True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 167: Church and State
Aired: 2021-07-08
Duration: 01:09:43


=== Fireworks and Trouble (03:42) ===

[00:00:00]  Attention listeners, this is a sort of true non-public service announcement.
[00:00:06]  You have this comes out Thursday.
[00:00:10]  It might have already passed, but you probably have about one day left before the shot spotters stop getting confused by fireworks, and you can just shoot as much as you want in any major city.
[00:00:23]  Brace, what did you do for 4th of July?
[00:00:24]  I didn't ever ask you.
[00:00:25]  Open fire.
[00:00:27]  Well, you know, you are Mr. Fireworks.
[00:00:32]  How did you celebrate?
[00:00:36]  I went to a sober barbecue.
[00:00:40]  And then, yeah, and then just like to watch on a hill later.
[00:00:46]  No fireworks?
[00:00:47]  Mr. Fireworks, here's all right.
[00:00:50]  My thing with fireworks is I started getting suspicious because how come you can buy fireworks in Chinatown, but they're never setting them off there?
[00:01:00]  Well, yeah, because it's, you know, a bunch of apartment buildings.
[00:01:04]  Yeah, but so what?
[00:01:06]  You got a roof.
[00:01:06]  And so now I've got, now I feel like fireworks exist to get me into trouble.
[00:01:11]  Honeypot.
[00:01:12]  Honeypot.
[00:01:13]  Because I've been hoarding hundreds of pounds of plastic explosive ever since you explicitly via text message told me to start doing it.
[00:01:20]  That's not true.
[00:01:22]  Well, okay.
[00:01:22]  I'm looking at the text message right now.
[00:01:25]  You can't just hold up your phone and say that now you're looking at the text message.
[00:01:28]  I know your little tricks.
[00:01:30]  I'm reading the, how about this?
[00:01:31]  I'm reading the text message.
[00:01:32]  No, you're lying.
[00:01:32]  No.
[00:01:33]  Brace, you can get the ingredients from China via mail order and you should assemble it.
[00:01:39]  Here are detailed instructions on how to do it.
[00:01:41]  Oh my God.
[00:01:42]  Women do this to me all the time.
[00:01:44]  They contact me online.
[00:01:46]  No, you know, they're like, hey, it's sexy.
[00:01:50]  Not that you said that to me.
[00:01:51]  I'll give you that.
[00:01:52]  And they're like, do this crime.
[00:01:54]  And I'm like, okay, sure, whatever.
[00:01:56]  Like, if that makes you happy, talk to me more.
[00:01:58]  And then I get in trouble for it.
[00:02:00]  It's such bullshit.
[00:02:01]  No, they've got to call you Mr. Honeypot.
[00:02:27]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:28]  Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
[00:02:31]  We're, well, I'm Brace.
[00:02:36]  Oh, hold on.
[00:02:37]  No, I am plural.
[00:02:38]  Brace is the one that is speaking right now.
[00:02:41]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:42]  Now it's now it's Mikhail.
[00:02:46]  What's the devil's name?
[00:02:48]  What?
[00:02:48]  You said the devil's name was.
[00:02:50]  No, but I'm wrong.
[00:02:52]  What's the devil's name?
[00:02:53]  That's all like fucked up.
[00:02:54]  It's like not BLZA bubb.
[00:02:57]  when it's like like malakai moloch no my malakai no my malak dude malak's not the devil it's like sumerian no i but i am molok but i'm back to brace brace is now fronting for my system of personalities oh my god now no check this one out now i'm liz i'm liz oh sorry I don't know why.
[00:03:25]  That just made me feel funny.
[00:03:27]  No, we should keep going.
[00:03:29]  Okay.
[00:03:30]  All right.
[00:03:30]  Well, you should, you got to introduce.
[00:03:31]  No, you're not Liz.
[00:03:32]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:33]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:34]  I'm Liz.
[00:03:35]  That's Brace.
[00:03:36]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:03:39]  See, this is how I'm going to get around all this whole thing is I'm just going to introduce you.
[00:03:42]  No, I'm sorry.

