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Happy Abolish Canada Day!
106 Plays3 years ago
As the numbers of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools piles up Rob Houle returns to discuss happy and sad fireworks, what you're celebrating when you're celebrating Canada Day and we dive into the details of a couple of sites where it has long been speculated that there are mass, unmarked graves in Alberta.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A new pod on the network that I want to highlight is the latest from the Alberta Advantage. Guest host Aaron Giovanni of Sweaterweather interviews Andrew Jackson about his new book and a lifetime spent on the Canadian Left. And that's the kind of content you get on Harbinger. Become a supporter of this media network and get exclusive supporter-only content, as well as just go and support a fantastic project at harbingermedianetwork.com. Now, on to the show.
00:00:39
Speaker
friends and enemies. Welcome to the progress report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Miskwichi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty six territory on the banks of the Kasis Kasa, one Mississippi or the North Saskatchewan river. Joining us today is a friend of the pod and returning guest, Rob, who Rob, welcome. Welcome back to the progress
Heat Dome and Climate Change Discussion
00:01:00
Speaker
report. Hello. Happy to be here. Thanks for the invite back. I hope you're keeping cool.
00:01:07
Speaker
in this ridiculous heat dome that we find ourselves in. Uh, trying to the best that we can as a family of five, um, it gets pretty tough when he got little ones and things like that, but I'm sitting in my basement right now, which, um, usually is much cooler, but actually it's, it's not that cool down here. It's almost like I'm sitting in the living room. So it's, uh, it's been a weird couple of days and a weird week and.
00:01:35
Speaker
We can all thank climate change for the heat dome.
00:01:38
Speaker
And so recording here in the basement of progress over to headquarters, I got to say the office is an absolutely incredible respite from this heat dome. I am very grateful, very, very grateful for just how cool it is. And when I step out of the office at the end of the day, it's always shocking how fucking hot it is.
00:02:06
Speaker
But yeah, this is the context that we find ourselves in. There's that meme going around of like, this is the hottest summer ever. And it's like, no, son, this is the coldest summer for the rest of your life.
00:02:23
Speaker
It, uh, I went outside for a little bit. It is, yeah, it's, it's nasty out there and you can only help but think of maybe are less fortunate that are struggling in these times and, and facing it on a day to day. And, uh, I hope they're getting all the supports that they need and people need to do, um, all that they can to make sure that we're helping each other out during these crazy ups and downs of heat and whatever else.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. How about your folks if people need water, you know, get some water.
Residential Schools and Canada's Genocidal Legacy
00:02:56
Speaker
So for folks that are listening, we are like a content warning here. We are going to be talking about residential schools. We are going to be talking about the genocidal legacy of Canada and the Canadian state. So if you don't want to listen by all means, but we are going to be getting into some details later on, we're going to be talking about some pretty gruesome stuff that happened, you know, medical experiments for sterilization. So that's going to be coming up later in the pod as well.
00:03:18
Speaker
So just an FYI for folks who are listening. But yeah, Rob, we are likely going to be releasing this pod on Canada Day. The question of what is Canada Day, what are we celebrating when we celebrate Canada Day has really been flipped on its head since the discovery of the 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and the subsequent finding of more children at these residential school burial unmarked graves.
00:03:50
Speaker
I think this has started a conversation about what kind of country Canada is and what you are celebrating when you celebrate Canada Day, right? Well, I think it's definitely been a point of reflection and a point of conversation around, yeah, why do we celebrate
00:04:10
Speaker
candidates because it's, it's the 4th of July is less, less successful kind of cousin, or is it because there's a deep sense of nationalism and other things that happen on, on July 1st, or maybe it's, maybe we do it just because we've always just done it and maybe we've been brainwashed to do some of it. And I think.
00:04:35
Speaker
all of the stuff that's coming to this surface and will continue to come to the surface as we continue to do these explorations and searches will only, will only compound the issue.
Reframing Canadian Nationalism
00:04:45
Speaker
So I think it's, yeah, it's, we tried to do it on Canada 150, but, um, it didn't get as much traction as I think people really hoped for, but now I think we're seeing the ramifications and the buildup from that kind of movement and the, the sheer audacity that we're seeing around.
00:05:04
Speaker
what happened in these institutions and the generations that have been lost because of what had happened there. I think Canada 150 is an important milestone to talk about.
00:05:19
Speaker
speaking purely personally, it was very important to see the counterprogramming of Canada 150 for me and to start doing the reading and the learning and reflection that was needed whenever that was, what, four or five years ago, just in my own kind of context. Yeah, was Canada 150 still on a bash celebration of fucking
00:05:42
Speaker
Canadian nationalism, yes. But I wouldn't discount it. I think Canada 150 counter programming was super important to get us to the point where we are now, where the consensus around Canada, the good, Canada, the just, seems to be cracking up in real time. Right?
00:06:05
Speaker
Well, I think, yeah, that's what we're seeing playing out. That's what we're seeing in the media stories that are coming out in the conversations in our own communities around, yeah, maybe Canada isn't this glowing beacon of justice and freedom and all these other things that we've always said we were. Maybe we're actually much, much worse than that. Maybe we're a wolf in sheep's clothing and maybe
00:06:31
Speaker
There are entire populations in this country who, if we put them in front of a pedestal and in front of a microphone, would tell us what it's really like here. And that can be jarring for a lot of people, and especially devout Canadians, and I think it's long past you.
