Season 1, Episode 29: What are the Harms of Misrepresentation?

Gabrielle Weasel Head and KJ McCusker

A must watch! The Gravity Well Podcast episode 29 delves into the complexities of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation, particularly focusing on Indigenous identities. I acknowledge the podcast’s previous missteps in vetting guests and aim to rectify the situation by inviting Gabrielle Weasel Head and KJ McCusker (Jules) to discuss the impacts of misrepresentation. Gabrielle, from the Kainai Nation, and Jules, half Inuit and half Dene, with a background in Indigenous studies and community work, share their insights on the violence and harm caused by cultural appropriation. They emphasize the importance of ethical relationships and understanding one’s identity. The conversation highlights the need for genuine engagement with Indigenous communities and the dangers of superficial understanding through quick courses or certifications. The episode concludes with a call for deeper, more respectful interactions and a return to land-based knowledge and practices.

Welcome and Introduction to Gabrielle and Jules

Jenny:

Welcome to the Gravity Well Podcast. Here we break down heavy ideas into small buckets that you can handle. Our mission is simple. Help us work through your dilemmas in conversation and process. Together, we and our community will face your dilemmas and make the world a better place for all beings. In the spirit of truth, I acknowledge I’m a settler on Stolen Blackfoot Tree Seven and Metis District Five and Six territories. I take reconciliation by seeking the wisdom of elders and individuals who aim to restore water, air, land, life, and community. A healthy living relationship with the Earth and each other is our guide. Okay, I’m pleased to invite both KJ and Gabriel to the discussion today. I’m going to give a little bit of background for folks before I get into this. So we had a guest on our show. I did make our public announcement in our interview with a guest last week, I’m just going to hit the highlights of it.

We had a guest we dedicated four episodes to and didn’t adequately vet the guest, misrepresented both him and the community that we were intending to represent. I aim to host authentic conversations with members of the community that we’re discussing, and so we apologize for the error that we made and we’ve gone to the effort of taking down the material. We’re doing our best to make that right. And so I’m here with two people who have offered to help us work through what misrepresentation is. We’re going to start with just what is it. Then we’re going to get into what does it do? And then we’re going to talk about how we can move forward together and some ideas that we’ve already worked through. Again, I’m grateful to be for the Blackfoot Confederacy community has allowed us to rectify this and move forward in a way that’s beneficial for all of us. So grateful. If you wouldn’t mind, Gabrielle, you’re first on my screen. Can you please introduce yourself, offer a bit of your background first, and then you’re welcome to get into helping describe misrepresentation and cultural appropriation for us. Thank you.

Meet Gabrielle & Jules and Their Introduction to the Problem of Misrepresentation

Gabrielle:

Oki. Hi there. My name is Tsapinaaki Gabrielle Weasel Head. I am from the Kainai Nation, also known as Blood Tribe, which is part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. I work as an associate professor in indigenous studies with Mount Royal University, and I was born and raised in my community in my nation, the Kainai Nation, I’ve just consistently been off of my nation now for about 14 years. So I’ve been residing in Mo now the city of Calgary for 14 years. And yeah, so I am happy to be invited here to speak about some of the issues and why this, I believe, not just why I believe this is, but the rise of what we would refer to in Canada as “Pretendians” and how I’ve grown up. And you never really heard about these things because I don’t know if anybody ever heard about that or ever listened to that one Barbara Mandrell song about how she was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.

Jenny:

Yes, I love that song. Yeah.

Gabrielle:

Yeah, I was Indian when Indian wasn’t cool.

Jenny:

Oh, wow. Yeah. That’s fascinating.

Gabrielle:

Now this is, yeah, this is something, I mean, I can speak a little bit more about it, but first I’d like to just pass it over to KJ to introduce himself. I’ll just stop there.

Jules:

Thank you for the introduction. I do appreciate being asked to join you both. My name’s KJ McCusker, I go by Jules, and I was born in Edmonton, and raised in Calgary, I’m pretty familiar with the native scene there because I grew up in it. The career path that I’ve taken was a creative director, and I was studying, actually at Mount Royal College. I was doing Indigenous studies there. That’s when I hit on a lot of the systemic issues with residential schools and family values, which drove me into a brand new pocket of communications work. I worked in Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and on the Kizhaay Anishinaabe Niin Project, which is used almost nationwide in some ways, but mostly in Ontario, and it’s a reformation program for violent men to try and understand where their violence comes from and help ’em become better humans. “I am a kind man” in its essence, and I’ve been doing that work for, gosh, pretty close to 15 years.

