Canada's Darkest Secret: Residential Schools

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm. Do you know what is a podcast? This is
a podcast, a podcast called Behind the Bastards about bad people,
the worst people in all of history and the worst
things in all of history, and generally bad stuff. I'm
Robert Evans in case you didn't know, Boy, I don't know.

(00:22):
Middling introduction. It's no me just shouting the word hitler
a totally but it's not great. I'm sorry. Look, it's
hard to introduce a podcast every week and we it's not.
They're not all gonna be winners. Everyone's not gonna be
a gonna be a triumph of the human spirit. So
just deal with it. Just deal with it. I'm sorry. Hi, Hi,
Sophie UM, and hello to our guest today, Anna Hosnia. Anna.

(00:46):
How are you doing? Hello? How should people introduce podcasts?
How has that done? I mean, I don't do any better.
I'm just like, hi, this is the name of the show, okay,
and then I get into it. Yeah. I never know
how and I still don't. Um, because, as as I
think I've repeated to people, one of the key aspects

(01:09):
of my job is never learning how to do it properly. An,
how do you feel about Canada? Um? Canada and I
have an interesting relationship. I spent the majority of the
end of last year in the beginning of this year
making sure I could get into Canada, which was stressful.
Remember this criminal behavior on my record that Canada probably

(01:33):
wouldn't appreciate. But I got in no big they didn't
even care, So I don't know. It's like a nice
terrain with nice people. It's a nice terrain nice people
Canada gets. You know, it's nice being next to the
United States because the US is always fucking up in
like such extreme and invisible ways that as long as like,

(01:58):
as long as you're you're just kind quiet, uh, you
can get away with murder, which Canada has for for
as long as there's been a Canada. Oh yeah, you know,
I like it's it's a it's a messy country, right
like it it's it's a messier country than you'd expect
considering the reputation Canada has for like, oh the nice Canadians,

(02:19):
everything works, like the government's so functional. Um, like, we
should all be more like Canada. And I guess if
you're the United States, we should be more like Canada
because they are a better country than US. But they're
still they're still messy as hell. And today we're gonna
finally come out swinging against Canada. Anna, We're gonna, we're gonna,
we're gonna knock them down, knock them down. A couple

(02:41):
of pegs with you. I had no idea. I let
you have no idea what you're referencing? Like, yeah, like
they're mess Oh yeah, they are. They are very Have
you ever heard of residential schools? No? Yeah, that's what
we're talking about today. And this is um upper particularly
ugly chapter of Canadian history. Um that is now fairly

(03:04):
well known in Canada, but I don't think most people
outside of the Great White North have ever heard of them. Um,
So it's yeah, it's it's a pretty terrible thing, and
we're going to talk about it, and um, you know,
eventually whip our listeners up into a frenzy and burned
down the entire nation of Canada. Probably not that second
Party because they're still better than the United States, but like,

(03:27):
you know, pretty messy. Still, do you bring get the
vibe that like every government is bad? Yes, yes, constantly
every day. It was just me, but like man everywhere
is bad. Yeah, they're all it's all bad. It's all bad.
Some of them are like competent bad and some of
them are incompetent bad, Like the US is consistently incompetent

(03:49):
bad and Canada is consistently competent bad um. And that
is what I would say is the chief difference between
the badness of them. Anyway, let's start at the beginning.
So the beginning of Canada, that is our our our
neighbors to the north, got their start as a semi
independent political entity in eighteen seventy six, when the British
North America Act united the three remaining British American colonies

(04:12):
into the first four provinces of the Dominion of Canada,
which is a pretty cool name. After you know that act.
In eighteen seventy six, Canada got its own government and
a federal structure for like the first time. This is
the first time. Eighteen seventy six is when Canada, Canada
starts being like a big thing as opposed to like
just a bunch of different British colonies. You know, you
get your there's this colony that started out as just

(04:35):
a bunch of fur trappers, and you know, there's the
place where the people actually live and YadA, YadA, YadA. Um,
they all get united in eighteen seventy six, and they're
a they're a polity finally. So uh. This went over
pretty well with all the white people who inhabited the
area that we call Canada, because white people everywhere have
always loved Canada, but it was less celebrated among the

(04:56):
indigenous people of the region, um, who were super psyched
about Britain, being like, now you're all Canada, um, because
they had been other things previously and perhaps preferred that
to be in Canada. So the governments of the colonies
of Canada had started setting up reservations for indigenous people
back in the eighteen thirties, um, and these were kind

(05:17):
of patterned off of the ones in the United States.
Canada had kind of a history of looking over to
how the US dealt with indigenous people and being like,
what if we did that? But quieter, um, so less
of the of the genocidal wars. You know, you do
get you do get some of that. The Canadian Mounties
are certainly a part of of the history of white

(05:39):
people with funny hats and guns murdering Native Americans, but
it is it is generally a bit quieter in Canada. Um,
but they you know, they operate on some of the
same premises. And in the eighteen thirties they start setting
up reservations, and as in the United States, the goal
of these reservations was to give natives unproductive land so
that they would stay out of white people's way while
we looted the rest of the land mass. So you

(06:01):
would start out as the indigenous people, you know, this
all being your land that your ancestors have been on
since forever. And then Canada says we're gonna guarantee you
that you have land forever. But it's this specific chunk
of what used to be a much larger piece of land,
and it's the worst chunk of it. And if you, uh,
if you leave, you you get in trouble. So the

(06:23):
Dominion of Canada poured it over several old laws that
governed how they got to treat members of Native tribes.
And these had the kind of startlingly racist names you'd expect,
including the Gradual Civilization Act of eighteen fifty seven, UM,
which was meant to gradually civilize indigenous people. Um. Yeah,
that's a nice way to put it, Like, we're not

(06:45):
going to be too fast for you were Canada. You know,
when we when we commit an ethnic cleansing, it's nice
and slow, real, real, real, even tempered uh genocide. So
the Gradual Civilization Act gave Natives who had educated themselves
in white schools the option of being enfranchised as British citizens.

(07:05):
Doing so meant that they got all of the rights
of a British you know, a citizen of the crown,
but they had to give up all legal claim to
the land of their tribe. They couldn't live on the reservations,
and they weren't seen as as natives anymore as Indians
and the legal parlance of the time. So you got
to vote in all of that stuff if you agreed
to stop being an indigenous person, like yeah, yeah, that

(07:29):
was that was the rule. What then, Yeah, The goal
was basically to get all of the natives in the
members of native tribes in Canada to like give up
their rights to their native land and their native hunting
and stuff that they've been guaranteed by previous treaties, Like
treaties guaranteed you the right of you're the member of
you know, certain tribes, you get to hunt in certain
areas and you know, if you remember, you get to

(07:49):
you get to hold certain land. And some of that
land had nice mining on it. Some of that land
was good for growing, uh, And settlers wanted it, and
they figured the best way to make sure that they
could have it was convinced all of these natives to
give up their claim to the land and exchange for
the unclear benefits of being a British citizen. So that's
basically the idea is you all become British citizens and

(08:11):
we just kind of exterminate your cultures peacefully. So well,
I mean, is this all because they want control? Like
they yeah, what who cares if you have a native?
Like why do you have to like forego everything about
your life to become a British citizen. Well, because people
found it very unsettling that despite all of the what

(08:34):
seemed to be them the self evident benefits of civilization, UM,
Native Americans pretty consistently in both North you know, the
United States and in Canada and all the chunks of
North America that were being taken up by white people, UM,
were consistently unwilling to give up their cultures. And they're
they're like the historical way that their families had lived

(08:54):
in favor of living in cities like white people because
it sucked um and among other things, that was kind
of a direct threat to people's white people's attitudes about
the nature of of the world. Um. But also like
they wanted their ship right. They kept finding like gold
mines and silver mines and coal on Native land, and

(09:16):
they wanted it, and the best way to get it
was to reduce the number of people who legally counted
as natives so that eventually there would be none of
them left. And it was like, again, they weren't out
their massacre, although that happened to sometimes, they weren't necessarily
out there massacreing people. The goal was to just gradually
reduce the number of people who legally counted as native
to zero so that all of that land would be

(09:38):
open for settlement. This is the polite Canadian way of
committing a genocide. Um. Yeah. And so anyone who took
the state up on the offer of enfranchisement would receive
a grant of land that was not part of the
reservation and a one time cash payment, but they would
lose all of the rights that they had as members
of their tribe. UM. But people didn't like this offer.