00:06:52
Speaker
If Canada wouldn't exist in its present form without the kidnapping and murder of Indigenous children, white Canadians simply would not have the wealth and power and privilege that they have today if the residential school project never happened.
00:07:12
Speaker
And thinking about that and realizing that as a white person, you are standing on the bodies of dead Indigenous children is something to reflect on, which is why perhaps fireworks are not the best way to celebrate Canada Day.
00:07:31
Speaker
And this has been a subject of much debate and concern. You've got Aaron O'Toole whinging about a few cities canceling, quote unquote, canceling Canada Day by not having their typical fireworks celebrations.
00:07:50
Speaker
We've had Nahad Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary say that the fireworks that are happening on Canada Day, they're, quote, they're not meant to be a celebration. They're meant to be an honoring of the children who have been lost and a commitment to the future. So Rob, do you think these are happy fireworks or sad fireworks?
00:08:09
Speaker
Yeah, I was chuckling last night when some of those messages came in to me and my social media and looking at the responses to, well, these aren't your happy go
Debating Canada Day Celebrations
00:08:21
Speaker
lucky fireworks. These are the sad ones that when they explode, I think one of the comments was when they explode, it'll be a sad trombone sound or something.
00:08:30
Speaker
And that made me laugh because yeah, that's how, if you don't take some of these things seriously, that's what it becomes. It becomes this farce around.
00:08:43
Speaker
doing things that we always need to do because the budget is there. And if you don't spend the budget for fireworks, then what else are you gonna spend it on? And we all know that there are millions of other things that they could spend all the money that they're having for fireworks on. But I commend some of the, at least talking about it and maybe holding them accountable. And in moments like these, it's important that we recognize leaders that wanna lead and wanna do things differently.
00:09:11
Speaker
and those that just give in to status quo and don't want to shake the boat too much. I think that's what you're seeing is that with this nonsense around sad fireworks versus celebrations.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, celebration and mourning are two very different fucking acts. And fireworks is not how we typically mourn in this country, especially as white Canadian settler types. But you bring up an excellent point about the budget, which I want to highlight right now. And I actually did a bit of reporting and asked the city of Edmonton what their
00:09:46
Speaker
Budget this year is for fireworks, and they're spending $250,000 this year. That's about $60,000 more than usual that is spent on these fireworks. They're spending a little extra money this year in order for signage. They're going to live stream it. And apparently, according to the comms source and the email to be back, they're making the fireworks taller. They're putting more propellant in it. They're going to be heightening the show in order for people to be able to see it from farther away.
00:10:16
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, that is both a number. I had no idea what the number was going to be. I thought it was going to be high, but just as a point of reference, a unit of affordable housing, like a rough rubric for a unit of affordable housing is about $200,000.
00:10:32
Speaker
Yeah, that's when you get into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's that's a lot of money that can be used for other things. And I I know City Council was kind of wavering on whether or not they were going to have fireworks this year and wavering it on whether or not you want to celebrate the day. But I think
00:10:52
Speaker
It's very important that we continue to have these conversations around, yeah, what are you celebrating? There's a fantastic, I do it, I tend to do it every year on National Indigenous Peoples Day, but there's this speech from George Erasmus, who was leader of the National Indian Brotherhood in the 80s, and then in the 90s, around, I think it was at the time, Canada 125, and basically talking about what are we gonna celebrate? Are we gonna celebrate that?
00:11:23
Speaker
The Canadian flag, which was adopted in 1956, a lot of people don't know that, that it's only like 70 years old, is older than the rights of indigenous people to vote in this country. Like these are the types of things that you are celebrating on Canada Day. And when you start to put it into perspective, maybe it's not the right way and maybe you have no reason to celebrate whatsoever.
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the question of canceling Canada Day and reducing it to kind of this stupid kind of cancel culture binary is incredibly unhelpful. I mean, I still want a fucking holiday in July. I'm not going to lie. I don't want to work. I don't want to get rid of the day off, but I think
00:12:10
Speaker
how you celebrate it is incredibly important. And so in Australia, you have examples of invasion day or survival day on what is typically called Australia day. I think that is an example of something that can be done.
00:12:31
Speaker
And it's it is You know, I don't know. I still haven't what I'm gonna do for the day. It's so fucking hot It's hard to plan that far in the future. But like what are you going to be doing this Canada Day? What do you think Canada Day should become? Yeah this this year We normally don't celebrate Canada Day at all as a family we tend to shy away from from
00:12:57
Speaker
events and whatever else uh this year we will be my wife has taken the initiative to lead a uh a memorial walk in her community in the south of the province um to honor the missing children and namely um children lost to residential schools their community was very heavily impacted by she's from the stony tribe so they were very heavily impacted by the mcdoogles and their whole um
00:13:24
Speaker
shyster kind of activities in the south and their connection to Edmonton as well and the McDougall's, George and John, the reverends. So we'll be holding a walk to subvert Canada Day and encouraging attendees to wear orange, to not wear red and white, to not fire off their fireworks and whatever else. Because we didn't, there were stories of kind of
00:13:53
Speaker
her family and my family's experiences in residential schools. But we actually found out that one of her uncles had died in residential schools as a child. So we were able to find his name and find some of the records. And that is one of the other reasons why there is no reason to celebrate Canada Day because children were killed at the hands of state and the church.