=== Mass Burials in Residential Schools (15:03) ===

[00:03:43]  We're okay.
[00:03:43]  We've moved on.
[00:03:44]  You just introduced me twice.
[00:03:45]  Yeah.
[00:03:45]  And now the hello, welcome.
[00:03:47]  The podcast is True Anon.
[00:03:49]  Hey, what's up?
[00:03:49]  Young Chomsky on the mic here.
[00:03:51]  Also, Liz.
[00:03:54]  Now Brace is fronting.
[00:03:55]  Hello.
[00:03:56]  Welcome to True Anon.
[00:03:58]  Why am I doing that voice for me?
[00:04:01]  Yes.
[00:04:02]  Hello.
[00:04:02]  Welcome to your episode of Truan for today.
[00:04:09]  We have with us today John Kane from Let's Talk Native Podcast and Resistance Radio here to talk with us about the, well, as I'm sure a lot of you heard on the news, a lot of bodies are being discovered at residential schools in Canada.
[00:04:22]  So we spent a little time talking about the residential schools and then a lot of time talking about the reasons for the residential schools and the, especially the after effects on them.
[00:04:31]  And yeah, I think it was a pretty good interview.
[00:04:33]  And let's start it now.
[00:04:49]  All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the interview.
[00:04:52]  We have with us today John Kane, the host of Let's Talk Native Podcast and Resistance Radio on WBAI New York City and WPFW in DC, a prominent native voice on a full range of native issues, here to talk with us a little bit about the recent sort of, I guess, news cycle about the residential schools that a lot of Native children were sent to and get a little deeper into that.
[00:05:18]  John, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:05:19]  How are you doing?
[00:05:20]  I'm doing fine.
[00:05:21]  And thank you so much for allowing me the opportunity to, again, shed some light on this issue.
[00:05:27]  Most people know almost nothing about this era that was over 100 years long for all intents and purposes, where Native kids were ripped from their homes, sent to these institutions that were more like prisons than schools, and with one objective, which was to strip away their culture and assimilate them into U.S. and Canadian society.
[00:05:51]  Yeah, I think a lot of the focus has been on sort of the recent unearthings of, I think, three mass burial sites at various Canadian schools, totaling something like 750 bodies that they found, I think, assumed to be mostly children.
[00:06:06]  And I think maybe if people have like any sort of cursory familiarity with the issue, they think that like, okay, well, they happen in Canada, they happen in the U.S., they ended a long time ago.
[00:06:16]  And I think just like from the sort of mainline way that I see it talked about is that like the U.S. killed most Native people and then stuck the rest into these schools.
[00:06:26]  And the Canadians were a little more gentle.
[00:06:28]  And, you know, they call natives First Nations.
[00:06:33]  And it's much more like lovey-dovey up there.
[00:06:37]  You know, it's Canadian.
[00:06:38]  I think people have this view of like Canadians as like more civilized than Americans.
[00:06:42]  But from what I understand, they basically had the same exact objective and same exact purpose in both countries.
[00:06:49]  Well, that's exactly right.
[00:06:50]  And again, that myth that somehow Canada is nicer and gentler is just that.
[00:06:58]  It's just a myth.
[00:06:59]  It couldn't be farther from the truth.
[00:07:00]  Look, we had the Canadian army invade Mohawk territory, the military, not just the RCMP or the provincial police, but their army literally invaded Mohawk territory.
[00:07:13]  And that's 1990.
[00:07:16]  So the suggestion that somehow Canada is less racist, what's interesting is on the Canadian side, the victims of racism are more prominently Native people because they don't have as large a black population as they do a native population comparatively to the United States.
[00:07:34]  So, no, I mean, that could not be farther from the truth.
[00:07:38]  And you stated it just right.
[00:07:41]  I mean, Canada and the United States followed the exact same policy.
[00:07:45]  And we can argue about chicken and egg, who was first, but the standard for essentially denationalizing, deculturalizing, and committing this genocide against Native people was, look, it was pioneered in Canada and the United States and other countries, other imperial nations like Great Britain and others.
[00:08:10]  I mean, we've seen this repeated in Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand.
[00:08:18]  So this is a standard that the United States, Hitler prided, took some pride in what he was doing with the Jewish population.
[00:08:28]  And it's documented in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that he learned from the Americans.
[00:08:36]  So we're talking about the boarding schools here today.
[00:08:40]  And we couldn't really talk about the boarding schools without talking about what preceded them.
[00:08:44]  So when did these things start and what led up to them starting and how come they started them in the first place?
[00:08:50]  I mean, I think sort of in the popular imagination, it's like, well, they just killed Native people and then they sent them to these reservations and sort of just like, you know, maybe switched them around to like shittier and shittier places to live and then kind of just like abandoned them.
[00:09:05]  But this was an actual like active intervention, like after I think the years that people sort of like think of the genocide against Native peoples as having stopped.
[00:09:15]  Well, you have to understand that there are the international definition of genocide involves killing people, causing harm, physical or mental harm to people, deliberately creating the conditions that a people would cease to exist, interfering with childbirth, and removing children from their culture and from their distinct group.
[00:09:46]  Those are the five international definitions of genocide.
[00:09:49]  And they read like the playbook of residential schools.
[00:09:52]  So when we look historically, the United States specifically had five policies that were the recognized policies that they had towards Native people.
[00:10:05]  And it started with extermination, the idea of just killing us.
[00:10:09]  And then along with that was the effort to remove us from our lands.
[00:10:15]  And that was characterized legislatively by the Removal Act.
[00:10:22]  There was also a policy of assimilation, which was to try to strip away our cultural identity and Americanize us, I guess.
[00:10:32]  And then there was termination.
[00:10:34]  Termination was a policy that they had where they could say, okay, we don't have to recognize you as Native people anymore.
[00:10:39]  We've done a good enough job stripping away your Native identity.
[00:10:42]  So now we can cease to recognize you.
[00:10:45]  So we, you know, almost like we can do this on paper.
[00:10:48]  We can just say, okay, we're not going to call you Native people.
[00:10:51]  We're not killing you anymore, but we're erasing you from a paper standpoint.
[00:10:56]  And then the final policy that the United States claims to have is self-determination.
[00:11:02]  And these policies are also common for the Canadian side as well.
[00:11:07]  And self-determination is this idea of reducing us to really more like organizations, not nations, not sovereignty is not a part of it.
[00:11:19]  It's that we're going to allow them, allow Native people to have a certain amount of control over what they do on their native territories.
[00:11:27]  So there's a limited amount of space that we're going to give them to make decisions for themselves.
[00:11:33]  But even that is steeped in federalism.
[00:11:37]  It's steeped in this notion that we have no jurisdiction over our own lands, that only the federal and/or state governments do.
[00:11:45]  So when Both the U.S. and Canada get to a place where they know they can no longer, in the world's eye, that is, kill us and just, you know, just commit the mass murder that they did through military actions primarily, but also through things like offering bounties for our scalps.
[00:12:08]  Abraham Lincoln was guilty of signing the execution order for the largest mass execution in the history of the United States.
[00:12:15]  That was in Mankato, Minnesota.
[00:12:18]  Ironically, that hanging took place in Mankato, Minnesota, the day after Christmas in 1862.
[00:12:25]  That means that the execution that took place happened a week before his emancipation proclamation became essentially law, came into effect, which was on January 1st, essentially, of 1863.
[00:12:39]  See, but this is none of the stuff is talked about.
[00:12:41]  But what happens when it's no longer fashionable to murder us was this idea that they had that if they could take our children, they could see to it that we would cease to exist.
[00:12:54]  If they could take our children and literally turn us against our own culture, I mean, this is one of the things that some of these Canadian ministers boasted about.
[00:13:05]  They said, look, we're going to teach these children to hate themselves as Native people.
[00:13:11]  So it isn't just about conversion, it's about creating an animosity amongst Native people for their own culture.
[00:13:18]  Teach them that their ceremonies and their culture are satanic, that they're evil, and that only through the grace of God that they're going to lead them to with these residential schools.
[00:13:30]  And again, and I need to remind people: these residential schools on both the U.S. and Canadian sides were government-funded, government-mandated, and church-run.
[00:13:40]  And those churches weren't just Catholics, they were a full range of Protestant denominations as well.
[00:13:48]  And it was literally the unholy marriage between church and state that both U.S. and Canada claim they don't have.
[00:13:56]  I do have to go back to something that was said in the beginning.
[00:14:01]  That number on the Canadian side alone, as far as these discovered burial sites, is now over 1,300.
[00:14:12]  One school alone, they found 751, the remains of 751 children.
[00:14:19]  So the more they look, the more they're going to find.
[00:14:22]  I mean, there are literally hundreds of these schools on the U.S. and the Canadian side.
[00:14:27]  And the same thing was done on the U.S. side as on the Canadian side.
[00:14:31]  You know, there may have been some marked graves that are a little bit more prominent, like at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
[00:14:38]  But the 182 marked graves in Carlisle by no means represents all of the death that took place there.
[00:14:46]  There was a recent Dartmouth grad that did an analysis and research.
[00:14:52]  There's actually some pretty good government documents associated with this.
[00:14:55]  On the U.S. side, there's a report called the Merriam Report, and that came out, I think, in 1928.
[00:15:02]  On the Canadian side, in 1907, there was a study also done, and that one was called the Bryce Report.
[00:15:08]  And it details the atrocities that took place at some of these things.
[00:15:12]  But anyway, this Dartmouth grad suggested that there are far more children buried around Carlisle Indian School than the 182 graves with headstones.
[00:15:27]  This researcher also suggested that this Colonel Pratt, whatever his title was at the time, who ran Carlisle Indian School, also didn't want, he was trying to reduce the number of deaths on his hands, you know, under his watch.
[00:15:45]  So he would send terminally ill children home who would never have had a chance to go home if they weren't terminally ill.
[00:15:52]  This one report suggests that there may be that Carlisle Indian School may be responsible for over 600 deaths.
[00:15:59]  So look, a lot of this news cycle is being driven by some of this discovery of these buried children on the Canadian side.
[00:16:11]  But what the interesting thing is, is Canada already went through what they called their Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[00:16:19]  And that ended like in 2015.
[00:16:23]  These discoveries now are being driven by Native territories themselves.
[00:16:28]  This isn't part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[00:16:31]  They refused to do any searches for these burial sites.
[00:16:36]  And there's a little semantics being played here because, you know, when some of this news broke, they were calling them mass graves, you know, mass burial sites and that kind of thing.
[00:16:47]  And then they kind of, you know, started playing semantics with it a little bit and say, well, they're not really mass graves.
[00:16:53]  They're just unmarked graves.
[00:16:54]  Well, you know, until somebody can determine how many were buried at a time, it's again, you're playing games with words.
[00:17:04]  The fact of the matter is that these churches who documented pretty much everything were literally hiding these bodies.
[00:17:12]  And when we talk about erasure, I mean, we are literally talking about history, culture, and lives being buried, both, you know, literally and figuratively.
[00:17:23]  Yeah, I mean, I think the astounding thing to a lot of people, I mean, including myself, is just the sheer numbers of bodies at a lot of these schools.
[00:17:32]  I mean, 751 at one school is, I mean, listen.
[00:17:38]  No, I'm no headmaster or anything, but that seems like a lot of children to die at your school.
[00:17:44]  I mean, it does not seem like if I was running a school where like 10 kids died, I think I would probably maybe change some things around.
[00:17:53]  And so what went down here exactly?
[00:17:56]  Because I've seen a lot of people sort of downplay it as like, well, there's, you know, there was a lot of disease at the time.
[00:18:03]  And like, you know, there was child mortality was pretty high up until, you know, whatever, like basically the mid-20th century.
[00:18:11]  But it seems to me that there was probably not a similar rate of child mortality at boarding schools, maybe for people of a different background or skin color.
[00:18:22]  And so what exactly was killing these kids?
[00:18:25]  And what did they have to undergo, really, in general at these schools?
[00:18:28]  Because, you know, we've talked about them, but like what are what are these schools and why would kids die at?
[00:18:33]  Well, and again, that's a good question because it's hard to determine at this point that these deaths were murders or killings, but we know that they're deaths and that they have not been fully accounted for.