I’ve been pretty entrenched in working with Indigenous communities and territories and stuff. My last big stint was helping develop anti-suicide related work in Fort Severn, which then brought me to understand that cultural values need to be instilled in the school and need to begin in kindergarten, and seeing that our cultural misunderstanding of what we consider to be traditional behaviour as opposed to learned behaviour from residential school, these are clashing within communities and causing a misunderstanding of who we are from an indigenous point of view, from a cultural point of view. Culturally, I was taken from Edmonton Royal Alex, I was left abandoned in the hospital, and then I was registered through foster care and adopted out to a non-native family. My father was not given the opportunity to take me back to his community, and it took me 25 to 30 years to get to where the hell I came from.

That’s been a long journey. I’m from Fort Simpson. I’ve yet to reconnect with my family there, but that’s where I’m from. My grandmother’s from Nunuvut, and my father was half Inuit and half Dene, but they’re, they’re Dene citizens of Fort Simpson. The main thing, that theme that you’re talking about, I wrote an article for the Toronto Star regarding my philosophies on how taking and replacing us with someone who’s not who we are is a form of violence. And I guess the idea was that when you try and misrepresent yourself as a part of our communities, it causes a rift and it creates a ricochet effect, and that ricochet effect is a form of violence. And that’s where my sort of thesis lands there on taking our identities. And I’ve seen this since I was a kid. I mean, you mentioned that you’ve not seen that type of thing, but I remember going to Powwow was even in Chiai Man during Chiai days, and this white dude would show up in a full buck skin regalia and a chief address and painted red, and everyone sort of just treated him like a tourist.

But that action alone is just so ridiculous. At the time, I would watch elders not do much about it and just kind of laugh it off or shrug it off. People would make fun of them. But then that grew. I mean, we saw the Sacheen Littefeather misrepresenting us on an international stage. We saw Buffy Saint Marie misrepresent us for countless years. And this brings us back to what you were just hitting on, where the information that you gather from that person who does not come from our communities, that information is enormously flawed. And it’s that misrepresentation is now reverberating through the chambers of academia, and it’s reverberating through justice, it’s reverberating through governance, it’s reverberating through all these areas of Canadian American society. I do appreciate the fact that you want to circle back and recover the trail, if you will, from the air of having somebody misrepresent themselves on your show. That’s my introduction in a sense.

Jenny:

Incredible. Thank you so much, KJ, or Jules, you said, right? You prefer.

Jules:

Yeah, yeah.

Jenny:

Okay. Thank you, Jules. Gabrielle, am I saying that right now? If you wouldn’t mind going and then I’ll reflect back from both of you.

Gabrielle:

Thank you, Jules, for your introduction, and it’s really good to meet you, even if it’s just through this virtually. And Jenny, yeah, thank you for looping back around and inviting some Indigenous people to speak on this topic. I guess. I mean, I can come at it from two ways, a theoretical academic perspective, or I can come at it from where I prefer as who I am and as a Kainai, as a Blackfoot woman, and situated within my paradigm and within that lived reality of my cultural lifeways. Growing up on the largest Indian Reserve in Canada, that was how I grew up, was just an Indian kid from the Rez. And that was what we were called back then Indians. That was the discourse and that was another label. And today that’s changed or looping back around to the Indian days on my Rez, did I see white folks dancing in regalia?

Yes, I saw some. Did I have a white person that was part of my family? Yes, I did. And do we have adoption protocols within Kainai that allow for the transference of knowledge and people to be part of our societies? Yes, we do. But that is not the same as someone misrepresenting themselves as being indigenous or being Blackfoot, for example, being from Kainai. But yet they’re not. And they haven’t been adopted into the community and they haven’t been invited. And I remember I was listening to this one little introduction from this little research video in Sydney, Australia, and it was from a settler scholar. And she said once when a person, once you are invited as a guest, then you’re a guest. But once you are expecting an invitation, you are no longer a guest. The problem here with misrepresentation is people come in and because there is this idea in western culture, well, in Eurocentric culture, I will say not just western culture, Eurocentric culture, which is the origins of Canada today, the problem is when they come into our lands, into these lands that have been gifted to us to care for by a source of life, and they come here and everything is a free for all, not only are the lands appropriated, not only are lifeways appropriated, but our very identities are appropriated.

And then through that appropriation misrepresented. In 2006, Patrick Wolf wrote an article on settler colonialism and what is settler colonialism. It differs from colonisation in distinct ways in that the people that have colonised are here to stay. The agenda of settler colonialism is to erase and replace, erase Indigenous lifeways and replace them. This is the problem that we’re facing now. And as Jules was talking about earlier, like violence. How do we define violence typically in society? We define violence as harm, some kind of harm. Usually, it’s physical and the law is very narrow in terms of how it defines violence. But there’s spiritual violence, there’s emotional violence, there’s mental violence, psychological violence, all of that. When we are misrepresented in that way, the violence has taken place in what are the ramifications of that violence, the perpetuation of stereotypes now, and this constant placing of Indigenous people in the past.