00:14:19
Speaker
Yeah, and I gotta keep coming back to the fireworks because one of the places that prominently decided to stop having or to not have a fireworks celebration this year was the city of St. Albert, just north of Edmonton.
00:14:35
Speaker
One of the reasons why they decided to cancel their Canada Day fireworks celebration was because Mission Hill, this is where they set their fireworks off in St. Albert, is according to the city, St. Albert, a quote unquote likely spot to contain the unmarked graves of former Indian residential school students. And setting off Canada Day fucking fireworks over top of the graves, the literal unmarked graves of the victims of Indian residential schools is like a little too on the nose.
00:15:06
Speaker
Yeah, and I commend them for some of their initial comments, but then I also feel the obligation to chastise them a little bit for walking back on some of those comments later on.
00:15:22
Speaker
I was watching some of the social media and as soon as the pushback started around, oh, you guys are canceling Canada Day and all these other things. They went back and, well, you know, it's not COVID optimal to set them off there. And like all these other real reasons why they decided to do it and then they tacked on.
00:15:42
Speaker
well in honor of our indigenous residents who may be traumatized by. So again, it's this wishy-washy kind of approach, but yeah, no, the Mission Hill, the right where Bishop Grandin and Lacombe built their mission and took kids and as depicted in the famous mural, that's the area. So again,
00:16:07
Speaker
If there are graves there, what else have we been doing there? We've been setting off fireworks there for however long. Maybe it's time. We look at somewhere else. Maybe it's time. We reconsider the whole thing. And yeah, maybe we do something differently with the money. I don't know. Maybe it makes more sense than wasting it all for seven minutes of fun.
Residential School History in St. Albert
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, and St. Albert, I think, is important to talk about. I want to go into a little more detail on St. Albert and the residential schools that were there because, one, it's what's close to where we are and it's like a handy point, but it is like the first real outpost in Alberta of the Catholic
00:16:53
Speaker
Um, you know, church and they really just got set up. That was their home base. That's where they got started. And I don't want, just want this podcast to be a bunch of hot takes on how Canada day is canceled. I think, you know, the work of discovering these mass graves and bringing these children's bodies back to their families and communities is ongoing. And I think St. Albert is a good place to examine, uh, you know, it's, it was, um,
00:17:20
Speaker
founded in 1861 by Father Albert Lacombe. He was one of the very first Catholic missionaries to ever come this far west. There's like 66,000 people living there today.
00:17:34
Speaker
Um, and yeah, it is home to two separate residential school sites. Um, you know, one that we know for sure has, uh, unmarked graves. Like there is a car that says Aboriginal cemetery, uh, right behind an, uh, former Indian Indian residential school, um, uh, in the, the, the St. Albert municipal cemetery there. And.
00:17:58
Speaker
So the Uville one, the one where they were going to set the fireworks off at, where they're not anymore going to set the fireworks off at. I don't know a ton about that one. It was run by the Grey Nuns of Montreal of the Grey Nuns hospital fame here in Edmonton, which is a fact I learned recently. It burnt down in 19, it was one of the first residential schools as well, but it burnt down in 1948. Now there's like a retirement living home there, which again, must be truly cursed. But,
00:18:29
Speaker
But I don't know a ton about that one. The one that I think is worth further examination is the Edmonton Indian Residential School, which was run by the Methodists, which then became the United Church.
00:18:40
Speaker
Uh, and that was run from 1924 to 1968. Uh, it replaced the industrial school in Red Deer and the industrial schools are like a residential school precursor where, um, you know, they were supposed to teach, they were, they were still doing the same thing of like kidnapping indigenous kids and putting them in boarding school, but they were, it was much more like job training focused. Um.
00:19:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think, I think with, yeah, I think what, what a lot of people are coming to the understanding now is that, uh, and I see it on social media a lot and even in conversations with people that I know that, that maybe the, the whole school aspect is clouding people's better judgment on a lot of these institutions. Like maybe we should change the language now and maybe we should just start calling them what they were. They were institutions slash concentration camps slash.
00:19:34
Speaker
prisons, right, that people were sent to live in from the age of three years old or even younger to, in most cases, 16 to 18 years old. So you're talking about people's entire youth and lifespan as adolescents being spent in these institutions.
00:19:56
Speaker
And yeah, and there was very little schooling at all. I think through some of my learnings, through some of my learning, just talking about people who came out of the institutions and having
00:20:10
Speaker
Um, no more than like a grade six to eight education, even though they've been there until they were, until they were 18 years old and, and yeah, and the Uville, um, on top of the hill, very prominent space. Uh, and that's, that's kind of the narrative of St. Albert overall is that, um, it's this place that, that celebrates kind of the Francophone culture and Grandin and other people, but really misses the mark around, um,
00:20:40
Speaker
The important settlements that were here before the Métis of course with the connection to the French were around Sturgeon Lake Sturgeon River and the Big Lake community Very prominent farming was happening here before granite even got here But then it all kind of gets whitewashed for him st. Albert look home and then of course The institutions that that we're talking about the industrial especially industrial one
00:21:07
Speaker
Yeah, and the Edmonton Indian Residential School was a particularly brutal example of how these things were not schools. I mean, the Edmonton Indian Residential School was essentially an agricultural work camp. Students spent half a day in class. The rest of the day, they were tending to crops and animals. And when it was harvest time, most of the boys were just working full-time days on the harvest. There were 500 acres under cultivation.