(10:00):
Only one guy actually took it, and so the government
of Canada had to keep pushing. They they passed a
Gradual Enfranchisement Act in eighteen sixty nine UM, which had
the same basic goal and mandated that enfranchise natives had
to adopt English names. UM. The Act also attempted to
lay out how tribes on reservations were supposed to organize
their societies and care for their land. It determined like

(10:22):
how many people had to could could be underneath the
chief and all this stuff. It was just like trying
taking these societies that we're seeing as kind of like
inherently disordered and uncivilized and trying to turn them into
something that British legal codes could understand. God hate that.
I hate everything about this. Yeah, it's all pretty gross. Um.
And both of these laws, you know, the ones we've

(10:43):
discussed so far, we're eventually superseded by the Indian Act
of eighteen seventy six, which is still in a modified
form law in Canada today. UM. And as a result
of all this legislation, it was kind of established to
the late eighteen hundreds that indigenous peoples existed under federal jurisdiction.
So the federal government of Canada uh um was sort
of responsible for dealing with indigenous people. Um. Yeah, it's

(11:07):
it's it's all kind of a messy history. And I
don't want to get too much into the weeds of
like Canadian uh law here, but I did find an
interesting booklet called Facing History, which is um published by
an international organization of educators that focus on teaching like
the ugly parts of history to two people. Um. And
I'm gonna quote from that, sort of summarizing how Canadian

(11:27):
law about evolved to treat natives. Um. And they use
the word Indian a lot. Uh. That's just kind of
what the legal term was at the time in Canada
because racism. Um. So we will be using that here
when we're referring to the actual laws. Quote. The Indian
Act of eighteen seventy six created the legal category of
status Indian, a category that had long lasting implications for

(11:48):
the First Nations of Canada once it entered into law.
The Act imposed a single common legal definition, lumping together
different nations and languages into the broad category of First Nations.
What does it mean to be a stab at us Indian?
The original document of eighteen seventy six to find someone
as being legally Indian if that person fit these descriptions. First,
any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to

(12:10):
a particular band. Secondly any child of such person. Thirdly,
any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person. Now,
a key element was the law's definition of who was
Indian and what Indian. This was. The term Indian was
used several centuries before the laws simply formalized its use.
It is worth noting, however, that none of the many clans, bands,
alliances and nations ever called themselves Indian. And it's really

(12:33):
messy talking about like a lot of people think that
you just used the term First Nations for like the
Indigenous peoples of Canada, but that's actually only that was
a specific legal term for a specific subset of tribes,
and there were a bunch of other tribes that aren't
First Nations but are Indigenous peoples in Canada. It's very
I'm not an expert on it by any means, but
it's like there's a really weird legal history that's basically

(12:55):
it's focused around the fact that the Canadian government really
didn't want to recogn as certain tribes as actually being natives,
because those tribes regularly rosen rebellion against the Canadian government,
like thematists um, and so they they they defined them
out of existence. So they made a definition of Indian
that didn't include the tribes. They had problems with that.

(13:17):
Those people wouldn't have rights either. Again, it's like the polite, liberal,
white person way of committing a genocide. Just you erased
them on paper, so you don't have like, yeah, it's
it's it's pretty pretty interesting, pretty Canadian. So this process, yeah,
so this is how they attempt to do it at first,
like just kind of slowly write these people out of

(13:37):
existence and give them an option to like become citizens
so that they because clearly nobody who could become a
British citizen would want to still be a member of,
you know, whatever tribe. But this really didn't work out
very well, and Indigenous people continued to want to be
indigenous people, and this was a problem for the new
government of Canada. Uh Prime Minister John A. McDonald found

(13:58):
this very frustrating and ticular he was a big believer
in civilizing the Native and he felt that the government
had to do whatever it could to sever the connections
of individuals to their tribes so that they could be Canadians.
The best way to do this, he felt, was boarding schools. Quote.
When the school is on the reserve, the child lives
with his parents, who are savages. He is surrounded by savages,

(14:19):
and though he may learn to write, read and write,
his habits and training and motive thought are Indian. He
is simply a savage who can read and write. Prime
Minister McDonald decided to commission a study into how Canada
might most rapidly civilize her indigenous people. He commissioned a
journalist named Nicholas Davon to travel to the United States,
since the Good Old USA was clearly the best at
getting rid of North America's native peoples. Davon traveled to Washington,

(14:43):
d c. And he met with veterans of US Grant's administration,
which had enshrined a policy of What's Grant called aggressive civilization,
which is a polite way of talking about forcing people
to live like white folks, forcing Indigenous people to live
like white folks, taking them off their land, taking their
children from them, throwing their children into these what they

(15:03):
called industrial boarding schools. Civilization aggressive civilization. Yeah, that was
Grant's term for don't. I don't know, don't a lot
of these terms like savage and civilization. Uh, and like
what you just said, is there such I mean to

(15:25):
refer to anyone as a savage because they come like
from a Native background. To just be like you're a
savage because you are a Native American. It's like, fuck
you culture. You don't know their culture. You don't know shit.
Because the words savage, I think would be a great
term to use, like bodacious, Like some kid does like

(15:45):
a sweet skateboard trick and you're like, bro, that was savage,
Like that's that would be That's that's so much better.
But it's been poisoned because of racism. Just just another
crime of of of colonialism is that we can't the
word savage to talk about sweet skateboarding tricks. I hate
it so devastating. Yeah, it's heartbreaking and also heartbreaking is

(16:10):
um the story of Ulyssie Simpson Grant's kind of relationship
to the genocide of Native People's. Grant is one of
those guys who you really want to like because you
know the Confederacy and stuff, um, and you know the
destruction of the KKK like he did. He has some
he has some good moments as a president, as both
as a president and as a general um. And he'd
spent most of his career with like a pretty vocally

(16:34):
uh positive attitude towards Native Americans and against US imperialism. Um.
As a veteran, he had condemned the US Mexican War
as quote one of the most unjust ever waged by
a stronger against a weaker nation. In eighteen sixty nine,
after taking office, he'd promised peace in the American West
and admitted our dealings with the Indians properly lay us

(16:55):
open to charges of cruelty and swindling. Um. So Grant
was guy like when he came to when he came
into the presidency, you might have felt like, oh, he
might actually be pretty good president in terms of like
US Native relations, Like he clearly understands, like, yeah, we've
been sucking these people over for a while. But shortly
after he came into power, gold was discovered in the