=== Deaths Unaccounted (12:46) ===

[00:18:47]  In fact, in many cases, not accounted for at all.
[00:18:50]  So we know that these deaths occurred.
[00:18:53]  But one thing I've got to make clear is every child who went to these schools died a little bit.
[00:19:00]  I mean, that was the intent.
[00:19:01]  I mean, look, the policy was called kill the Indian, save the man.
[00:19:05]  Killing the Indian, literally, was one of the options.
[00:19:09]  Look, both Canada and the United States were trying to solve the Indian problem.
[00:19:13]  The Indian problem was that we existed and that we existed in a state that did not fit within their cultural ideals.
[00:19:24]  We existed as a distinct people.
[00:19:31]  In many places, we were still possessing some of what had become our lands if we were removed to another site, for instance.
[00:19:39]  But we were not assimilating, at least not nearly at the rate that Canada and the United States wanted us to.
[00:19:46]  So there was a real effort to not just strip us away, like I said earlier, not just strip us away, but to make us hate our identity.
[00:20:01]  So although this was about stripping our identity, the means for doing that involved what was really tantamount to torture.
[00:20:10]  I mean, the children were beaten.
[00:20:12]  They were abused, sexually abused.
[00:20:15]  They were malnourished.
[00:20:16]  The reason that so many children died of disease was because they weren't healthy in the first place.
[00:20:23]  And in fact, it wasn't even just disease.
[00:20:26]  The death rate was also attributed to dying of really just common ailments and even accidents.
[00:20:33]  I mean, these buildings weren't built to any kind of code.
[00:20:37]  There were fires that took lives because there was no standards for these things.
[00:20:43]  Even a minor injury could turn fatal because they were not given proper medical attention.
[00:20:48]  You know, you had tuberculosis.
[00:20:51]  You had, you know, I can't, I haven't even seen the numbers on the children that died of the Spanish flu because these residential schools were in full swing at that time.
[00:21:02]  But you talked about the mortality rate for children.
[00:21:06]  You have to understand that even when mortality rates are considered, You're talking about mortality rates that include infant mortality, except for at these schools.
[00:21:15]  So when you're talking about mortality rates in general at that time, we can say, okay, yeah, those mortality rates were pretty high.
[00:21:23]  They were, I mean, they were saying in 1907 when they did this one report that the, yeah, the child mortality rate was in the 20 to perhaps even 30% range, but that included infant mortality rate, which was the highest level of mortality.
[00:21:43]  These schools were all kids that were older than that, and their rates were between 40 and 60%.
[00:21:50]  So the average mortality rate in Canada in 1907 was between 25 and 30%.
[00:21:55]  But the average mortality rate in these residential schools was between 40 and 60, and that included no infants.
[00:22:02]  So there was clearly a distinction.
[00:22:05]  And again, there was a report done.
[00:22:07]  They knew this stuff.
[00:22:08]  There were newspapers in Canada, especially during the height of the tuberculosis epidemics, that were saying there's no excuse for these children to be dying having mortality rates over 50%.
[00:22:22]  But that's what existed there.
[00:22:24]  But it wasn't an accident.
[00:22:26]  Because again, I got to go back to what the objective here is.
[00:22:29]  The objective was either kill our children or see to it that we would no longer exist as Native people.
[00:22:38]  Because as I mentioned on the genocide thing, there was also sterilization that was going on here.
[00:22:46]  There were children, little girls, who were becoming pregnant at the, I say at the hands, but obviously it's not the hand that did it, at the hands of church staff, priests, and other staff members.
[00:23:00]  And even the Catholic Church was performing abortions on these young girls.
[00:23:07]  And those babies were dying, not just through abortion, but even some that gave birth to were never accounted for.
[00:23:14]  And the crazy part is these schools had absolute control over these children.
[00:23:18]  They had power of attorney over them.
[00:23:20]  They could conduct not just surgeries and medical treatments on these kids.
[00:23:25]  They could do anything they wanted to these kids.
[00:23:26]  And there was nobody to provide any oversight over it.
[00:23:30]  So again, when you talk about the lives that these children lived, they were punished for speaking their language.
[00:23:38]  They were beaten for trying to maintain any sense of Native identity.
[00:23:42]  You know, and I'm just going to throw this out as an aside.
[00:23:45]  This is one of the reasons why I hate the idea of white people using Native mascots for their schools.
[00:23:54]  Because most of these schools or other sports teams adopted these Native imageries for white children while these residential schools were going on.
[00:24:04]  So at the very same time that Native kids were being beaten and tortured and even killed for maintaining some semblance of their identity, little white kids were encouraged to play Indian as a part of their taxpayer-funded school education.
[00:24:20]  I mean, and that to me is absurd.
[00:24:22]  But I think it's to really break down the trauma that these children went through.
[00:24:29]  It is both what happened to them individually and what it meant societally, because you basically destroyed the family.
[00:24:38]  And not just a generation.
[00:24:40]  We're talking about 100 years here, where you took away any sense for what being a parent would be, because none of these children had their parents.
[00:24:51]  Some of these kids, when they age out of these schools, would never locate their parents again.
[00:24:58]  And the parents were forbidden.
[00:24:59]  There's images, you can find it on the internet of some of these parents actually erecting camps outside of these boarding schools until they were run off by the RCMP.
[00:25:09]  And some of the deaths also were associated with kids who attempted to run away from these schools, sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from their home.
[00:25:19]  I mean, there is example after example of kids who died trying to trek home, whether they froze to death or whether they died of other effects of the elements.
[00:25:32]  I mean, so the range of injury and death and trauma that kids experienced through this thing is huge.
[00:25:40]  And when you consider that this went on for 100 years, you have multiple generations where the idea of nurturing children was stripped away from the parents who had the kids taken from them.
[00:25:56]  And the idea of being nurtured was something that these kids knew nothing about.
[00:26:01]  So when they would age out of these schools, they wouldn't know how to be parents.
[00:26:06]  They wouldn't know how to do some of the basic things, like tell a child they love them or hug them and doing some of the basic things.
[00:26:13]  I mean, they called these schools, but there was no real education going on.
[00:26:18]  I mean, there was a lot of religion, but a lot of it was like forced labor.
[00:26:23]  In spite of the fact that they were growing crops and for sale and that kind of stuff, these kids looked like migrant workers and they were malnourished in spite of the fact that they produced food to generate revenue for the schools.
[00:26:55]  You said this is going on for, you know, over 100 years.
[00:26:58]  And I think that that was that, you know, and Brace said this earlier: that this would be one of the biggest, like, or most surprising facts about this part of our history to a lot of listeners is that this is going on for up until much more recent than I think anyone would assume.
[00:27:15]  It sounds like something, oh, back in the 1800s, back in the late 1800s, maybe back in the turn of the century.
[00:27:20]  But no, this was going on.
[00:27:22]  I mean, these schools existed for, I mean, what, up until 30, 40 years ago?
[00:27:28]  Well, on the U.S. side, 1976, I think is the date the last U.S. Indian boarding school was opened.
[00:27:37]  But on the Canadian side, it was in the 1990s.
[00:27:40]  It was like 1997 or something.
[00:27:42]  That is fucking insane.
[00:27:45]  Ken Starr was getting Congress ready while this was getting shut down.
[00:27:50]  It's insane.
[00:27:51]  Well, and it doesn't end there because here's the thing.
[00:27:55]  There was also foster care and adoption policies that were still stripping kids away from their homes.
[00:28:04]  And it's not like, look, the happy story is when Angelina Jolie grabs up some impoverished child and raises them to be like her.
[00:28:19]  That's supposed to be the good story.
[00:28:20]  And look, there are examples of affluent white people who wanted to have a little Indian baby.
[00:28:28]  But that's the exception to the rule.
[00:28:30]  A lot of these kids, and this is what Maine went through when they held their truth and reconciliation process in Maine.
[00:28:39]  They were looking at not just residential schools, they were looking at the foster care system and how many kids were being tortured by white families as they were put up for adoption.
[00:28:49]  So what ended with the closure of residential schools was just the massive institutions that had kids.
[00:28:59]  I mean, on the Canadian side, there was probably 150,000 kids that were run through these schools.
[00:29:05]  And I think there was between, I think it was close to 140 or 150 schools on the Canadian side, but there were many more than that on the U.S. side.
[00:29:13]  And some of those schools were serving as, you know, almost as adoption agencies too.
[00:29:21]  But when the residential schools ended, there were still kids that are being stripped away.
[00:29:25]  On the US side, they passed a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act that was supposed to stop some of that.
[00:29:30]  It was supposed to create a preference for Native kids to stay on Native lands.
[00:29:35]  But that has been a failure as well.
[00:29:38]  And one of the ways around it is for families on the Canadian side to get Native kids on the US side and for American families to get, or U.S. families, I should say, to get Native kids from the Canadian side.
[00:29:52]  That dodges the regulatory reach of a federal law like the Indian Child Welfare Act.
[00:29:58]  I mean, it's just, it's really just astounding to me.
[00:30:02]  I mean, when I was a kid, I met, I mean, this is probably the only time I learned about these schools when I was younger is that when I was a kid, I met in Utah, or I think it was Utah, a lady who had been to one of these schools when she was a kid.
[00:30:16]  She was an older lady.
[00:30:17]  And she told us, like, yeah, when I was a kid, there was these guys that just like came to the reservation and just like took all the 12-year-olds.
[00:30:25]  And like, I was just one of them.
[00:30:26]  I didn't go home for like six years.
[00:30:28]  And it blew my mind at the time.
[00:30:29]  Like, it was just like astounding.
[00:30:32]  Cause I mean, this lady was like, you know, she was like, I think in her 60s or 70s.
[00:30:37]  I mean, this is, you know, this is probably the early 2000s.
[00:30:40]  And it was just like insane.
[00:30:43]  And, you know, seeing the pictures of a lot of these kids, I mean, I was looking at some yesterday, you know, and there's kids in like 1960s clothing at some of these schools, which really like, I think even, even if like we realize, like, you know, we like in this conversation now, we're talking about these didn't close, you know, in Canada until the 90s, in America until, you know, well into the 70s.
[00:31:04]  It's just, it's astounding to me because I think really just like with the reservation system, I think for a large part of the American public, it's like, all right, well, natives are kind of, it's like out of sight, out of mind.
[00:31:19]  You know, like, you guys got your little space over there and like, we don't really have to think about it, about you.
[00:31:23]  I mean, it's the same sort of thing in Australia.
[00:31:25]  It's like, you know, that you just don't really come into contact with a lot of Native people.
[00:31:29]  I think maybe a little different in Canada just because of the population proportions there.