00:21:36
Speaker
as well as dairy cows, chickens, pigs, other animals. This was the food, not only did they produce food for themselves, but also this food went to market and proceeds went to the school.
00:21:51
Speaker
The United Church has a decent archive site of the information that they've collected and made public from their archives on the residential schools that they operate. I think it's worth pulling a quote from that. It's from thechildrenremembered.ca.
00:22:11
Speaker
And this is from the, like, from the own website, not, not, this is a quote from them. So there's no author, but it's from that website. Quote, the emphasis on farm work at the expense of academic study was a constant source of friction between the school on the one hand and the children, their parents, and visiting inspectors on the other. In 1930, one boy who pleaded to be returned home or transferred to another school wrote, I just went to school three days since I came here. That isn't why my father sent me here to work. He sent me here to go to school and study hard and to learn to read and write.
00:22:41
Speaker
The boy stated that he had to have someone write the letter for him because he had not yet learned anything at all. Indian Agent Mortimer, to whom the boy was writing, confirmed that he found it difficult to convince parents in his agency in British Columbia to send their children to Edmonton because of complaints that the students were continually working on the farm, thereby getting little or no education.
00:23:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a perfect example of what life in these institutions is like, and especially the industrial ones. And we talked a little bit about how the proceeds went to the school. Well, when you have the school managing all these funds and getting grants from the government to run the school,
00:23:25
Speaker
my experience and looking at some of the records has been some of these people get sticky fingers and then money starts disappearing. So not only were they working people's children's hands to the bone, but then they were then pocketing the proceeds afterwards and then doing things like land speculation and everything else on the side. So creating entire industries on the backs and on the work of these child labor victims.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, this is agricultural child slavery, and it didn't stop until 1953. The half-day system of agricultural child slavery wasn't stopped, wasn't put to rest until 1953. Children at this school were also forced to dig unmarked graves, as reported by Keith Drine of the Edmonton Journal just this past year, in 2003 in the Edmonton Journal.
00:24:20
Speaker
George Burton told the Edmonton Journal about the times he was ordered to dig graves, including those for the caskets of children. This is a quote from George Burton again. I had a lot of nightmares about that. We had to dig these holes so far down. I remember yelling and screaming in my sleep because I thought I was going to get buried in one of those holes. There's hundreds of them around here.
00:24:42
Speaker
And I think if we were to find another mass grave in the next short while, I think it's very likely that we are going to be finding one behind the site or on the site of the former Edmonton Indian Residential School. And there's already two separate markers at the St. Albert Municipal Cemetery, which is what this place is now.
00:25:08
Speaker
one just says Aboriginal Cemetery on it. That's it with two dates on it, like 1946 to 1966. There's no further information attached to this boulder with a plaque on it.
00:25:28
Speaker
So what we know is that there were markers there. When the cemetery passed into the hands of the city of St. Albert, I believe, it came into disrepair and there's a fire and a lot of the stones that were there were destroyed.
00:25:44
Speaker
There's another car in there as well. These folks at least get names and the date of their death, and that is 98 Inuit who died at the Charles Kamsal Hospital were buried at this cemetery attached to the residential school. And that's a whole other kettle of fish that I think is worth reopening with you, Rob, and that is the story of the Charles Kamsal Indian Hospital.
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah, the Charles Council Hospital soon to be blossoming condos and trendy downtown living neighborhood. Yeah.
00:26:31
Speaker
Yeah, a truly cursed fucking development if there ever was one. This was the largest Indian hospital to ever exist. It operated from 1946 to 1968. It's in this otherwise quiet, tree-lined, mature neighborhood. North Central Edmonton, Inglewood is the neighborhood, but it is an incredibly evil and haunted
00:26:52
Speaker
place. This was segregated health care delivery for indigenous people. Also a tuberculosis sanatorium where a lot of Inuit were sent, which is, again, we could do a whole other podcast on how Canada handled that. But what do you know about the Charles Council? What do you think people need to know about it? Well, I used to work in kind of
00:27:19
Speaker
the security industry. So I know people who used to work there back when, back before it was being developed and it was just an empty building, they used to do private security. So I know that that building is extremely haunted. I definitely
00:27:36
Speaker
wouldn't want to buy a condo there, no matter what the cost.
From Indian Hospital to Condos: Transformation of Sites
00:27:42
Speaker
And it was an Indian hospital. The Inuit have a history of being sent there for tuberculosis. And you mentioned the graves and the cairn in St. Albert. But it raises other questions about what about the other Indians that would have died there due to sickness, where are they buried?
00:28:04
Speaker
If they don't have a Cairn like the Inuit do and a record of it, then where were they buried? I know that people would spend many, many years there. My Mushom, Max McCree, I didn't learn this until just before he had passed away, but he had spent the better part of 10 years on and off in that institution.