(17:16):
Black Hills, which was land guaranteed to the Lakota by
a very clear treaty. So there's gold in them hills.
And then Hills is owned by the Lakota um and
so the only thing to do was to orchestrate a
war for resources, uh, and lie about the fact that
the Lakota had started it, even though Grant actually like
sent in troops and yeah, it was like the Iraq

(17:36):
War of the day. Actually, if you read, um, there's
a good Scientific American article will quote, but if you
read about like what Grant did to the Lakota and
the Black Hills, it sounds a lot like the the
Iraq War. So the whole thing snowballed. And I was
gonna say, like us going for oil, right yeah, yeah,
just like you've got the like the basically using a

(17:57):
mix of lies in provac cation in order to justify
a war for resource extraction. Now I have a question,
was there any oil in Canada also on like India
Native American land that we also tried to do. I
haven't heard anything about. But people didn't give a shit
about oil at this point, right, like yeah, baby, we

(18:19):
were all about golden coal back in them days. Yeah.
Um yeah. So this is like the whole thing, you know,
the ship in the Black Hills turns into a cluster fuck.
It includes the massacre of George Custer, and the Seventh Cavalry. Um.
But despite the fact that it was a huge disaster,
the policy of aggressive civilization that Grant had initially announced

(18:41):
in eighteen sixty nine was seen by a great idea
by Nicholas Gavin and eventually by the Canadian government. Um So,
they they basically decided, like, look over at the United
States waging a genocidal war in the Black Hills, and
they're like, it's too loud. But like the fundamental idea
of forcing these people off of their land and into
cities and into schools where we teach their kids, that's

(19:04):
a good idea. Um So, in eighteen seventy nine, Nicholas
Davin traveled back to Canada after his time in d
C and he wrote a report called Report on the
on Industrial Schools for Indians and half Breeds. Now, Yeah,
interestingly enough, half breed isn't a general term. Uh, that's
a specific term. That was the official Yeah, that's the

(19:25):
official Canadian government term for the Metiste people. Um was
half half breed um. And the short version of the
stories that the Matists had rebelled against the government a
number of times and the white people in charge didn't
want to recognize them as real Indians because that would
entitle them to land and hunting rights and all that stuff.
Um So, while the Matists weren't considered to be an

(19:45):
Indigenous people under the Indian Act, they were considered to
be an Indigenous people when it came to um the
Canadian government's policy of abducting Indigenous children and forcing them
into these uh what what we're called industrial boarding schools.
Um So, like they both were and weren't Native people
under the government side. But yeah, that the Canadian government

(20:06):
just called the Mattie's half breeds. What the funk? This?
Almo feels like a j K Rolling book, just like
so filled with weird terms that you're like, this is
the kind of like racism in a way. It's very racy,
super straight up racism in our I mean, I'm just
referring to like j K Rolling books, but like this
is just fucked half breeds. Fuck how to hear? That's

(20:29):
I can never wrap my mind around like caring about
a person's culture this much. It's like who cares? Who
cares so much? To be like you are labeled this
because this happens to be your background, Like leave it
the fun you know what, I'm just I I hate it,
you know, I just hate it. It's it's not great,
and it's a there's a complicated history there that we're

(20:51):
not gonna get into in tremendous detail. But what's important
is that, like the the overall policy, while you have
the Canadian government considers like UM only recognizes some Indigenous
groups as as actual tribes. Any person who is like
an Aboriginal person UM in the area that becomes known
as Canada is kind of covered by the rules that

(21:14):
the Canadian government puts in place about residential schools. And
basically what they start to mandate is that Indigenous children
cannot stay in their homes. They have to be taken
away and educated at schools that are located away from
the reservation because like native schools are they teach you
to be a savage? Like yeah, yeah, yeah, Davin Wright

(21:38):
wrote wrote in his report quote the day school does
not work because the influence of the wigwam was stronger
than the influence of the school. UM. So basically, like
people like natives, even if you teach them to read
and write, you know, in English and whatnot, they're going
to like at their own culture there's something and this
is this is like a long standing like thing with

(21:58):
white people in North America in particular. Is this like
kind of admission that when people have the choice between
quote unquote civilized life and living the way that like
native tribes had for generations, they almost always preferred to
live the way that the tribes had lived. Um, Like
nobody nobody wanted to live in cities or whatever. Um.

(22:19):
But yeah, so that really bummed out the Canadian government.
Uh yeah, um, and we gotta do something about that.
So can I just say there's something very interesting about
how white people are so and especially like white governments
are so good at creating identity crisis within like people

(22:41):
of color, like to a point of like almost like
you don't feel healthy mentally at all because you don't
know where you stand. And it's because white people are
constantly trying to be like technically like if you want
to be this, you have to do that, and it's
like you fucking suck like a lot of Like I
feel like I struggle with that same thing because growing

(23:03):
up I was constantly told I had to be a
certain way to fit in with like other like white kids.
I was growing up with and it fucked me up
for a very long time where I felt like I
had to go away from my own culture of like
being Iranian. And then it took me a long time
of like therapy to come back around and be like,
why I appreciate where I come from. And I felt
like I was mine fucked to a point where I

(23:25):
was my name is Anna, but I was called Anna
so many times so long by people that I started
introducing myself as Anna because I was like, well, that's
what they keep calling like. I was literally mind fucked
and yeah, oh god, it's this. It's this. The people
in charge of these these polities of the United States government,

(23:46):
of the state governments of Canada, UM are kind of
inherently horrified that there might be other ways to do things.
And maybe I don't know. I was sure there's a
number of reasons, including the fact that people who are
in power feel like their power arrests on everybody believing
in the system they believe in. But there's a bunch
going on here. A lot of it's just about resource extraction, right,

(24:07):
is that if you if you break up the tribes um,
then they can't hold on to their land. And that's
I think really at the core of what Canada is
doing here. So the understanding they have is that like
if you take away the kids of indigenous people, you
send them a great distance away to these these schools,
they will grow up not feeling like a part of

(24:28):
their tribe. And the thing that they the initial term
they used for these places was industrial boarding schools, which
is a horrible name. Um. And they these were what
they sounded like, massive boarding schools filled with children who
had been forcibly taken away from parents by the government. Um.
And these they were kind of based not on like
the nice English boarding schools of the past, um, but

(24:48):
on the kind of places that like in England, if
you're your family was in debt or two poor, your
kids would be taken from you would put in these workhouses. Um.
It was. It was based on the workhouses. It was
ba done these places for the storage of poor children
whose parents were seen as unfit to take care of them. Um.
And the hope of the Canadian government was that these

(25:09):
kids would be educated in such a way that it
would kill the Indian inside them. Uh. Nicholas Davin wrote, quote,
if anything is to be done with the Indian, we
must catch him very young. The children must be kept
constantly within the circle of civilized conditions. So the Canadian
government big fans of this idea, and they started building
a series of industrial boarding schools and these were managed

(25:29):
by the Anglican and Catholic churches. Um so yeah, yeah, yeah,
what is there? Something? Is there something you know about
I don't know, say, the Catholic Church and the raising
of children that that might be relevant? Here is there
a history there? Oh? Boy? Everybody loves everybody loves the church?

(25:53):
Is yeah? I love that sitcom. Everyone loves the Church
and everybody loves yeah yeah products and we're back. Oh
my goodness. Those products really washed the taste of a

(26:15):
slow cultural genocide out of my mouth. How about you
anna always love products? So yeah, the Canadian government starts
putting up these industrial schools, these industrial boarding schools, and
puts the churches in charge of them. And this saves
the government money and it also helped various Christian denominations
with their plan to gradually convert all the indigenous peoples

(26:35):
of Canada. Uh. The idea was that it would be
easier to get kids to adopt a new religion after
they were forcibly taken away from their family and everything
they had ever known. Um, which is a tactic I
plan to steal when I get my COLT up and running,
like it does seem to be like credit to the
Canadian government. The earlier you abduct the kids, the easier
it is to get them on board with your COLT.

