations aboriginal names aboriginal and sister and so on so almightyon says that her father was raised in the reserve with no status she spoke uh both languages uh but she could pass so yeah so no i know there are a lot of people who who fall in the in the cracks this way and you know anyway sorry it's kind of a different topic but one of the questions is how how optimistic is anyone about that being the future of first nations identity for me both the optimism and the pes pessimism ultimately are linked to language you know i just i just don't see dna as being the the focus of you know what in the 21st century what in the 21st century does first nation status mean or status in any sense you know um i think it has to revolve around the language as the touchstone of identity i knew a white guy and he was very white uh he was like white skinned with red hair just imagine he was very obvious he was a i don't know if he was a scottish ancestor or what but he grew up entirely on a first nations reservation and his father i'm sorry distant memory his father was something like the electrician for the first nations it was something like that like his father had a job on the reservation of that kind i would guess electrician and handyman repairing things so he was a white kid who grew up entirely on a first native revision all of his friends growing up were first nations and then he lives you know in between two worlds but you know we spoke no language but english right so you know you know that's where you're from but obviously it'd be very different if that guy had grown up and he was fluent in korea or he was fluent in ojibwe or or anything else he would have a different different impact for him different impact for the for the future of the country you know um all right so he's going to say the royal commission aboriginal peoples this is the grand canadian tradition of having a so-called fact-finding mission and an inquiry and it making absolutely no difference whatsoever and it's sinking down to being the level of a footnote known only by academics you know but the world commission aboriginal peoples it concluded with a list of recommendations let's say it was 120 recommendations maybe it was 200 recommendations but there was sort of the final conclusion was this list of things they were supposed to do so i was still a kid in 1996 but nevertheless you know my response to that i remember reading the list and i was furious because i felt like this wasn't going to change anything at all i thought this is too namby pamby this is too conciliatory like we need fundamental change for the status of first nations in canada 20 years later you look back at that list none of it happened none of the recommendations were followed nothing happened of course i assumed naively in 96 these recommendations this is what the government was now going to take as their plan of action to transform the status of first nations people in canada nope you know nothing happened nothing changed and now you look back on it you think about what a better world it might be today if in 1996 the government had taken that kind of that kind of positive uh that kind of positive action you know um all right so there's there's some more stuff that would be interesting to respond uh everyone knew nobody did anything about it why i think that most people left or right dabble in politics wanting to feel powerful wanting to feel important and being afraid of or avoiding a sense of powerlessness a sense of impotence a sense of their own insignificance in the world my parents climbed over the fence in ottawa at the parliament building to tear down the american flag and burn it in front of the prime minister of canada and the president united states who were behind the window looking out at them as they did this it was a rare occasion where the president united states was visiting canada obviously they could have gone to jail or been beaten up by the cops my father subscribed to the theory that the cops had been told to stand back and let it happen that it was politically convenient for the prime minister of canada to say look you can see how much the people here are against you you know perhaps to say look this is why canada can't do more to help you in vietnam or whatever interesting theory on my father's part all right my parents were people who felt powerful who felt important taking a stand on vietnam taking take this is this great phrase we have in english taking a stand what does it mean it's ridiculous taking a stand on laos taking a stand on cambodia parts of the world places they were perfectly ignorant of oh they were absolutely ignorant of those places and i think of course strategically and morally what they had to say about those places was completely wrong but it made them feel powerful it made them feel important [Music] so the problem is weakness perceived as strength strength perceived as weakness right because my parents and millions of people in their generation would have felt weak would have felt embarrassed would have felt out of place getting in their cars and driving to a first nations reservation and saying hey you know i understand you guys are going through this terrible transition here i understand there's this crisis i understand this room and i want to help and maybe maybe i'm not sure how i can help you know i want to get involved and maybe you don't just drive your car there once maybe you go back again and again and maybe it's difficult and maybe it's awkward and maybe those people speak english with difficulty with a certain accent you find very difficult to decipher at first and maybe a lot of them are alcoholics and maybe a lot of them are overweight and maybe they don't wear fashionable clothes the way people do in toronto or montreal right like this is the shallowness people have in politics i remember reading a comment on the internet this was one of the many times in which i considered becoming a lawyer and i was looking around for advice about going to law school specific things i was googling about going to law school i found this comment from a guy saying young people today have an idea of being a lawyer and an activist that comes from the tv show ally mcbeal as a cultural reference i hope it's been forgotten and he said i mean it's shallow but it's really true they assume they are going to live a life with surrounded by beautiful well-dressed fashionable people having witty dialogue and you know sitting down in boardroom meetings and coming to sudden decisive decisions about issues of great importance more legal and political issues and this is not what working in the law is like at all all right i think that and look i'll speak about my own father um my father grew up with photographs in time a magazine photographs in life magazine photographs in the newspaper we've all seen him always a beautiful young woman painted with flowers and either naked or in a bikini at a peace protest whether it was a peace protest or a concert right there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that my father got involved with radical politics because of the good looking women that were on the cover of the