=== Native Lands and Sovereignty (04:54) ===

[00:31:34]  No, it's not.
[00:31:35]  It's not any different on the Canadian side.
[00:31:36]  It's still, it is still the same policy.
[00:31:41]  It's still the same problems.
[00:31:42]  And, you know, and I'm not saying the policy is different.
[00:31:45]  I'm saying like you just don't come into really into contact with it here unless you like live near a reservation or like you don't really learn about it.
[00:31:52]  Well, and that's true to a point on the Canadian side because what you will find is that a lot of the homeless population that are native will migrate towards the urban environment.
[00:32:01]  So if you go to someplace like Winnipeg or, you know, Saskatoon or Regina or whatever, you will see a native population.
[00:32:09]  But most of what you're going to see is a homeless population because the abject poverty that exists on native lands, on the lands, on the territories that we claim, even though Canada will dispute that claim, is still we are living, again, in abject poverty.
[00:32:30]  We have not only was this idea of removing us from our traditional land bases, you know, through the removal period and some of what the same thing that took place on the Canadian side, but there was also a real effort to make sure that Native people would not be able to claim sovereignty over that lands.
[00:32:52]  Now, as I say that, let me be clear.
[00:32:55]  We do claim sovereignty over that land.
[00:32:57]  And so this is a dispute.
[00:32:59]  We don't concede that we don't have our lands.
[00:33:02]  So I want to be careful to make it sound like that we lost it.
[00:33:07]  We still occupy some of these Native territories.
[00:33:13]  But we have to fight whether it's New York State over things like eminent domain.
[00:33:18]  Look, in the 50s, they flooded a river called the Allegheny River.
[00:33:26]  They dammed it up, I should say, to protect Pittsburgh from some sort of flood control for Pittsburgh.
[00:33:32]  John Kennedy, who was running against Nixon at the time, had to support the Kinzua Dam project on the Allegheny River, which would flood 10,000 acres of Seneca land.
[00:33:46]  He apologized for it later.
[00:33:49]  But what does sorry mean?
[00:33:51]  What does an apology mean when you literally had the Army Corps of Engineer come in and bulldoze all of the homes along the Allegheny River?
[00:34:01]  But these are the kind of things, and this was an eminent domain, which was a situation that was illegal.
[00:34:07]  On the Canadian side, all Native territories are considered what they call trust lands.
[00:34:13]  They are owned by the Crown for the use and enjoyment of Native territories.
[00:34:17]  Most of the Native lands on the U.S. side are held the same way.
[00:34:21]  Again, they're considered trust lands.
[00:34:23]  I will say where we live in what we call Haudenosaunee lands, we actually hold the original title.
[00:34:34]  There are treaties that say so.
[00:34:35]  I mean, we didn't write the treaties.
[00:34:37]  They were written by white men who, you know, who, in some of the language in like the Canadegue Treaty, says, we acknowledge that the land is yours and the United States will never claim the same nor disturb you in the free use and enjoyment of your lands.
[00:34:49]  Of course, we've been disturbed plenty since those words were written.
[00:34:52]  But the fact is that they had to acknowledge that in order to preserve peace or to gain certain sessions of other parts of our traditional lands.
[00:35:05]  But You touched on it, Liz, a little bit earlier.
[00:35:09]  Part of our identity, in fact, the very words that we call themselves, look, I'm by most, um, what most people know would call me Mohawk.
[00:35:19]  But our word for that is gunyagahaga, and it means the people of the land of Flint.
[00:35:24]  I live in Seneca territory, but Seneca's don't call themselves Seneca's, not in our in their language.
[00:35:30]  They call themselves Unundawaga.
[00:35:32]  It means the people of the big hills or the people of the mountains.
[00:35:37]  So our very names that we call ourselves are descriptions of the land.
[00:35:44]  Our general word for native people is ungwe unwe, and it means a real or original people.
[00:35:51]  But by real or original, we mean original to the land that we have, that we're bound to the land that is a part of our identity.
[00:36:00]  So when you strip that away, both with policies like the Removal Act or the reservation systems that were constructed, or taking children from their homes and putting them in these prison camps, then you have already physically removed part of their identity, and then you do the rest of it through the treatment of these children.
[00:36:21]  You cut their hair off, you actually change their names.
[00:36:24]  You know, I talked about Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