(26:56):
And then you know, the f d A let you
on fire. Anyway. The first wave of these boarding schools
numbered about sixty nine institutions with only students, but the
program quickly grew and by nineteen thirty one there were
eighties some residential schools operating in Canada. And that's the
name that like industrial boarding school is kind of too harsh.

(27:16):
They transition to calling them residential schools because the kids
live there. Uh. And I'm gonna quote now from a
rite up in Indigenous Foundations, which is a a website
that's kind of a project of the University of British
Columbia to tell the stories of the kids who wound
up in these institutions. Quote. Authorities would frequently take children
to schools far from their home communities, part of a

(27:37):
strategy to alienate them from their families and familiar surroundings.
In nineteen twenty, under the Indian Act, which is like
the most recent update of the Indian Act, it became
mandatory for every Indian child to attend a residential school
and illegal for them to attend any other educational institution.
The purpose of the residential schools was to eliminate all
aspects of Aboriginal culture. Students had their hair cut short,

(27:59):
they were dressed in unif forms, and their days were
strictly regimented by timetables. Boys and girls were kept separate,
and even siblings rarely interacted, further weakening family ties. Chief
Bobby Joseph of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society recalls
that he had no idea how to interact with girls
and never even got to know his own sister beyond
a mere wave in the dining room. In addition, students

(28:19):
were strictly forbidden to speak their languages, even though many
children knew no other or to practice Aboriginal customs or traditions.
Hihilations of these rules were severely punished. Oh boy, yeah,
so it's basically you're you're you're trying not to kill them,
but you are trying to kill their culture. Right, which
kind of internally kills them. Yeah. Yeah, definitely destroys people

(28:42):
on the inside as human beings. Um yeah, it's it's
fun stuff Canada. So punishment for speaking one's native tongue
is among the most common traumatizing experiences you'll hear from
the survivors of residential schools. Um. Because spoilers, this ship
continued up into the present day. There's a ton of
people who will talk, like a ton of different stories
out there are people's experiences here because the very last

(29:04):
residential school didn't close its doors until nineteen nine six. Um,
so this started in eighteen eighty three and continued into
the late nineties. Like Bill Clinton was in office when
they finally closed down the last residential school. So there's
like there's like fucking people in their twenties who went
to these places. So uh yeah. One of the survivors

(29:26):
of the residential schools is an author named Gilbert oscar
Boos who attended the Guarnier Residential School. Now, his native
tongue was Ojibway, and the Guarnier School punished all uses
of Ojibway with physical violence. And I'm gonna quote now
from a writ up based on Gilbert's experiences titled The Welcome,
It begins with an encounter between little Wolf based on
Oscar Boos and Catholic priest the Black Robe quote. Little

(29:51):
Wolf saw it, but couldn't believe it was actually happening.
The black robes huge hairy hand flew up, appeared to
hang in mid air as it drifted through a lazy semicircle,
and exploded violently in the boys face. The blow blow
slammed him into the hard stone ends of an iron gate.
Dazed and shaken, he lay in the dust, dimly aware
of split ripped lips and warm salty blood making angry
red patterns on a brand new buckskin shirt. Indian language

(30:12):
is verboten. You will not speak it again. Far off
in the swirling mists of pain and confusion, Adore slams
a lock turns. Empty walls bear mute witness to the
sounds of muffled, muffled sobs torn from a small, frightened
boy huddled in a darkened corner, and like locking kids
in cellars and whatnot, sometimes for days on end was
a common punishment for them speaking their language, but physical

(30:34):
punishment in particular um was a really consistent um Uh
response to kids using their native language. George Gwaren, a
former chief of the Musquem Nation, later recalled quote Sister
Mary Baptiste had a supply of sticks as long and
thick as pool cues. When she heard me speak my language,
she lift up her hands and bring the stick down
on me. I've still got bumps and scars on my hands.

(30:55):
I still have to wear special gloves because the cold
weather really hurts my hands. I tried very hard not
to cry when I was being beaten, and I can
still just turn off my feelings. And I'm lucky. Many
of them in my age they either didn't make it,
committed suicide or died violent deaths, or alcohol got them.
And it wasn't just my generation. My grandmother who's in
her late nineties to this day, it's too painful her
to her to talk about what happened to her at

(31:16):
the school. And both of these cases, these stories actually
kind of weigh in on the more minor end of
punishments meeted out to Indigenous kids for speaking their native languages.
It was not uncommon for students guilty of language speaking
to be beaten and shackled to their beds. Um and
another common punishment was to have needles shoved into their
tongues to remind them not to use forbidden words. That's

(31:37):
some That truly feels like a story from like the
Dark Ages, not like yea yeah yeah yeah, like was
going on when a lot of us were in school. Um,
I'm going to quote again from that booklet published by
Facing History. Quote. Many in the school's administrations believe that

(31:57):
the student's independent spirit had to be broken in order
for them to accept a new way of life. Students
who did not adhere to school schedules and regulations received strappings, whippings,
and were often humiliated in front of peers. Students who
tried to escape from the schools had their hair cut
very short. Indeed, such offenses would earn students long hours
even days in a dark, secluded closet, often without real food. Uh.

(32:18):
The cutting of the hair on the first day at
school or for punishment had a profound meaning. Long hair
has a deep and spiritual meaning, and indigenous cultures, too
many it serves as an extension of a person's mind,
reflective of its strength and beauty. The hair length and
style also distinguished between different indigenous nations and Symbolically, the
cutting of a person's hair by an enemy is an
act of humiliation and forced submission. The staff at the

(32:39):
Mohawk Institute even built a prison cell for those who
tried to escape. Indeed, disobedience and escape were two of
the most common forms of resistance to the harsh foreign discipline,
and sometimes kids would die trying to escape from these places.
Are escaping and winding up because they were out in
the middle of nowhere, winding up in the middle of
like a desperate Canadian winter, trying to get back home
wasn't uncommon at all. Yeah, there's sorry, there is no

(33:03):
like absolutely zero regulation of these schools, and if there is,
they just don't care. Yeah, they just don't care. Treat it.
They that's really it. They don't care. The actual education
at these places is piss poor at best. Residential school
students did not receive anything close to the same education
as white Canadians and public schools like The goal here

(33:24):
was not to give these kids a good education. The
goal was to break their connection to their culture um
and in fact, they didn't learn the normal classes that
other Canadian students were supposed to learn. Indigenous children were
taught only practical skills. Girls learned how to become domestic maids.
They learned to do laundry and cook and clean. Boys
were taught how to do carpentry or farm or other

(33:45):
manual labor tasks. UM. So again, they're training them to
be low level, working class people because that's all they
think they're good for. They don't want them to be
in natives. They don't want them to live like indigenous
people had lived for centuries. But they also don't don't
see them as really really being Canadian. They just want

(34:07):
to take their land and make them into farm workers
or whatever. Um and yeah. Residential schools were, of course
chronically underfunded and often only kept the lights on with
the help of child labor. Uh. Most of them operated
under what was known as the half day work day system,
where they would have half days of classes and the
students would work unpaid the other half of the time. Um,