00:28:27
Speaker
And when he would be sent there, it was because the doctors back home either didn't want to treat you or couldn't treat you anymore. And one of the best treatments or the only treatment they had at the time for tuberculosis was bed rest. So basically he was bed stricken for the better part of 10 years. He had tuberculosis in the bones and his leg.
00:28:49
Speaker
The only thing to do to pass the time was to pick up skills and abilities. He became a leather worker. He made some fantastic wallets and other kind of implements by gaining his skills there on his own. So I have a personal connection there as well.
00:29:06
Speaker
And then the real upsetting thing is that even into his old age, he still had problems with his legs due to tuberculosis. He had things, tumors that would flare up and whatever else. So an institution that was supposed to be curing people actually never ended up curing the majority of the people that went there and actually probably made their lives worse by pulling them away from their families and whatever else. So it is a,
00:29:34
Speaker
Yeah, it is a very, very evil place and probably stricken with graves and remains throughout the land. No, medical experiments were done there. Forced sterilizations were done there. Women would go and deliver children there and then discover later that
00:29:54
Speaker
they had been sterilized. The hospital was involved in the 60s scoop. Children would be warehoused there before being adopted out to fight families. You're right. It's long been speculated that there are unmarked graves at the Charles Council. Chief Calvin Bruno of the Papaschias First Nation has called for a thorough investigation of the site since 2017. He was quoted recently in just recently, like 2021 in June.
00:30:21
Speaker
about why this still needs to happen. Quote, it was known as an Indian hospital because that's where a lot of our people went back then. And a lot of people came and got treated and left, but some didn't make it back home, said Calvin Bruno.
00:30:36
Speaker
While there is a dedicated indigenous cemetery in St. Albert, Bruno believes strongly that there are adults and children still buried there and has wanted ground searches for decades. It's more than a belief, Bruno said. We have research and documents, even a map that shows that the southeast corner of the property is where potential human remains are. Either it's covered up or human remains get moved. He added, I'd like to investigate there still and see definitively if there is a cemetery.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, I cannot imagine wanting to live on that site. Developer, oh, Gene Dub owns it. And it just actually recently, in just like November of last year, it got rezoned, like the city of City Council approved a rezoning that would allow it to be taller and more dense. So I don't know if they're putting more buildings on the site, but this is a fucking crime scene.
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think and I think the plan is to have some sort of urban village there with townhomes and all these other Surrounding the large kind of Apartment building slash former Indian Hospital. Yeah. No it it
00:31:47
Speaker
All these spaces and places, there is a crime scene aspect to it. And again, like downtown Edmonton in the Rossdale area, before kind of 1950, 1960, any kind of development down there, I'm sure and certain would have come across human remains, bones, things like that, that they would have just thrown into another pile if they would have seen them at all.
00:32:15
Speaker
and then thought nothing else out of them because there was a lack of protocols and other things in place back then. So again, the likelihood that there's something buried on this site specifically, it is very high and I would encourage people to maybe stop for a second, think about what the ramifications are, and then maybe do the due diligence to do a proper search that has probably never been done.
00:32:41
Speaker
and see if there are remains there that need to be put to rest because some of these, some of our people and some of our ancestors need some closure and need some answers. And that's, it's not an excuse anymore to say we don't have the time or money to do it because COVID has changed a lot of these conversations. Yeah. I mean, there was a relationship between the hospital and the residential school that existed. Like that's where the Inuit who died got buried.
00:33:10
Speaker
I have to assume that when children got sick at the Edmonton Indian Residential School, that if they did receive treatment, they would have received it at the Charles Council. There is a relationship there that needs to be explored further as well as the grounds around that hospital need to be inspected further as well. But I don't have a smooth segue into this one, but there's no other way to say it in that we have seen
00:33:41
Speaker
a lot of what I would call direct action against the buildings and the statues that were associated with this historical, with this genocide. And so, what did we see? We saw churches burned down in BC. We saw a church lit on fire just recently in Calgary, or just outside of Calgary, the Siksika, though the building wasn't seriously damaged.
00:34:11
Speaker
You know, we've seen the statue of the Pope vandalized here in Edmonton, you know, Bishop Grandin's. Well, let's reserve that. Let's reserve the Bishop Grandin stuff for the other stuff. What are your thoughts on this direct action that we're seeing? Well, I think it's it's it's.
00:34:33
Speaker
long past due for one. Again, and it's this ongoing conversation of what is Canada? Canada is the erasure of Indigenous peoples and their monuments and their structures with the erection of all these other kind of people and institutions. And now we're seeing a resurgence and maybe a reclamation in a sense.
Reclaiming Indigenous Spaces: Direct Action
00:34:58
Speaker
of that space back by toppling some of these statues and Churchill was painted red and why do we have a statue of Churchill anyways? Has anyone ever kind of opened up that conversation around why do we have a statue of Pope John Paul II? Was he here? Did he stand on that spot? Did he give some sort of sermon from the mound there? And then the churches and the other buildings being burnt down,
00:35:27
Speaker
I think that's also kind of an action of reclamation because a lot of people, and even indigenous people, and especially where I'm from, Treaty No. 8 territory, which is much more secluded in some instances than Treaty No. 6 and 7, the impact of Catholicism and Christianity in our communities
00:35:53
Speaker
is very, very plain on the face. And you have leaders that are born-again Christians and things like that. And not that there's anything wrong with religion, but when you start to cloud over our indigenous beliefs and our indigenous systems and structures for buildings like churches and other things, and it gets very convoluted and it gets very difficult to argue one over the other when
00:36:23
Speaker
one hand's shaking the other. So in my area, a lot of the communities, a couple of the buildings that'll be there for sure is you'll have a band office.