=== Cutting Hair, Changing Names (06:23) ===

[00:36:29]  Yeah, they have marked graves, but most of the names on those graves are the biblical names that were placed on these kids once they came there.
[00:36:37]  They had their hair cut, their clothes stripped off them.
[00:36:42]  They had pesticides sprayed on them.
[00:36:44]  And then they were given these uniforms and they were forbidden to keep their names unless they already had a biblical name.
[00:36:52]  So you got Isaac and Joshua and all these other biblical names that got attributed to these kids.
[00:36:59]  And that's what's on those grave markers.
[00:37:03]  It's not the names of who they really were.
[00:37:05]  I want to talk a little bit about the political fallout of this,
[00:37:27]  because you mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, which I think some Americans really like hold up as a kind of like, I don't know, pillar of what is, you know, oh, this.
[00:37:38]  this is something that could be done that the Americans could undertake, and this is something that we need.
[00:37:44]  And I mean, you mentioned that these residence schools, these camps, were never a part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada.
[00:37:54]  No, that's not what I said.
[00:37:56]  What I said was that the discovery of these bodies never happened within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
[00:38:02]  Right, right.
[00:38:03]  They spent from 2008 to 2015 is when the commission was, you know, was seated and they went through some of their, they went through, like I said, that Bryce report and they did some investigations.
[00:38:16]  Canada actually refused to look at the grounds and to really hear the stories from people who say, my, you know, my child, my sister, my aunt, my grandmother, whatever, whoever, or grandmother's sister, or whatever, that they never returned from these schools.
[00:38:32]  Canada wouldn't do an investigation.
[00:38:34]  So their Truth and Reconciliation Commission ended in 2015 and they didn't did nothing to account for lost children.
[00:38:43]  They were just talking about the atrocities that were committed there.
[00:38:46]  But it should be noted that out of that commission, 94 calls to action were in the conclusion in the final report.
[00:38:55]  Almost none of them have been acted upon.
[00:38:57]  So one of the things that they did was they came up with some dollar value that they could send checks to survivors of the residential schools.
[00:39:10]  But there has been no meaningful change.
[00:39:13]  There still is a lack of education.
[00:39:15]  I mean, nobody is, I mean, there was an apology.
[00:39:18]  You know, my friend Murray Porter, who is a blues artist, has a song called Is Sorry Enough.
[00:39:30]  And I encourage you to take a listen to the song.
[00:39:33]  Maybe you'll get away with it, playing it on your show or something.
[00:39:37]  But he addresses the fact that it's not what you say, it's what you do.
[00:39:42]  And Canada has not made this right in any way, shape, or form.
[00:39:46]  They still haven't addressed some of the root causes of the poverty.
[00:39:50]  And the crazy part is part of the justification that Canada and the United States tried to use for the residential schools was the condition of life on reservations, reservation life.
[00:40:04]  It was poor.
[00:40:05]  Kids didn't have much of a future.
[00:40:07]  You're sort of, it's very insular.
[00:40:09]  And so yank you out of that, teach you how to be a good low-wage worker.
[00:40:13]  Well, and the hope was that if they assimilated these children, that they could be, you know, again, be enough of those low-wage workers that they could change, you know, kind of the structures that existed on native territories.
[00:40:27]  But the problem is, you know, look, they talked about alcoholism.
[00:40:31]  We didn't produce alcohol on our territories.
[00:40:33]  That was supplied.
[00:40:34]  I mean, there was literally requisition for barrels of rum and gin for treaty negotiations.
[00:40:43]  I mean, so the idea that alcohol or drugs or any other substances makes it to our territory, we don't produce any of it there.
[00:40:51]  It comes to our territories.
[00:40:53]  So the poverty that exists in our territories is a product of policy.
[00:40:58]  That's where the poverty comes from.
[00:41:00]  So when you create an unlivable circumstance and then say, well, that unlivable circumstance is the reason we're going to take all the children out of there.
[00:41:10]  I mean, you become your own self-fulfilling prophecy.
[00:41:14]  And of course, the children are so traumatized by their time in these schools that alcoholism increase on these territories after kids went through these schools.
[00:41:28]  It's not like they were taught some skill set that they could take and create a life for themselves afterwards.
[00:41:35]  Yeah, absolutely.
[00:41:35]  It's all part of the same kind of systemic and systematic breakdown of the peoples.
[00:41:41]  You know, they say one of the well-versed comments that are made about the reservation system is that reservations were not a place for Native people to go to live.
[00:41:52]  It was a place for Native people to go to die.
[00:41:54]  And as much as many Native people still have a strong affinity to their territories, we don't have an affinity to the poverty that is imposed upon our territories and imposed upon our people.
[00:42:07]  And, you know, look, we fight the state over every possible opportunity that we realize.
[00:42:14]  I mean, look, the world's become a smaller place because of the internet and trade and commerce.
[00:42:21]  But even things like gaming, they're regulated in a very heavy way by the states.
[00:42:29]  The federal government passes a law that says you have to have a compact with the state to open up a casino.
[00:42:36]  And the states become heavy-handed.
[00:42:38]  New York State built the Seneca Nation out of $1.5 billion in the first 15 years of their casino operation and is now in a fight for the next billion dollars as we speak.