(34:31):
not just cleaning and maintaining the school, but also you know,
growing food or what not, doing things you know that
that essentially helped pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Um and yeah, it was again unpaid labor. And we
all know what another term for unpaid labor is many
students spent so little time in class that by age
eighteen they'd only reached the fifth grade. Um they were,

(34:53):
as a rule, discouraged from pursuing higher education. So that's good,
that's good stuff Canada. UM. I didn't know any of
the US about Canada, and I am deeply disturbed by
all of it. I don't understand. I'm going to drop
kick a maple leaf right after this, Yeah, drop kick
a maple leaf. Yeah, I'm gonna beat the ship at

(35:13):
us and leaves out of this. I imagine you're trying to,
but it keeps like, you know, it floats down and
you're just trying to kick it, but it keeps moving.
You know. It's troublesome. That's why Canada's never faced justice
is how difficult it is to drop kick a maple leaf.
Very hard. One day our scientists will figure it out,
but until then, you know, we just have to let

(35:35):
the anger live in our hearts. So to make matters
more heartbreaking, a significant number of Indigenous parents willingly took
their children to residential schools. Um it was required, but
some of the parents saw it as like an opportunity,
like something. It was not uncommon for parents to try
to hide their children, but some saw this as an
opportunity for their kids to actually like have a better

(35:56):
chance of success in white society. And it was also
a matter of like the different churches, the Anglican and
the Catholic churches would compete for students because they kind
of wanted to beat the other church and saving the
most souls. UM. So it was not uncommon for like
churches to come on to different reservations to kind of
induce parents to pick their specific school to send their

(36:17):
kids to. UM. One student who later attended a residential
school and Saskatchewan recalled quote, we had these two competing religions,
the Anglican and Catholic churches, both competing for our souls.
It seemed, you know, I remember growing up on the
reserve here when they were looking for students that were
competing against each other. We were the prizes, you know,
that they would gain if they won. I remember they
the Catholic priests coming out with you know, used hockey

(36:38):
equipment and telling us, you know, come on, come to
our school, come play hockey for us, Come and play
in our band. We've got all kinds of bands here.
We've got trombones and trumpets and drums and all that
kind of stuff. They use all this stuff to encourage
us or entice us to come to the Catholic school.
And then on the other hand, the Anglicans, they would
come out with what they called bail clothes. They bring
out a bunch of clothes in a bail, like a
big bail. It was all used clothing, and they'd give

(36:59):
it to themen on the reserve here, and the women
made blankets and stuff out of these old clothes. But
that's the way they competed for us as people. So
that's cool, fun stuff. Yeah, good on the churches. So
most residential schools kept students away for ten months out
of the year somewhere year round. All correspondents from children
back home had to be written in English, with most
which most children's parents could not read. Uh. Families were

(37:22):
deliberately split up inside, with brothers and sisters kept as
far apart as possible. And as you might imagine, the
teachers who would willingly work in such an environment did
not tend to be the cream of the crop. Um. Yeah,
and I'm gonna site again from that Indigenous Foundation's website
by the University of British Columbia quote. Another significant problem

(37:43):
at residential schools was the quality of the teachers these
institutions attracted and we're willing to hire. The Anglican run St.
John's Indian Residential School was the rule rather than the exception,
when it reported in nineteen forty seven that the teachers
at both junior and senior levels had some teaching experience
but no qualifications for their jobs. In nineteen fifty two,
federal government survey found that ten people employed as teachers

(38:04):
claimed no formal education beyond grade eight. Unqualified teachers were
hired because no one else was willing to brave the
Canadian wilderness to work for pitifully low rages at cash
strapped schools. Residential school teachers did not, in general approach
normal standards. In ninety eight, a departmental study conducted of
the qualification of the teachers and the residential schools disclosed
that over of the teaching staff had no professional training. Indeed,

(38:27):
some had not even graduated from high school. Where do
they they just pull any like you just show up
to the interview, You're like, honestly like I don't like
Native Americans, and they're like, you have a job. Are
you willing to hit kids who use their native language? Yes?
All right, you're a history teacher. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty great.

(38:50):
So if the quality of the education was bad, then
at least residential schools were also pestilential death chaps that
murdered thousands of children. I wrote that in a more
positive way than it than it is. So there were
there are numbers of kids dying, huge numbers of kids dying.
Will never know how many, but thousands for sure. Um. Yeah.

(39:10):
In nineteen oh seven, a government medical inspector named P. H.
Bryce reported that twenty four percent of the time in Canada,
when a previously healthy Aboriginal child died, they died in
a residential school. Um. And this number undercuts the amount
of deaths because one of the few things that would
actually get you sent home from a residential school was
being deathly ill. Uh. Students who were sent away from

(39:32):
the school back home, UM died with their parents and
stayed out of government statistics and the data suggests that
between forty seven percent and seventy of all Indigenous students
discharged from residential schools died immediately after coming home. Um. Yeah,
and these kids just getting tuberculosis, spreading it back to
the tribe. Will never know how many died. Um. Now,

(39:54):
a lot of kids did die at the schools. The
minimum you'll hear bandied about is somewhere in the neighborhood
of thirty two hundred, you know, over this period up
until the late nineteen nineties, but there are credible estimates
that placed the death toll at well over six thousand children.
The reason there's such a discrepancy is that virtually all
residential schools made use of an age old tool for

(40:14):
committing genocide without pissing off the neighbors, mass grades. When
small pox or tuberculosis would sweep through a school, surviving
students were often enlisted to hide the corpses of their
classmates from prying eyes. So Vester Green, who was forced
to bury the corpse of an Inuit boy in nineteen
fifty three, later recalled we were told never to tell
anyone by Jim Ludford, the principal, who got me and

(40:35):
three other boys to bury him. But a lot more
kids got buried all the time. And that big grave
next to the school, yeah, so they there. Did your
school not have a mass grave on a fortunately? Um
people weren't dying at my school because I guess white
people ran it and they cared about the other white kids.

(40:55):
I guess no one died at my school because there
were white people at it. Yeah, I mean, you know,
I do believe that every school could eventually have mass graves,
And I think COVID nineteen is going to get us there. Actually,
I think finally we will achieve, we will defeat racism
by bringing mass graves to all kinds of schools. Um.

(41:16):
And that's really that's an improvement to cheer for, right, Yeah,
I mean, let's cheer for it. Damn. So at the
United Church School in Edmonton, dead Indigenous children were buried
under a hedge. At Blue Quills Catholic School near saddle Lake,
skeletons and schools were regularly spotted near the basement furnace.

(41:37):
At the Mohawk Institute, ran by the Anglican Church in Brantford,
children were buried under the orchard at the side of
the school building. We'll never have any idea how many
kids were disposed this way. They're still digging up mass
graves around residential schools today. Um, like you'll, you'll they're
regular stories about them finding more and like, yeah, it's
it's horrible the Canadian government. One of the reasons why

(41:58):
it's so hard for us to know how many kids
actually died in residential schools is that the Canadian government
stopped recording the deaths of Aboriginal students in nineteen twenty
because so many kids were dying and it made them
look bad. The deadliest years were probably the interwar period,
the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, but Indigenous students kept
right on dying at residential schools up to the modern era.