00:36:32
Speaker
And then you'll have a church and there's always going to be a church there because it was difficult to get them out of the community. It was much more secluded. They probably had more impact in some of those communities as well. So it's as a person who was raised in some of the Catholic faith and participated in early on in my life on some of those things and learned about
00:36:58
Speaker
the commandments and all those other things and then reconnected with indigeneity and our true ways of knowing and doing and spirituality. I get in trouble when I commend people who are taking some of those direct actions because some of these people, although they were following the Word of God,
00:37:18
Speaker
were not very good people. And I made some comments around George McDougal. The McDougal church was burned down in the Morley Reserve a number of years ago. There's a movement now to rebuild it by church organizations in the town of Cochrane and other places. That guy was a straight up
00:37:40
Speaker
straight up colonizer, straight up asshole who stole Old Ban Buffalo or the Ban of Two Stone that sits in the Ram right now, another stolen artifact. He stole it from the Iron Creek even when we told him not to touch it because
00:37:56
Speaker
It'll have ramifications. He stole it and took it down to treaty number seven where the church was because he wanted people to follow him there. So again, either it's about the faith or it's about these individuals and when you start to look at instances like this, it gets harder and harder to digest that they were doing things for the greater good and they were just interested in their own self-worth and self-interest.
00:38:20
Speaker
And I posted on Twitter the person that painted the John Paul II statue. Yeah, I have 100% certainty that the EPS and others are going to go all out to try to find this person. And I saw pictures of cops taking fingerprint samples from the paint and whatever else. So they're going to go all out to try to find this individual. I will happily contribute to a bail fund for that person because
00:38:50
Speaker
because these institutions that do not pay taxes at all have been afforded way, way too much flexibility and leniency in society. And now it's time to start putting them under the microscope. Yeah, direct action gets the good, gets the goods. And yes, I too will happily contribute to the bail fund if the police ever find the person who vandalized the Pope John Paul II statue, though I think pretty unlikely.
00:39:18
Speaker
that they find the person unless someone snitches or comes out. The other thing that has kind of happened with remarkable speed has been anything attached to Bishop Grandin has now, he's getting its name changed. We've seen the Bishop Grandin name come off a school in Edmonton. We've seen it come off a school in Calgary. The LRT stop that is named after Grandin here is getting its name changed, though I don't know what it's being replaced with.
00:39:48
Speaker
the horrendous mural that was in Grandin Station has now been finally fucking covered up. This was a person who was one of the key architects of the Indian residential school system. We are now seeing that we're just not going to stand for having his name on everything anymore.
00:40:12
Speaker
But I'd still like to point out that the media arm of the Edmonton Archdiocese is called Grandin Media. And I haven't seen whether they're going to be changing the name of that institution any time soon. What are your thoughts on all this, all the Grandin stuff happening? Well, yeah, I think he was. He was very important to the residential school system, and I would say
00:40:41
Speaker
and through some of the readings of the TRC report and whatnot, like he is the guy. He is the guy that came up with the idea that if you take the Indians out of the community and you house them apart from their parents and apart from their families,
00:40:58
Speaker
you can better assimilate them by not letting them go back to their communities. And there's a famous quote that's attributed to John A. McDonald around, if they go home, if they come to school, they'll be civilized. But if they go home at night, they'll be in an Indian
00:41:14
Speaker
Indian family with Indian customs and I'll never really get rid of that or something to that effect. Those words from John A were taken from some of the things that Bishop Grandin was writing and saying and doing. So like he is the guy.
00:41:33
Speaker
So for things to be named after him, for things to carry his history forward, his legacy with the church and the Francophone community, very, very troubling, of course, for Indigenous people. And long past due that we start to take some of that name away and start to
00:42:00
Speaker
reimagine what our relationship is apart from him and what role he played in such detrimental impacts to indigenous people. And things can happen very quickly. And we talked about it a little bit earlier about the money and the impacts of money and the cost of doing things. Well,
00:42:20
Speaker
Obviously, it's costly to have to keep cleaning a structure or a wall or a mural, and it makes more sense to just take it down so that you don't have to keep cleaning because your budget can only allow for so much flexibility, right? So that's one way to do it. The other way is to
00:42:39
Speaker
convinced the hearts and the minds of the people doing the work that, yeah, this guy wasn't that great and maybe we shouldn't be honoring him. And I think both of those things are happening at the same time in parallel. I think it's, it's fantastic that we're starting to see things happen in a matter of hours, like the Indian Catholic school voted to remove his name. And then within a matter of hours, the mural was gone and the name was gone. And
00:43:03
Speaker
Um, I have to commend the mayor for, for kind of pushing some of these things because in difficult times like this leaders lead, it takes a leader to kind of kick the can first. Um, and I think that's what the mayor and council kind of initiated, even though there was a lot of back and forth and.