=== Regulating Gaming and Casinos (15:37) ===

[00:42:52]  Now, a billion dollars to New York State is not much, but a billion dollars to the Seneca Nation and to the impoverished people who live there is a big deal.
[00:43:03]  And this is what state after state, you know, you talked about the political fallout.
[00:43:08]  One of the things, the problems I have is not just when people say, well, let's look at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, you know, as a guidepost.
[00:43:17]  You know, I hear people raving about the fact that, oh, a few Native women got elected into Congress.
[00:43:24]  Well, the problem is that we didn't vote for them.
[00:43:27]  I mean, for the most part, it's white people who got Deb Hallen elected to Congress from New Mexico.
[00:43:34]  It was white people who elected Sharice David to Congress in Kansas.
[00:43:39]  So their constituency is not us.
[00:43:42]  They're not there to serve us.
[00:43:43]  They're there to serve their constituency.
[00:43:45]  And when Deb Hallen gets nominated to the Interior Department, again, we didn't put her there.
[00:43:51]  We didn't vote for her to be the Secretary of the Interior.
[00:43:55]  An old, rich white man did.
[00:43:58]  And so that's who has Deb Hallen sitting there.
[00:44:01]  And her job is to serve at the pleasure of Joe Biden.
[00:44:04]  And I got to remind people, and this is one of the things that I have to bring up.
[00:44:10]  Anybody who thinks that Native people are going to see some great changes because Joe Biden is the president and Deb Hallen is sitting at the head of the Interior Department, if you go back to the Obama-Biden administration, there was a suit against the Treasury Department that started when Bush was in office.
[00:44:31]  This isn't Obama's fault here, necessarily, or Biden's yet.
[00:44:35]  But there was a suit against the Treasury Department and the Interior Department that was called the Cobel suit.
[00:44:40]  Eloise Cabell brought the suit and it became a class action suit.
[00:44:44]  It alleged through gross mismanagement, theft, incompetence, improper bookkeeping, a loss of $176 billion of Native assets at the hands of the Treasury Department and the Interior Department.
[00:45:04]  $176 billion.
[00:45:07]  They hired one of the premier accounting firms at the time, Arthur Anderson, to try to make some sense of the loss.
[00:45:13]  And they said, look, you guys have destroyed records.
[00:45:16]  There's no way to, we can't create a forensic audit that's going to properly account for all this stuff.
[00:45:21]  You got to come up with a settlement.
[00:45:23]  And some of the talk was a settlement that was somewhere between $40 and $100 billion.
[00:45:27]  Nobody was talking about trying to do a settlement for $176 billion.
[00:45:31]  Yeah.
[00:45:32]  The settlement was reached during the Obama-Biden administration for less than $4 billion.
[00:45:39]  I mean, we're literally talking pennies or less than pennies on the dollar.
[00:45:44]  So $176 billion loss is settled for less than $4 billion.
[00:45:51]  And the worst part of it is most of that less than $4 billion never went to Native people.
[00:45:58]  It went to white people.
[00:46:00]  Why did it go to white people?
[00:46:01]  Well, because part of the suit alleged some of the improprieties that was associated with occupation of Native lands.
[00:46:09]  So more than half of that settlement went to pay white people who were illegally occupying Native lands or who had somehow gotten it through shady means.
[00:46:19]  So anybody who gets excited about Joe Biden, this is what took place during the Obiden-Obama administration.
[00:46:26]  Did I say Obiden?
[00:46:27]  I always say Obiden.
[00:46:28]  Yeah, yeah, we call it Obid.
[00:46:29]  Liz calls him a bungler.
[00:46:31]  So you're all good there.
[00:46:33]  So, I mean, it is really hard for me as a Native person to get it.
[00:46:37]  I mean, look, is Deb Hallen going to look into this?
[00:46:40]  Well, yeah, but why is she looking into it now?
[00:46:43]  Why?
[00:46:43]  Because it hit the news cycle.
[00:46:45]  She didn't come into, as a congressperson, she wasn't raising issues about this.
[00:46:49]  Now all of a sudden she'll tell, oh, yeah, my grandparents went to a residential school.
[00:46:54]  It's funny, you know, that didn't get brought up during your confirmation hearings.
[00:46:58]  Of course not, right?
[00:46:59]  Well, I think the crazy thing, too, is that, like, okay, well, this news cycle, like every news cycle is going to end if it's not ending already, right?
[00:47:06]  Like, maybe, I mean, I, you know, I'm sure there'll be more bodies exhumed and that might like keep it afloat for a little while.
[00:47:13]  But like, you know, obviously all of us know this.
[00:47:16]  News cycles end.
[00:47:17]  And then sort of any promises that you make during those news cycles and any like, you know, maybe like, well, we'll fix this or do this, just like the truth and reconciliation thing.
[00:47:26]  You don't really have to do that shit anymore because nobody gives a shit anymore.
[00:47:30]  Now it's just like the like sort of tail end of the comic for you.
[00:47:34]  Smaller and smaller as far as it goes.
[00:47:36]  And like, you know, the sort of Instagram infographics and like whatever.
[00:47:39]  People just stop giving a shit in a few months.
[00:47:41]  Hey, uh, Joe Biden's dog died.
[00:47:44]  Yeah, true.
[00:47:44]  Which, by the way, fake.
[00:47:48]  He ate that fucking thing.
[00:47:49]  My whole thing with the dog is like, okay, you dogs.
[00:47:52]  Oh, come on.
[00:47:53]  Let's not talk about the dog.
[00:47:54]  I was only kidding.
[00:47:55]  No, no, no, no.
[00:47:56]  We're talking about the dog for now.
[00:47:57]  Because my whole thought, just real quick, allow me this.
[00:47:59]  If the dog is crazy, it's biting people, you don't have to kill it.
[00:48:02]  It's Joe Biden's dog.
[00:48:03]  There's some insane Biden head out there who like loves Biden that no matter how crazy that dog is, you can just give him or her that dog and they'll be stoked forever.
[00:48:12]  So, yeah.
[00:48:13]  I think I don't think it was the dog that bites that died, though.
[00:48:16]  See, now you got me talking about the goddamn dog.
[00:48:18]  Wait, there was another dog.
[00:48:22]  My point is exactly what you guys have.
[00:48:23]  They have doubles of the dog, like they have doubles of Biden.
[00:48:26]  That's what it is.
[00:48:28]  Your point, you know, it makes sense completely.
[00:48:30]  It doesn't matter what the fuck Deb Holly.
[00:48:31]  She can say whatever she wants right now.
[00:48:33]  I'm going to look into it.
[00:48:33]  This is the greatest tragedy.
[00:48:35]  It doesn't fucking matter what she says because in two weeks, she won't have to say anything about it.
[00:48:40]  Well, and to that point, to that point, she did.
[00:48:43]  She said it was a tragedy.
[00:48:45]  She didn't say it was genocide.
[00:48:47]  In fact, the native Canadian minister who issued, who basically presented the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, he called it cultural genocide.
[00:48:58]  There is no such thing as cultural genocide.
[00:49:01]  If you strip away a child's identity with the purpose of making it so that they will cease to exist, again, let me read it one more time.
[00:49:13]  I'm going to read it.
[00:49:14]  This is literally the international definition of genocide.
[00:49:17]  Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, such as killing members of the group.
[00:49:28]  Well, schools can check that box.
[00:49:31]  Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
[00:49:34]  Oh, check that box.
[00:49:36]  Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
[00:49:43]  That's their written reason for the for that.
[00:49:46]  That's their established reason for having these schools.
[00:49:49]  Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
[00:49:53]  Sterilization programs began at these schools and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
[00:49:59]  That's the international definition of genocide.