(42:19):
Sue Caribou was taken from her parents at age seven
and forced into a residential school in the nineteen seventies.
She believes that dozens of other kids died while she
was in turn there quote, remains were found all over
the fields, but student numbers do not reflect the reality.
Many of my friends committed suicide after their release. Which
is something that all of these kids, these people will
will point out, is that, like the death toll, One

(42:41):
of the reasons will never know the death toll is
that a lot of the people who died, uh, you know,
killed themselves years later. And so she's just like, oh, no,
It's just part of the weirdly high suicide rate that
Natives have in in in Canada. Um anyway, Sue's experiences
give you an idea of how brutal residential goals remained
right up into the modern era. From a rite up

(43:02):
in the Guardian quote, Sue Caribou contracts pneumonia once a year,
like clockwork. The recurring illness stems from her childhood years
at one of Canada's horrific residential schools. I was thrown
into a cold shower every night, sometimes after being raped,
the frail fifty year old Indigenous mother of six said,
mother of actly Cariboo was snatched from her parents house
in nineteen seventy two by the state funded, church run

(43:24):
Indian residential school system that brutally attempted to assimilate Native
children for over a century. She was only seven years old.
We had to stand like soldiers while singing the national anthem,
otherwise we would be beaten up, she recalled. Cariboo said.
Catholic missionaries physically and sexually abused her until nineteen seventy
nine at the Guy Hill Institution in the east of
the province of Manitoba. She said she was called a

(43:45):
dog and was forced to eat rotten vegetables and forbidden
to speak her native language of Cree. I vowed myself
that if I ever get out alive, out of that
horrible place, I would speak up and fight for our rights.
She said. Uh. And it's worth noting that the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police, you know, the is everybody with the
hats and they read, yeah, they were the ones who
would drag these kids out of their houses. Oh my

(44:07):
fu Yeah, proud urcmp history there. So Sue's experiences being
molested at her residential school were not at all extreme.
To date, more than two thousand people have sued the
Canadian government as a result of sexual abuse they endured
while they were interned at residential schools. This experience was
remarkably consistent across the different religious denominations. Catholic priest right

(44:31):
tons of kids, because that's what Catholic priests do. Anglican
pastors also raped raped tons of kids because the residential
schools were an almost deliberately perfect environment for child molesters.
One of the most successful molesters was a man with
and I'm gonna need you to strap in for this
name Anna because it's it's he's a child molester. So
we can't we can't laugh about it too much. But
his name is William Peniston Starr. What the fuck Peniston? Yeah,

(44:56):
I know, I know, I know Peniston Star Peniston Star. No, no, no,
two different words. I had to like triple check to
make sure Peniston wasn't like, how how is that a name? Peniston?
William Peniston Star. Yeah. Anyway. In nineteen fifty six, this
guy starts working as a physical training teacher at the

(45:18):
Glycan School in Alberta, uh, and then he gets promoted
and transferred to be the principle of an Anglican school
in Quebec. In nineteen sixty eight, he's appointed the director
of the Gordon Residence and his evaluations as an employee.
As an employee were like consistently positive, which is why
he rose so rapidly through the ranks. You know, there

(45:38):
weren't a lot of good employees at the residential school,
so he was kind of seen as a superstar. But
there were some early signs that there might that everything
was not all above board with Mr Peniston star Um.
In the late nineteen fifties, he had to suddenly leave
his job at Glycan after an unidentified conflict came between
him and a group of senior boys. Indian official Indians

(46:00):
Official WP identified conflict. Yeah, they never go into detail.
The Indian Affairs Department published a report on the matter
and said that there were issues with the within the
Gymnastics Gymnasium tumbling team that Star trained, but didn't say
what those issues were. He conflict. I'm just like that.

(46:22):
That phrasing is truly trash. Well, do you know what
it sounds like to me? Like maybe they he tried
to pull some ship and they confronted him. Yeah, that's
exactly what it sounds like happened. Is he was trying
he wound up molesting or attempting to molest some of
the kids on his wrestling team, and they complained and
the Anglican churchs transferred him and promoted him. God, yeah, yeah,

(46:47):
it's cool. But you know what doesn't abused children on
a wrestling team. Are you doing a horrible transition to
an adverct? I don't know. I don't know what else
to do in times like this, Sophie. I have no
other comforts but botching an ad transition. That's my whole
that's my whole world. You can don't find our faces comforting.

(47:10):
I I have lost all ability to take comfort in
the human form. The only thing that comforts me now
is transitioning to ads awkwardly products. Okay, so we're back
and we're talking about William Peniston star Um. I can't

(47:33):
get over that. That makes me think of like I
remember in history class growing up, they'd always be like,
so many American names are just made up because you
know that. But to me to think that someone years
on years, you know, hundreds of years ago, was like, okay, now,
what can we name this family? Maybe Peniston and it's

(47:56):
what you just named it after an anatomy. Maybe their
family was a bunch of dicks sore, because you know
how they always say like, well, your family owns land,
so you guys are the lanterns or whatever the fun
but this maybe it's like the whole family was a
bunch of fucking dicks. So they were like, and these
guys will be the Penistons. I like, I like that version,

(48:17):
Yeah so do I. So yeah, So this guy Um
gets in trouble for molesting his wrestling students, and they
promote him Um. He continues to teach wrestling. He leads
a lot of trips overseas for like hold On Fallout
Junior just took an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University.

(48:38):
Oh that's that's unfortunate, poor Jerry. You know what, I
bet Jerry Fallwell has never done molested wrestling students at
his school. I'm kidding, he's he's almost certainly done that.
I was gonna say, I don't know, I'll be shocked
if Jerry was Liberty University president after posting a product

(49:00):
of provocative photo on social media. He was. What's best
about that is how he initially tried to argue that
he wasn't drunk in the photo when he was so
visibly drunk that he couldn't even cover his stomach. It's amazing.
I do think the like Righteous Gemstones the TV show, truly.

(49:22):
I think it's such a like outing of what it
is to be that type of like television pastor of
Like it's like you, what do you even try? Like
don't even pretend anymore? Like everyone knows you guys are
not these like righteous like god fearing people, like come on,
give me, it's good break. You know who is a righteous,

(49:44):
god fearing person, Anglican educator Peniston Star. Um, yeah, rapist.
So this guy's this guy's career continues like a rocket
for years and years in years, um and while he's
teaching kids and you know, leading overseas trips for you know,

(50:05):
the school dance troupe and stuff, he is just molesting
the ship out of a bunch of children. And I'm
gonna quote now from the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's
report on Residential Schools. Quote. Throughout his time at the school,
Starr had been using his position to sexually exploit students.
He instituted a system of bribery and intimidation to establish
a regime under which he could sexually assault students. Those

(50:27):
who refused to participate were punished through the denial of privileges.
He was arrested on March fifth, nineteen nine, on twelve
charges relating to sexual and child abuse, all arising from
the years that he worked at the Gordon Residence. According
to an internal government document, at the time, the department
had not received any complaints related to sexual or other
abuse during the time that Star was employed at the residence.
On February second, nineteen ninety three, Star Wars pleaded guilty

(50:50):
to ten counts of sexually assaulting ten boys between the
ages of seven and fourteen while he was the administrator
of the Gordon Residence. He was sentenced to four and
a half years in jail, and it's since come out
that it's it's likely that he's he has victims in
the hundreds. Um, yeah, four years, you said four four
and a half years. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. Uh.

(51:13):
Sexual assault by students against other students was also unfortunately
very common, and this was the natural result of several
terrible things. For one thing, huge numbers of residential school
teachers sexually assaulted their students. Again, thousands and thousands of
kids were victimized by their teachers, and this normalized a
lot of aggressively sexual behavior to the kids, and some
of them went on to copy it. For another thing,

(51:34):
all these kids had been pulled out of their families
and communities, so they've been like ripped out of the
moral universe they had inhabited as children, uh, and stuck
in a completely new one. Their parents were replaced by
nuns and priests and teachers who I'm sure sometimes cared
about them, but just as often beat them or molested them,
or helped them had them help dispose the corpses of
their peers. So just a bad place to be a kid. Uh.