00:43:23
Speaker
a lot of ridiculous conversation around it much more than really needed to happen. But I think it's a step in the right direction. And especially with Grandin, if we're going to be talking about toppling kind of Christopher Columbus and some of these other kind of genocidal people.
00:43:42
Speaker
Grandin is right up there and I think he's on the same level. So I think we have to do away with him. We have to rewrite the history books and retell a better story. And I work on the Grandin working group. I've been involved in some of those conversations. I wasn't here when the mural project
00:44:05
Speaker
with Aaron Paquette was initiated back when the TRC was coming here. But even in doing some of this work, I had some own reflection around looking at the TRC report, seeing the sections that dedicate the grand in, seeing the sections where they talk about him being the guy of residential school mentality. And the reason why these thousands of kids are dead is because he decided that, well, we should just house the kids and then not send them home.
00:44:35
Speaker
and then to welcome one of the final events here to the city and to celebrate a mural of him by adding on these other indigenous murals. I struggle with that thought process and I struggle with house maybe in the back room somewhere, maybe Marie and other people like
00:44:58
Speaker
Like, what the hell is this shit? Like, how can they have a mural to this guy and then do this? Like, I struggle with that, but I think it's heading in the right direction now. And maybe it's an opportunity to tell a broader story. And I commend people for sticking with it. I commend Aaron for being there at the forefront and for standing by his art and his pieces down there are fantastic. I think it's just a matter of
00:45:26
Speaker
The work it took to get this other piece covered up and then eventually replaced was probably a lot harder than it needed to be. It was a lot of fucking effort back then, even just to get the one, the add-on murals. Whereas six, seven years later, we're just like, fuck this, we're getting rid of it. And I think that is an encouraging sign that as a society, we're just like, we're not going to fucking pussyfoot around it anymore. We're just going to fucking do it.
00:45:51
Speaker
And it's encouraging to see. I mean, there's still a statue of Frank Oliver in this fucking town though. So it's not like we've figured it all out. The capacity for action by various levels of government is high right now, and that needs to be taken advantage
Efforts and Challenges in Addressing Residential School Legacies
00:46:05
Speaker
of. But Jason Kenney has set aside $8 million to search
00:46:11
Speaker
you know, these residential school sites for unmarked graves. There are 25 fucking Indian residential schools in Alberta, the most of any fucking province. Like $8 million sounds like a lot. It's not actually that much money to actually do this work.
00:46:25
Speaker
Well, and I've seen other kind of messaging and information coming out that those were the federally supported schools, the 25. So there are, in communities in the North and throughout the province, other institutions, other structures that were not federally supportive that could have
00:46:46
Speaker
graves and other kinds of burials on their sites as well. So $8 million is a drop in the bucket. And I've seen other kinds of conversations around in a national plan of the 100 and 100 plus schools that exist, a minimum of a billion dollars required to properly search the records, to properly do grand penetrating radar, to properly do any excavations that need to happen.
00:47:13
Speaker
It's gonna take a little bit of a lot of a lot of money and and there needs to be a commitment up front to want to do this and also a reflection on the failings of of the commitment through the TRC and the Commission and other things where Yeah, they weren't allowed to talk about some of these things they weren't allowed to explore because the government shut down and didn't give them the money that they needed to
00:47:37
Speaker
to properly do this. So again, like many other things, we're seeing a fallout of certain government's inability to do the right thing and an inability to want to take it a step further. And I recognize the $8 million, but the thing that always kind of sticks to me and I really do not appreciate is this speaking point that Jason keeps hammering out of a moral obligation. Oh, it's a moral obligation.
00:48:07
Speaker
It's a moral obligation to allow indigenous people to participate in the economy. It's a moral obligation to find these children.
00:48:15
Speaker
Well, sure, if you want to do the bare minimum, it's also probably a legal obligation through our treaty agreements and our treaty rights. It's probably a legal obligation if any provincial institutions were funded by the province at any time. So again, the moral obligation is the bare minimum.
00:48:37
Speaker
And I think that's kind of a scapegoat for the other real impacts that are connected to some of these things. But it goes over with some of the leaders, some other people around positive step four, but it's a drop in a bucket that needs to be more.
00:48:54
Speaker
there needs to be not only an action of finding them, but then what do we do after you find them? Because there's going to be more graves, there's going to be more sites, there's going to be reimagining and revisiting some of these other kind of occurrences in the province of Alberta. So we have
00:49:14
Speaker
Uh, the bobtail reserve south of musket cheese. That was certain. And we have the Michelle band. We have sharp head, which again, if you go in. Into indigenous communities and talk to them about sharp it, they will tell you about how the sharp head people were poisoned by a rancher in the area. Some of them were shot and killed as they were all kind of starving and struggling and being poisoned. Uh, and then they were buried in a mass grave and then the province.
00:49:42
Speaker
through partnership created a commemoration site of this mass grave but not much more after that and not a real exploration of the real history that happened in some of these places.
00:49:57
Speaker
But I hope it opens up a conversation around what we should be doing for indigenous people in some of these experiences. I've been to the greasy grass and I've seen the markers down there of George Armstrong Custer and some of the other people that died there. And the big hoopla around celebrating their life. We have sites like that in Alberta. We have Frog Lake, which was a site of a,
00:50:24
Speaker
an event, I call it the frog leg incident during the rebellion and during the resistance, the 1885 resistance, where you have markers paid to Indian agents who were very bad people and there is little recognition of the suffering of indigenous people in that area, the truth of what happened on that day.