[00:50:02]  So when Murray Sinclair stands up to the podium with this Truth and Reconciliation Commission report in his hand and says we've determined that it's cultural genocide, kids died there.
[00:50:15]  That's not about taking away our bead work.
[00:50:19]  This is about not just murdering children or creating the conditions that children will die, but it's about imposing conditions on those children so they would cease to exist as Native people.
[00:50:32]  And so when I hear Deb Halland echo similar language or say, yeah, this was tragic.
[00:50:37]  No, it's not tragic.
[00:50:39]  It's genocide.
[00:50:40]  And you know what?
[00:50:41]  There is a statute of limitations or there is a grandfather clause, but the word and the term and the definition of genocide came about in the 1940s, after World War II.
[00:50:53]  These residential schools continued for decades after that.
[00:50:58]  The United States and Canada both should be prosecuted in international courts for the crime of genocide.
[00:51:05]  Not for what they did before 1945, because they get a pass on that according to the definition of genocide.
[00:51:12]  But, you know, again, the very part of the beginning of that, they said committed with the intent to destroy.
[00:51:21]  There's no question about the intent here.
[00:51:23]  Both Canada and the United States were very clear what these schools were intended to do.
[00:51:28]  It was to solve the Indian problem.
[00:51:30]  And if the children died, that solved the problem.
[00:51:34]  If the children lived, but were so traumatized by their school experience that they would cease to maintain any semblance of their native identity, then they accomplished their goal.
[00:51:48]  One of the other things I want to mention, there were children who were sent to these schools as young as three years old and likely even younger than that.
[00:51:57]  So we're not just talking about 12-year-olds.
[00:52:00]  We are talking about three-year-olds.
[00:52:03]  Yeah, little children.
[00:52:05]  Little children.
[00:52:06]  And it's heartbreaking to think about too, because like, I mean, at the, you know, you know, we're having, you know, talk basically about like, you know, history and politics here, but the core of this is, you know, there's like little children who are, you know, thrust into an environment that is, you know, totally alien to the way they were raised.
[00:52:27]  You know, beaten if, I mean, I was reading about like kids getting their like fucking tongues like poked with needles if they try to speak their native languages, like just the most insane, like inhuman things to do to anybody, let alone like a, like a, what's essentially like a baby to me.
[00:52:46]  I think anyone under eight's like a baby.
[00:52:49]  It just like it is, I don't know, it's it's it's incredible.
[00:52:53]  And like, and like you're saying here, too, like these, these things can't just be viewed in like a vacuum, like, oh, they happened, it happened, and then it stopped happening.
[00:53:01]  We're really sorry, my bad.
[00:53:05]  I maintain to this day that much of the clergy sex abuse scandal that is being looked at both not just on the Catholic Church, but the Baptists are going through some of this and some of the others.
[00:53:18]  The foundation of this started with residential schools.
[00:53:21]  Nobody's made that direct connection, but I'm alleging that there's a direct connection.
[00:53:27]  When you talk about church organizations, churches that had complete control with no parental oversight, I mean, the parents could not have contact with these kids.
[00:53:38]  That was part of the plan.
[00:53:40]  So, the idea that these, you know, that these churches that ran these schools could abuse these children, we're talking about kids that were kicked to death by nuns.
[00:53:49]  Yeah.
[00:53:49]  We're talking about children that not just that weren't just buried.
[00:53:54]  There's story after story about them being incinerated in both the incinerators that existed in some of these schools or in just burnings outside.
[00:54:05]  I mean, there's story after story after story.
[00:54:08]  And although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had some oral testimony from survivors, it is not, it was never done thoroughly enough to get a full picture on what's going on.
[00:54:21]  And like I said, if you look at this Merriam report on the U.S. side or the Bryce report on the on the Canadian side, I mean, think about this.
[00:54:29]  The Bryce report comes out in 1907.
[00:54:32]  The schools would continue to exist for another 90 years with all of this, all of these atrocities continuing.
[00:54:40]  Yeah, that's what's insane to me, too.
[00:54:43]  This, this report you're talking about came out like literally almost a century before the last of the schools was closed.
[00:54:49]  Well, and again, I also can't get past the fact that while the death of the children is something that is making the news cycle, we are talking about 150,000 kids on the Canadian side.
[00:55:03]  And look, they're probably going to find, my guess would be they're going to find somewhere close to 5,000 sites or remains of 5,000 kids.
[00:55:14]  But that's a drop in a bucket to the amount of kids that were traumatized through these schools, just on the Canadian side, more kids than that on the U.S. side.
[00:55:23]  So these kids would have their lives permanently altered.
[00:55:29]  And look, you don't have to be a residential school survivor to be traumatized by this because it would still continue.
[00:55:36]  Even after the school shut down, we had several generations of Native people who still had lost the ability to parent and to nurture and to be supportive.
[00:55:50]  And when you think about what these children had to go through, what they witnessed, you know, and the crazy part is we're saying children, and they were children.
[00:55:59]  But as I sit here, these were the siblings and the peers and the cousins and the friends of my grandparents.
[00:56:09]  I mean, and, you know, and even my parents' generation.
[00:56:12]  I'm old enough that my parents' generation went through this thing.
[00:56:16]  And, you know, and that's just, that's just incredible.
[00:56:20]  And the fact is that there are children today that are still not being cared for properly, not just because of the poverty that exists on Native territories, but because of the trauma that was inflicted generation after generation after generation before these children came on the planet.
[00:56:55]  There are several issues that are before us because of what is in the news cycle.
[00:57:01]  One simple question is, what do you do with a site that you find 751 remains only through ground-penetrating radar?
[00:57:10]  Which is, to be clear, for those who aren't familiar with this, they haven't been exhumed.
[00:57:16]  They have been using technology to locate these bodies that were buried in unmarked graves.
[00:57:22]  And I will say, some of these schools are alleging, or some of the people associated with these schools are alleging that they may have been marked graves that are no longer marked, that somebody took the tombstones or the headstones or whatever else.
[00:57:36]  But regardless, they are unmarked graves today.
[00:57:39]  So the question is, what do you do with these kids?
[00:57:41]  What do you do with their remains?
[00:57:42]  Do you exhume them?
[00:57:44]  And look, in our culture, and I know people have different ways of viewing death and spirituality because of the influence of Christianity that was imposed on them through these schools in no small part.
[00:57:57]  But in our culture, we say that when we die, we go back to our mother.
[00:58:01]  So these children are returned to their mother.
[00:58:05]  Even though some of these kids may not be in their ancestral lands, many of them wouldn't be in their ancestral lands anyway because of the removal policies of both the United States and Canada.
[00:58:17]  So do you exhume the bodies?
[00:58:21]  Do you start to do cause of death autopsies on these children?
[00:58:26]  I mean, is that the next step?
[00:58:28]  I don't know.