(51:57):
Students were often victims, but they were not necessarily passive ones.
The book Survivors Speak notes to the extent that they could,
many students try to protect themselves and others from abuse.
At the Gordon School in Saskatchewan, the older children tried
to protect the younger ones from abuse at the hands
of the dormitory staff. Hazel Mary Anderson recalled, sometimes you'd
get sometimes you'd get too tired to stay up at

(52:17):
night to watch over them, so nobody bothers them because
those workers would, especially night workers, would bother the younger kids.
The younger kids dorms were next to the older girls dorms.
It's like the older girls would stay up and not
sleep at night to protect the little kids from being
molested by night workers. Yeah. By the nineteen fifties, it
had become clear to even the most idiotic of soulless

(52:38):
bureaucrats that the residential schools were not working as intended.
Indigenous children were meant to assimilate to lives as lowly
paid laborers. Aboriginal cultures were meant to be wiped out,
but it became clear that things were not working as intended,
and so the government pulled back. In nineteen fifty one,
the Indian Act was amended and the half day work
school system was ended. Next, the government decided children could

(52:58):
live with their parents whenever possible. In nineteen sixty nine,
the Department of Indian Affairs took control of the system
and pushed the churches out. All of this sounds good
on paper, but abuses continued. Schools were still underfunded, and
teachers were still underqualified, many of them had not even
graduated high school, and fits and starts. The Canadian government
tried to close the residential school system, but this often

(53:21):
just meant changing the words they used for doing the
same thing. In the nineteen sixties, thousands of Aboriginal children
were apprehended by social services and taken away from their families.
The sixties scoop, as it came to be known, kept
the last few residential schools full up through the nineteen
eighties and into the mid nineteen nineties, when the vast
majority were finally shuttered. The last residential school closed in

(53:43):
nineteen nineties six, by which point indigenous groups around Canada
were already organizing to sue their government over what they
considered to have been an act of genocide. By mid
April two thousand, Canada was being sued by an estimated
seven thousand survivors of the roughly hundred and fifty thousand
children who had been interned in residential schools since eighteen
eighty three. The Anglican Church was named as a codefendant,

(54:04):
and three hundred and fifty nine cases of abuse involving
sixteen hundred plaintiffs. It was enough that there were fears
that the national sign out of Canada might go bankrupt.
Over All the lawsuits, which eventually totaled more than two
billion dollars, lawsuits continued to stack up, and calls for
a government investigation and apology were repeatedly denied by the
Conservative administration of Stephen Harper. Finally, in two thousand and eight,

(54:26):
Canada launched its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which spent seven
long years compiling an exhaustive report on the residential schools.
The head of the commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, is the
second Aboriginal judge in Canadian history. His conclusion was stark
and he did not mince words, declaring Canada clearly participated
in a period of cultural genocide. So the Canadian government

(54:48):
has at least been like, yeah, we um, we did
us a genocide. Yeah that's good. Yeah, yeah, that's the
least you can do. Uh. Stephen Harper himself apologized on
behalf of the government UM in two thousand eight, although
he and his government refused to agree that Canada had
committed genocide. Uh. The Anglican and Catholic churches apologized to

(55:09):
although the Pope's representatives noted that his apology was a
personal one and not an official apology by the Catholic Church. Um,
you wouldn't want to do that. More than one point
six billion dollars has been awarded and handed out to
the survivors of residential schools so forth. Yeah. UM. This
is also very fresh, and there's new stories dropping regularly about,

(55:30):
for example, the scope of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's
involvement in this new mass graves that have been found
in different locations. In two thousand thirteen, the news broke
that in the forties and fifties, nutritional experiments had been
carried out on malnourished Aboriginal children at these schools with
the federal government's knowledge. Yeah, it's really fucked up. Um. Basically,
they found out that all these kids were malnourished, and

(55:52):
instead of giving them all vitamin supplements, they only gave
some of them vitamin supplements so they could watch how
different only the two groups reacted. UM, just used them
as tests something. They're like, on top of um, putting
you through the most truly traumatizing experience of your probably
your whole life, that could potentially ruin you as a being. Um,

(56:15):
let's see, let's just try and use you as science
experiments as well. Well. They wanted to know the effectiveness
of vitamins supplements for white people, and they had all
these kids that were not white that they could test
it on. So about kids were used as test subjects. Uh.
Subjects were kept on starvation level diets, they were given
or denied vitamins, minerals in certain foods, and dental services

(56:37):
were withheld from some students because researchers thought better teeth
and gums with skew results. So that's all fun. Fuck,
that's the fun story of the Canadian residential school system
that is wow, fuck you Canada, I know, what the
what the funk Canada? I mean, I'm glad they gave

(56:59):
some me back, but that doesn't that does not change
a fucking thing. I would not say they've made it
right now, No they haven't. You know what I don't
go ahead is that I don't like that. Oh you
know they're gonna be like is that and then go on?
But is that now? I also don't like that. And

(57:21):
I think there's this I don't understand it, but I
feel like it's just like the human being was like
and if this happens in all, like most countries, just
like if you find someone less than kill them off,
and it's like it's so devastating to be like why
has it take? Like even now it's still happening, but

(57:44):
like at least some people are coming around to be like, oh, yeah,
maybe we shouldn't just kill people. And it's like barely
are we coming around and we are barely kind of
turning a corner of like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't just
kill people because we think they're less than And there
is I don't understand, like what world was I raised
like I have very strict Iranian parents like, how was

(58:06):
I able to get to the point where I'm like,
you know what, that's really evil, funked up and not
a thing we should do. But then yet so many
people are so far behind. It doesn't make any sense
to me. It doesn't I don't Yep, it's bad. Yeah,
shake the country of Canada. Yeah, let's just let's just

(58:26):
kick the ship at us some maple leads and not
look too closely at our own history because everything candidate
was kind of based on the actions of the US
government earlier. And there's if you by the way you
go to Australia, very similar things were done. Um. Yeah,
the schools and stuff, like Canada's program was really particularly
extensive and lasted shockingly long period of time, Like they

(58:48):
kept it going a hell of a lot longer than
the US government kept their kind of residential schools agoing um,
But yeah, pretty much the same story. It does feel
like the more remote you are, the easier it is
to kind of like get away with here genocides. People
don't know how much Canada gets away with right, Like

(59:09):
when when we were in when I was in Guatemala,
I talk about that time a lot. Uh, my Canadian
friends like I was hanging out with a bunch of Canadians,
um and as an American, despite all the ship that
I Americans had done to Guatemala, we actually got like
less negative responses than the Canadians did because a number
of Canadian mining companies had been guilty of like horrific

(59:31):
behavior and like we're at that point doing horrible, horrible
things in Guatemala. Um. Which is a thing about Canada.
You could actually, if you wanna really look into Canadian history,
a lot of very specifically fucked up things around mining
that happens constantly, both within the country itself and with
companies that are headquartered in Canada but are mining concerns. UM.