00:50:45
Speaker
So I hope that all of these conversations move forward to real action and real recognition of what Canada is really about and what Canada Day is really about.
00:51:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's truth and reconciliation. It's a combo platter. You need the truth first. And the fucked up part of this is that in the TRC's 94 calls to action, there is a whole section called Missing Children and Burial Information with five separate recommendations. And this is not new. I think the TRC identified 3,000 plus children that died in residential school care with the
00:51:27
Speaker
with the willing acknowledgement in the report that it was like, this number is likely much larger. And I think what's relatively unique about Canada's settler colonial project, and this is not a point made by me, it's a point made by a guy named David Tuff.
00:51:41
Speaker
is that the regime that carried out the genocidal project of residential schools and everything else that was done in the name of assimilation are still in power. And they still enjoy the wealth they gained from the land they stole. And like other places in the world where terrible things have happened, those regimes aren't around anymore. The king of Belgium is still not in charge of Belgium. And even though he genocided 10 million people in the Congo,
00:52:09
Speaker
you know, he doesn't, his descendants don't stand up on a throne and get like worshiped anymore. And so to bring this all back to Canada Day, you know, do you think it would be appropriate to celebrate the continued existence of the Belgian monarchy? You know, like when people who are trying to defend Canada Day point out that bad things have happened in other places, it's not the flex you think it is, simply because all the conservatives and liberals and all the people
00:52:37
Speaker
All the rich and powerful merchants who gained so much from the theft of indigenous land are all still the rich and wealthy people who run Canada. They never faced any consequences and they still control the resources and the economy and the political structures of this country.
00:52:52
Speaker
And so canceling Canada Day is what reconciliation looks like. It is a symbol, yeah, of course, but it is a way to show that we are serious about addressing Canada's historical atrocities. And it's not about rewriting history, it's about getting to the truth part of truth and reconciliation. And, you know, I still want it to be a holiday though, I'm just saying. I still want my day off in July. Yeah, I think,
00:53:20
Speaker
I think it's this conversation around like, yeah, what are we celebrating? And if people and if Canadians really thought about it, all we're really celebrating is the moving of a piece of paper from one part of the ocean
00:53:43
Speaker
to another part of the ocean. That's all we're celebrating is that the transference of this B and A act and the repatriation of the constitution, if you want to get technical.
00:53:55
Speaker
Dominion day, baby. Yeah. From the Queen's desk to Parliament Hill. That's all. All the other relationships still exist. We still recognize the Queen as the head of state and the crown. Like what are Canadians really celebrating? It's a piece of paper without any of the substance behind it because we sure haven't honored the treaties. We sure haven't.
00:54:25
Speaker
haven't given Indigenous people their due diligence and what they're owed and we definitely haven't reconciled anything. So really we're just celebrating this flag that is 70 years old and a piece of paper that
00:54:43
Speaker
really doesn't give us any authority to do anything other than make things difficult and continue to lose court cases. I hope this day is a day of reflection, a day of rest for people. If you're not going to celebrate, at least you can still take a day of rest and not have to do any of the
00:55:04
Speaker
the hokey nonsense bullshit that you used to do. Maybe you can find the time to put on an orange shirt and to think about what it means to live where you're living and know that maybe there's land title that you have for your house. Maybe it used to be a reserve. Maybe there were people buried here.
00:55:22
Speaker
before you moved in and they got shipped somewhere else. Like all those conversations and questions should be entering Canadians minds at this time and hopefully leading to some sober second thoughts and reflection around what it means to be Canadian, what it means to have this relationship with Indigenous people and how we can help each other move forward together.
00:55:44
Speaker
That's a fantastic place to end it, Rob. Thanks so much for coming on. If people want to follow along with the work you do, how can people find you on the internet?
00:55:54
Speaker
I am at on Twitter at Nihail Rob. I have a number of articles out there that you can Google. They're on Edmonton City as a museum. I am a research fellow with the Elevate Institute, and we did a fantastic piece called Cashback that everyone should read, every Canadian should read to learn about Indian money so that we don't keep having this conversation around taxpayers dollars and all that other bullshit, because that is just a bunch of nonsense fed to people and Canadians.
00:56:23
Speaker
Um, and I'm on active on my Twitter and always commenting on something else or the other. And he, you are a published on, on the progress report as well. So, uh, we're always grateful when Rob, uh, when you write for us as well. Um, you know, that's, that's the show folks. If you like the podcast, if you want to keep hearing more podcasts like this, um, you know, the few things you can do, the biggest one I'm just going to skip right to the chase is to become a monthly donor.
00:56:51
Speaker
There's a link in the show notes, or if you go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, you put in your credit card, you fill out a few data points, hit go, five, 10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. We really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments, I'm very easy to reach. I am on Twitter as well, at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanKatprogressalberta.ca.
00:57:13
Speaker
Thanks so much to Cosmic Famicominist for our theme. Thanks again to Rob for being an incredible guest. Thank you for listening and goodbye.