=== Osage Murders Exposed (07:26) ===

[00:58:30]  Canada didn't even want to investigate the grave sites, let alone do any kind of autopsies on the remains.
[00:58:40]  And here's the part that I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't bring up.
[00:58:45]  Look, you mentioned about how this is in the news cycle now, and we're going to hear a constant drumbeat of another school and another school and another school.
[00:58:54]  And on the U.S. side, we'll hear it again.
[00:58:56]  What gets missed in this is that Native people are re-traumatized every single time this hits the news cycle.
[00:59:04]  Look, there are many of us who want this exposed for what it really was, which is genocide.
[00:59:10]  But at the same time, I know, especially the older generations, are impacted every time this thing hits the news cycle.
[00:59:18]  I mean, every time they hear the story of another school finding hundreds of children buried in unmarked graves, you know, there are people who have tried to put that in the past that have tried to survive the trauma that was inflicted upon them.
[00:59:34]  And we relive it every single time.
[00:59:38]  So there are the questions that remain about what do you do now?
[00:59:42]  What do you do now?
[00:59:44]  And then what is the reconciliation?
[00:59:48]  I mean, how do you, you know, what are the reparations?
[00:59:53]  And, you know, what is the contrition?
[00:59:57]  That's a good church word.
[00:59:59]  What is the contrition that the churches should have to accept on this?
[01:00:04]  I mean, and the governments that paid for this stuff.
[01:00:08]  So I don't know what the answer to that is.
[01:00:11]  And I know we can analyze this century of atrocities committed by, I mean, again, let's remember, we're talking about president after president after president after president for 100 freaking years.
[01:00:28]  We're talking about Canadian prime ministers.
[01:00:30]  We're talking about the Queen of England.
[01:00:31]  We're talking about, you know, these heads of state that all knew these things were going on.
[01:00:37]  So this isn't just a mistake.
[01:00:40]  This was a policy.
[01:00:42]  I mean, it's literally almost half the age of the United States.
[01:00:47]  And it's more than half the age of Canada as a country.
[01:00:52]  So, I mean, this is what happened.
[01:00:55]  So how do you deal with that kind of, you know, that kind of past, that kind of ethnic cleansing and genocide and, you know, and torture and murder?
[01:01:06]  And even if you deal with that in the past, as I said before we started the program, we have a problem going forward.
[01:01:13]  We are still fighting Canada over protecting our lands and our waters.
[01:01:19]  Over half the Native territories, over half of the Native territories on the Canadian side do not have clean water.
[01:01:25]  And I would argue that that's probably the same case on the U.S. side.
[01:01:29]  One of the biggest reasons that Navajo territory saw the tremendous loss of life Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, was the fact that they couldn't even wash properly because they don't have running water in so many places.
[01:01:45]  This is 2021, for Christ's sake.
[01:01:48]  And we're still seeing the conditions that Native people live under.
[01:01:52]  And all of a sudden, you can spend a trillion dollars on relief for COVID-19.
[01:01:58]  But you, when it comes to Native peoples and the crimes that have been committed, again, pennies on the dollar for the Cobel suit.
[01:02:07]  Pennies on the dollar.
[01:02:09]  That's insane to me that you're saying half don't have like running or clean water rather in Canada.
[01:02:16]  Like people having sex with robots.
[01:02:19]  You know, like, like, there's like holograms and shit out there.
[01:02:24]  Like, that's, it's, I mean, because, you know, I've been to a couple reservations in the Southwest when I was a lot younger.
[01:02:31]  And it's like, it is, you know, I mean, there is poverty and there is fucking poverty in some of these places.
[01:02:38]  And it's like, it's insane to me because I think, I think, like, like, like exactly like you're saying, it's like, there's just no, they just won't, they just won't do it.
[01:02:46]  You know, like, that's that, like, they, they, they'll maybe like address some of what they view as like bad behaviors of Native people or whatever, but they won't, they won't actually address anything that'll, that'll.
[01:02:56]  Well, and the crazy part is native territories do have resources, but, but they, but they get screwed out of them.
[01:03:03]  I mean, in in 1920, the richest people in the United States were the Osage in Oklahoma.
[01:03:10]  The Osage.
[01:03:11]  Why?
[01:03:11]  Because oil was discovered on the lands that they had acquired when they were forced to leave their ancestral homelands back east.
[01:03:19]  They acquired the lands in Oklahoma and they made sure they acquired the mineral rights and the rights below plow's debt.
[01:03:27]  So the Osage were the richest people in the United States in 1920.
[01:03:32]  And you know what, and you know what happened?
[01:03:34]  Without looking further into it, I'm going to say they still are all good.
[01:03:39]  They were never all good.
[01:03:40]  They were murdered.
[01:03:41]  There were literally white men that would move in on Native women, marry them, have children with them, and then murder their wives so they could control the head rights to wells.
[01:03:54]  This is a story.
[01:03:55]  There's a book called Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grant.
[01:03:59]  I encourage you to take a look at it.
[01:04:01]  And it talks about the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI.
[01:04:06]  I mean, this was one of the first cases that the FBI investigated.
[01:04:11]  But it was bungled and it was muffed.
[01:04:13]  The whole idea was they wanted to be able to attribute all of, and it was maybe as many as a thousand murders that took place there.
[01:04:20]  They wanted to attribute it to one serial killer, which wasn't the case anyway.
[01:04:24]  But that's just one example.
[01:04:27]  The Navajo had a settlement a number of years ago because the federal government had screwed them out of their just payment for uranium that was mined off of their territories.
[01:04:39]  And again, when the settlement came and it's, you know, you hear something like $250 million, wow, that's a lot of money.
[01:04:46]  But you know what?
[01:04:49]  There are over 200,000 Navajo.
[01:04:53]  So when you break it down, it's not that much money.
[01:04:56]  And it was still pennies on the dollar.
[01:04:58]  We see oil.
[01:04:59]  Look, there are extractive industries that exist on Native territories, and some of them for fossil fuels, Lakota territory.
[01:05:09]  The Bakken crude that is harvested off of those lands, the natural gas that is fracked for in those lands.
[01:05:16]  And yet there are Native people who freeze every single winter there.
[01:05:21]  On the Canadian side, at Awapiscat, which is one of the poorest communities in Ontario, De Beers has a diamond mine there, and yet they live in shacks and they live in abject poverty.
[01:05:37]  This is so even when there are natural resources, you know, whether they're minerals or whether it's logging or whether it's grazing, you know, for cattle or whatever, whatever the resources are, the native people are going to get screwed out of the fair market value for any of that.

=== Links in the Description (03:46) ===

[01:05:56]  Christ.
[01:05:59]  I don't even know what to say after that.
[01:06:02]  Again, when you hear the truth, it leaves you speechless.
[01:06:05]  And I understand that.
[01:06:06]  So as we talk about residential schools and what to do about them, I still come back to what are we going to do about what we are living through today as well.
[01:06:18]  We can't, I'm not saying we don't need to address the past, but if we can't even get some sort of truth and reconciliation on what we're going through in the present, then what hope do we have for the future?
[01:06:32]  Yeah.
[01:06:34]  I think that's a good place to leave it.
[01:06:36]  That was now I'm all like depressed.
[01:06:43]  Yeah.
[01:06:43]  Well, thank you for thank you for coming on the show.
[01:06:47]  That was a quite frankly, one of the most depressing interviews I think we've done in the history of this program.
[01:06:54]  And we've done a lot of really depressing interviews.
[01:06:57]  But that was, thank you.
[01:06:59]  That was that was, I learned a lot from that.
[01:07:02]  And yeah, and you can, you can check out John's show, Let's TalkNative.
[01:07:07]  It's letstalknative.com.
[01:07:09]  Without looking it up, I looked at the website earlier.
[01:07:11]  That is it, right?
[01:07:12]  Yes, it's letstalknative.com.
[01:07:14]  But our podcast is available on all of the platforms, just like yours.
[01:07:18]  It's available on all the platforms.
[01:07:20]  So we're not hard to find.
[01:07:22]  Look, the show that I do, the radio show that I do, Resistance Radio, we also post that up as a podcast, although it's a live radio show.
[01:07:30]  So you can find that if you look for Resistance Radio with John and Regan, you can find that podcast out there as well.
[01:07:37]  Anything else our freak listeners should check out?
[01:07:39]  Well, I do have some YouTube videos.
[01:07:41]  So if you go to our YouTube channel, which is Let's Talk Native TV, you will find that I have addressed many issues.
[01:07:48]  Look, you ever want to talk about Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Not So Shiny a Light?
[01:07:52]  I got a video on her.
[01:07:53]  You can check that out.
[01:07:54]  We can talk about the Doctor of the Christian Discovery as my videos have.
[01:07:58]  I've addressed everything from gaming and the battles that we have with the federal government, with the state.
[01:08:07]  So I've addressed all kinds of issues.
[01:08:09]  So if you go to Let's Talk Native TV, we do put my podcast up as videos, even though sometimes it's just the audio that's on there.
[01:08:19]  But Jake and I work on short form videos, and we've done some of them that are only five or 10 minutes long.
[01:08:26]  And they pack a lot of information in a very short time.
[01:08:30]  Very sick.
[01:08:31]  Well, we will put some links down in the description.
[01:08:33]  I don't know why I pointed.
[01:08:34]  I look like a YouTuber doing that.
[01:08:38]  Links down in the description.
[01:08:39]  We're not filming this.
[01:08:42]  There will be a link down in the description.
[01:08:44]  And again, thank you guys so much for joining us.
[01:08:47]  It has been a pleasure.
[01:08:49]  Well, thanks for having me.
[01:08:50]  And look, love to join you again anytime in the future.
[01:08:53]  So feel free to reach out.
[01:08:56]  Now you say you're sorry.
[01:09:02]  It's not what you say, it's what you do Tell us you'll do better But it's hard to believe in you.
[01:09:26]  Well, we have links in the descriptions to John's radio show.
[01:09:29]  Check it out there.
[01:09:32]  And I'm Liz.
[01:09:34]  My name is Brace.
[01:09:36]  We are joined, of course, by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called True Enough.
[01:09:41]  We'll see you next time.
[01:09:42]  Bye-bye.