(59:54):
And we talk a lot about all the wonderful social
programs Canada has a lot of that is funded by
resource extraction on a globe scale that generally ignores the
rights of a lot of people in the areas where
the extraction is occurring. It's good stuff. So it's almost
as if we shouldn't exist, it would maybe just countries.
Maybe just countries, because like I always do feel shitty,

(01:00:15):
like there's so many things to criticize Canada for. But
also I'm like, but I'm an American, like like like
it does. Like the reality is that they're all bad there.
They all do terrible things to people. Um, if you
want to look at any country that's considered to be
one of the good countries and you scratch it a
little bit, you'll find that they're operating horrific rare earth

(01:00:37):
earth mineral minds that rely on the mass, you know,
enslavement of children or something. It's just one of the
fun realities of the cool world we live in. Yeah,
can someone if there is any country I don't know,
like like Norway, Like I don't even know what's good.
Maybe I mean your best bets Uruguay, but like still

(01:00:59):
probably a bunch of fucked up ship you can find. Um.
All right, Well, can someone tweet at us if there's
any single good governmental run country please? Yeah? Maybe I see.
I think they're doing better. And I'm concerned a little
about ice and like what goes up what goes on
up there? You know. Yeah, they might not be a
real country. It might just be a Canadian mining front,

(01:01:20):
Like that would be a Canada thing to do, fake
in Iceland on us, fake and tricky ass Canadians. Okay, God,
damn it. Yeah, I am dying to know what's a
good place yep um if it exists, because a part
of me feels like it just doesn't exist. Yeah, let
us know if a single good place exists in the world.

(01:01:41):
Otherwise I will continue with my plans to hold up
with a bunch of children in a compound until the
f d A burns us alive. Oh that'll happen. Yeah,
it's gonna be a good time. Oh man, looking forward
to it. Really just watched that Waco TV show and
I was don't bring up Waco. I rewatch it every
single night on a yeah, eleven or twelve hours a

(01:02:06):
night of just pure Waco. I just can't get enough
of that David Koresh you know. And it's such a
funny thing in like popular culture because these like home
flippers from like h G TV like built their like
silo weird, Like I don't even know home Goods company
out in Waco, and I'm like, stop trying to rebrand Waco,

(01:02:28):
Like we shouldn't just know, we shouldn't forget what happened here,
Like this was such a fucking bullshit operation done by
our own government. Yeah, it was, don't forget. It was
horrible that they burnt that compound to the ground, and
the only way to make it right is to burn
the rest of Waco to the ground and finally free
the world from Waco. Yeah, just get rid of Waco.

(01:02:50):
But just we don't need a Waco I have. I've
spent many months there and it's a bad place. I
would apologize to Waco, but Waco knows that I'm right fascinating.
I would like to go see it, but no, you don't.
You don't need to see Waco, Okay, finn, I won't go.
I'll go to the silos. Image of a big truck stop.

(01:03:18):
That's what it is. That's the whole city of Waco,
big truck parking lot. It does feel like like when
I look at the photos of this, these these people
um chipping go go Anna Joanna Gaines who created this,
like Magnolia Market. At the silos, there's something so dark
about it, like it's just in the middle of nowhere,

(01:03:40):
and there's like these giant silos that are all like
aged and ship and I can't help but think, like, boy,
I can't believe somehow this is turned into Waco. But
I can't every everything turns out goes back to Waco.
That's the magic of Waco. Always if you're not Waco

(01:04:00):
a b w baby. Yeah, if you're not wacoing, you're
asleep and that's a problem. Yeah, be a Waco, not
a Sleepoh well, new shirt, be Awaco not asleep. Yeah,
we can have like a really nice, a really nice
depiction of of David Koresh's just just ripped cum gutters.

(01:04:23):
I mean just just cum gutters, cum gutters. Yeah, that's
what you call abs. That's the medical term. Yes, I've
heard someone recently call them a penis ravine. Yeah, that's
another medical term for abdominals. Yeah, both of those are
proper in doctor speak. Ask your doctor about penis ravines

(01:04:43):
and cume gutters today and David Koresh. Always be asking
your doctor about David kor or you could invest your
time into something else, like listening to some of the podcasts,
and it does on this very network. And it's like
to plug your plug double so that I don't have
to hear about Waco anymore. Yes, that's true. I begged
Sophia to book me so I could plug these goddamn shows.

(01:05:04):
So I have to do it. I I yeah, you know,
speaking of um penis ravines UM. I actually heard this
on the Penis Ravenus Penis peniston ravenus. Um. I do
a show right now. Well, I do ethnically ambiguos, as
you guys know, with my co host Green Units, who

(01:05:25):
has been on the show many times. Um, it's called
ethnically ambiguous, which saw about being a person of color
in America. Uh, and we that's you know, we're really
that's what we do. We talked about being a person
of color, child of immigrants, or even an immigrant in
this country. And actually I would recommend our episode with

(01:05:46):
um Joey Cliffs, who is a Native American man, who
is uh he. I honestly didn't know a lot about
um Native American culture because even though I live in
this country, you're taught nothing in history classes or your
schools because they just try and disregard the fact that
we live on Native land. All we learn is the
thing about the corn that you bury with the fish, right, yeah, exactly,

(01:06:12):
and then they ignore the fact that we also like
killed a bunch of Native people to be on this
land in you know, the United States. You're like Mayflower,
You're like yeah, murder Boat. Uh. But also yeah, we
do that show. I recommend the Joy Clift episode because
he is a native American man. He actually I learned
a lot from him, So check that out if you
guys want to. But also my other show, which is

(01:06:34):
less about anything. Uh, it's called Deckheads and I host
it with Nick Turner. Uh, and it's all about the
TV show below deck on Bravo. UM, and a lot
of people like, why do you watch these shows? Honestly
because it's the only thing that lets me turn my
mind off. And I nothing makes me more calm than

(01:06:54):
pure nonsense. Uh. And that's why I love reality TV.
It makes you feel alive in a way I haven't
felt in years. Um. And you know, me and Nick Turner,
comedian Nick Turner hosts the show, and I personally enjoy
it because it's about super yachts that really really rich,
horrible people, uh, rent for tens and thousands of dollars,

(01:07:18):
just so much money for like three days. It's absolute
nonsense and why would you ever spend your money like that?
And super yacht didn't cost that much money. But uh,
we just basically, uh, we're going over every single episode
of the show to ever exist, and we just fucking
rip these people a new asshole about their behavior. And

(01:07:39):
it's fascinating to see how white America works. It's fascinating
to see how rich people just sexually harass whoever they
want and get away with it, and how they just
treat everyone like fucking dirt. So if you want to
hear us really break down these these truly lovely times, uh,
because we we have been recording them all in quarantine.
So it's a great juxtaposition of what we understand as reality.

(01:08:01):
While like the Black Lives Matter movement is going on
like as we speak and continuing will hopefully continue to
go on until we have full justice. Um. But then
you just said and then you cut to us being like,
what the fuck are these people doing? And it's fascinating.
I truly enjoy it because these people have no shame,
and I think more people need to see how the

(01:08:23):
one percent live so you can understand like being rich
and owning all the fucking money in this country, Um,
it's bad and why would you ever want to be
a person like this? So if you guys like a
really interestingly dark social justice angle of us watching reality TV,

(01:08:45):
check it out. Because Jesus fucking Christ, these people have
no shame. I don't get it. I just don't get it.
And it's fascinating to observe. So yeah, check out Deckheads
also on iHeart Radio. Okay, yeah, alrighty, And that is
I was just gonna say. And you can follow me
at Anna, host me on Twitter if you would like

(01:09:06):
to see me, you know, tweet, find Anna on Twitter,
check out her shows and you can find us here
every Tuesday and Thursday talking about real sad ship that
bumps you out. That's the episode you need to know
it

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