newspaper and if you go to those protests there are enough good looking if you go to a protest in downtown montreal or downtown toronto or ottawa i mean you guys know this people go to vegan protests for that reason obviously if you're a heterosexual woman you can go to meet good looking men if you're a gay man you could go to meet good looking gay men and you are going with these kinds of ally mcbeal assumptions you're going with the assumption that you're going to meet witty highly educated well-spoken sharp fashionably dressed like-minded people and you may not admit to yourself that these are the incredibly shallow reasons for your own political activism and you may not realize that oh you went to a fundraiser for stop the war in vietnam or stop the war in cambodia right this is my parents you know one of those wars where i went and oh wow there were all these well-dressed attractive people oh this is just what i was looking for and maybe they let you get up on stage and speak for a moment and now you feel powerful and now you feel influential and now you feel important you're perceiving weaknesses strength the reality is you're not saving a single human life all right this is like uh the lead singer of the beatles doing his sleep-in john john lennon sorry i'm not a beatles fan you can tell john lennon claiming he was saving lives by staying in bed in a hotel in canada i believe it was in montreal and and giving interviews this kind of totally passive totally counterproductive you know protest and you know what there was this other cause there was this other difference you could have made you could have gone to the residential schools you could have asked yourself would i put my kid in this residential school you could have asked who hired these teachers who evaluated them what qualifications these people have oh well guess guess what you know in canada we don't have separation of church and state the united states has that principle in their constitution right in canada we don't have separation of church and state we have the church and state working together hand in glove we have the state handing out contracts to the church right and we have the state paying for and installing stained glass windows in church buildings on first nations reservations shamelessly right again that's that's an issue my parents could have made a difference in not overnight not instantly they could have become lifelong decade by decade crusaders are saying hey look there's something fundamentally immoral and evil and wrong here about having separate schools for catholics and protestants about having separate schools for different ethnic groups having separate schools for rich in the poor separate schools for first nations and europeans right and there's something profoundly evil about the government of canada treating the catholic church as its contractor and the government of canada giving up its legal responsibility to evaluate the confidence of the credentials of the teachers and put them in that position i just mentioned i did read some of the actual court rulings under this heading and i remember one of them the judge had to make a decision about to what extent the church was responsible as opposed to the canadian government on exactly this issue residential schools for assimilation and there was a specific area of misconduct uh therein you know and the judge said look like 99 of the evil 99 of the harm was done by the church here but nevertheless oh oh right so and the other side of it is church sorry the church who presented all their evidence for their case to you know disclaim the responsibility and the documents and record of the hansard the examination and on the other hand the government of canada it's not just they it's not just that the government of canada didn't do these evil things with its own hands or its own staff or by giving its own direct orders but obviously the record shows they gave it almost no thought at all they just didn't really care they didn't think about it like you know okay church will do it no more debate no more in vigilation you know no no uh no quality no quality control you know what i mean no no and but the judge said you know fundamentally it doesn't matter if the church is 99 responsible and the government only signed over only played a one percent role here because theoretically the responsibility rested with the government like the the moral onus the order was ultimately given by the government the higher power the higher responsibilities for the government and i forget if you made it a 60 40 split or a 49 51 split but he he gave the larger part of responsibility to the government it's like even if you didn't do this it was your responsibility to do it it was was your responsibility to prevent happiness was your responsibility to scrutinize to evaluate to invigilate this process that was happening and the fact that you didn't do it ultimately doesn't uh doesn't lower your your culpability all right you know everybody knew there was a difference that could have been made and on a mass scale right on a massive scale there was total indifference and total inaction well simultaneously you know there was so much activism there was so much passion on these other issues that came and went making no difference in the world my own family was torn apart by the israel-palestine conflict the green party of canada was torn apart by the israel-palestine conflict the new democrat party of canada the ndp our mainstream left-of-center party has been torn apart and still is being torn apart by the israel palestine conflict everyone wants to take a stand everyone wants to take a stand on the gaza strip what what difference can you possibly make and what difference would it or could it possibly make for you to practice your sense of moral superiority coming in here when i say coming in here literally at the dinner table at my family right at that scale or coming in here at a party meeting for the green party or the ndp or at city hall in toronto or in ottawa like what difference can it make for you to take a stand do you think the fate of israel or the fate of palestine rests in the hand of the canadian government and do you think it's going to make any difference for you to cuss out your own grandmother or something your own aunts and uncles fighting over this you know it's weakness perceived as strength and its strength perceived as weakness you could have made a difference you could have made a difference on the separation of church and state and you know what it's the same fundamental evil in israel as it is in canada the fundamental problem israel has is that they had to make a decision between being a democracy and being a theocracy and they didn't decide their government is a mix of the two right i mean now saudi arabia theocracy no democracy at all right israel has a hybrid system right but the separation of church and state is a fundamental problem in israel just as it is in canada right and the most extreme the most obvious victims are are aboriginal people right and you know what the thing is about real problems where you can really make the difference um i was so i attended political events related to this including back in the 1990s would have been 1997 1998 like not when i was a little kid kind of thing but i i went to political events related to first nations people and one of them that i attended somebody much older than me stood up and told the story by the way if you get to know first nations people there is a culture of telling stories so this is another thing if you actually go to these events there is a culture unlike white english speaking events where an elderly person will stand up and talk for like 20 30 minutes and everyone listens continuously it's very different from the style of discipline there is a storytelling culture and often also funny stories about often the sort of village elder figure anyone could be someone who's the kind of grandparent soon as they'll tell like a 20-minute story just for a plot twist at the very end that relates to the political issue just just like that's part of the they have their own sense of humor you know they have their own style of storytelling but anyway i was at one of these meetings someone stole that stood up and told the story and they said you know we had uh we had a meeting i forget which facet of the first nations residential school crisis this was addressed you know we had a meeting and there was this white guy there and he said that he had come to the conclusion that the solution was for white people to convert to the indigenous religion of the native people that they have to stop being christian they have to embrace you know aboriginal uh religion and that he said he was gonna lead by example he wanted to do this himself and he kind of caused a scene because he was saying he was a white person he wasn't from that region or something he wasn't living out near a reservation and he was saying no you like you have to do like you have to you the village others you have to arrange for me to convert to your religion and you can imagine the kind of anxiety and confusion and consternation ultimately an old woman at that meeting again it was described to me i was heard the story at a different meeting was there myself but what was described was that this older woman said to the guy ultimately to shut him up look it doesn't work that way if you want to join our religion you have to come and live with our community you actually have to come out and live that's the only way to do it you have to you know you have to move and you have to spend serious amounts of time attending our events like it's not you can't just sign up you can't just get a tattoo plenty of people people do get a tattoo all right it's a totally false dichotomy to look at this situation and say christianity is evil whereas the indigenous religion is good and i've studied the indigenous religion almost no white people in canada have all right if the indigenous religion had continued uninterrupted we would all be able to tell you terrible horrifying things about that religion and what it does to people right that's not the choice we're facing in the year 2021 all right the status today of that religion having been destroyed having been given up by the native people right in some cases it was taken from them against their will but in many cases when you start going through the history many of the tribes the vast majority of people willingly and eagerly converted to christianity another side of the history that's very uncomfortable to talk about a lot of the more enthusiastic converts a lot of them became preachers themselves and went to the truck went to the tribe next door and tried to convert that tribe to christianity for a lot of them the gospel was a huge turning point in their religion but a huge turning point in the history of their culture that they really embraced and tragically they embraced a form of cultural change that destroyed them all right the status of that religion today amongst first nations is something like the status of the poetry of shakespeare among speakers of english language okay there is literature there are stories you know okay but there is no human sacrifice anymore there is no slavery anymore there's no torture there's no you know the warrior culture has disappeared people are not fighting to the death in order to be given a feather that would symbolize their bravery like so it's gone it's over they gave up their religion in part and in part forcibly it was taken from them what i have to say to christians is you're next what you demanded of them we now have to demand of ourselves you know if you think about what was accomplished quote unquote positively by the residential schools right it was the secularization of first nations people was a totally failed attempt to prepare them for life in the modern world and nobody nobody among the white english-speaking or white french-speaking people ever looked in the mirror and thought oh maybe this would be good for me maybe this would be good for my children maybe we also should go through a process of confronting the feudal and ancient past the vestiges of it that continue in modern life through the organized conspiracy of the christian church right oh geez circumcision this makes a lot of sense oh oh so we cut off part of our penis to perpetuate a ritual that was written down and described in the old testament for the sons of abraham so that we will bear the mark of the covenant between the jewish people and god on our launch this this makes a lot of sense hmm there's nothing barbaric about this this isn't a vested no no no no no have a religion based on worshiping a man who was tortured and executed by the state look at the poll numbers christians are pro-capital punishment christians are pro-torture whereas atheists in both the united states of america and canada are morally opposed to capital punishment and are morally opposed to torture and these these people christians walk around with a symbol of capital punishment a symbol of state-sanctioned execution hanging around their necks all right um [Music] why was i so horrified back in the years 1991 to 1996 by the recommendations of the world commission for aboriginal peoples the rcap right i'd say in a phrase because there was neither anything creative nor anything destructive about it in reality we need to create a new culture and we need to demolish the own we need to create a new culture and we need to demolish the old it seems to me inexorable and inevitable that the conclusion we should draw from our history of attempted genocide against the aboriginal people is not just about the separation of church and state but the abolition of the christian religion itself and you will look in vain for any suggestion that this might happen in the conclusions the report of the world commission for aboriginal people you will look in vain for any such suggestion in the so-called truth and reconciliation commission i am not interested in truth in this sense because everyone already knew the truth in the 1990s it wasn't a secret everyone knew the only people who didn't know were those who chose to disregard the facts that were already available at that time and i am not interested in reconciliation i'm interested in change