You’ll notice with these Pretendians, and you’ll see whether they’re giving seminars or they’re giving cultural workshops or they’re talking in whatever kind of form they’re wearing, the regalia, the traditional regalia of Indigenous people to say, to show that outside externally I am, you will see me as Indigenous because I am wearing what are essentially these cultural artefacts that place us in the past. We only will see Indigenous people as being part of this romanticized past. And I’m speaking of actually a few people in academic circles who have since been called out as Pretendians. And there they are with their shawls or there they are giving their psychology seminars or whatever, and they’re all decked out and this kind of regalia. And then you see someone like Jules and myself where we are very much just who we are. We don’t need to put on all of these regalia and these are the issues that we face.

And then there’s a lot of money to be made off of being indigenous. First, it was making money off of our lands, which they still do, which is still happening, making money off of our teachings and our ceremonies. Now it’s making money off of who we are. At the heart of this is materialism and the value that is placed not on relationships, but on material wealth. Just some thoughts in terms of what are the harms of that and why do we need to start paying attention to it? And particularly who is most at risk of being duped into these by Pretendians is members of settler society, white settler society. And I have a whole other sort of analysis on that, but I’ll just leave it at that for now.

Jenny:

Great. I’m just going to take a second and reflect on what I heard from you guys. This was unbelievable, the comment about violence and the different types of violence that are experienced in this. I’m going to give a little bit of my perspective on this just to help you have a little more clarity on what I experienced in this mistake. And the conversation was around carrying a Blackfoot bundle. The reason why I was having that conversation is because I see the need for us to adopt indigenous ways of life. I’m looking to build community and understanding in the work I’m doing in the real world, which is socioecological stability, right? Regeneration. This is the work that we’re doing in the real world. What happens, if I can share with you, I felt like I met a dead end. What I mean is in the conversation, the person didn’t have recommendations going forward, how do we come together?

That was ultimately the question, how do we come together and use this knowledge to work together? I in a sense was feeling like I met a dead end, which didn’t make any sense to me because, to me, this is where I think we need to go. In a way, if I wasn’t corrected by the community, I wasn’t prepared to have another conversation. And then what would that mean? Not that I’m still not working with Indigenous folks in the work I’m doing. Then the KEPA conferences and we’re meeting with the watershed councils, which we’re trying to help these conversations come together. I would’ve still done that, but I would’ve felt very confused. And as you said, it’s a form of mental violence in a sense to be taught one thing that is inaccurate rather than something that we need to serve us.

That was what I was seeking, was knowledge that should serve society. That’s my very loose understanding of why I am the effects of this conversation and how it would’ve impacted me. And then obviously I intend to work with the community. That was a bit of a red flag for me to not hear. There was an opportunity to work together to tee off the next round of this conversation, which is what does the harm do? If we can talk a bit more about it, I described one way that I see the harm playing out. If you guys could describe that a bit more too, and I know you have, you’ve talked about this romanticizing in the past. Gabrielle, to me, it’s again about taking action. And that’s what I’ve heard from the indigenous community when I’ve had the opportunity to engage it’s a way of being Harley Bastien who I had the opportunity to meet is from Piikani was saying that it’s a way of being. It’s the way he wakes up and he carries on his day. Yeah, I’ll stop there. Thank you. And I don’t know KJ, you’re on.

What Does Misrepresentation Do?

Jules:

No, those are great points. And I do feel for you being duped in that way. And you’re right because someone who has our lived experience would have answers. We would have something. I want to just go back to the materialism and this emphasis on settler colonialism and this momentum of being in the colonial project. This is a long road. This has been an extraordinarily long road. I’ve studied this for the better part of 30 years. I could have a PhD, but I chose to audit because you have to search for information everywhere. We don’t have books written on how everything was done to us, it just doesn’t exist. But I want to go back to that materialism and capitalism just came to mind right away because I only want to mention this to understand where our two worldviews separate in the English language. The term capitalism, a capitalist was a person who collected heads.

And to capitalize on the situation would be to take someone’s head. And this is profoundly appropriate for this particular conversation because that’s what they’re doing. They’re taking our place, they’re taking our head. And this is where violence comes in. This is the essence of it. Materialism is born out of this long romantic relationship with capitalism and capitalizing on another person’s misfortune. The textbook definition of capitalism is to take advantage of another person’s disadvantage. And that’s to capitalize. I think that’s what we’re seeing here. We see all these forms of capitalizing on various aspects of opportunity that just happen to dwell within our communities in terms of our identity. And this is brand, I mean not brand new. This goes way back. I mean this goes back to the Indian wars of the 17 hundreds. It’s not brand new in the sense brand new of what we’re seeing now with it centered around settlers who feel this idea that they can take, create pathology, family lore or however they want to explain their way through this idea that they are indeed one of us or come from one of our communities made up.

And it’s capitalizing on that particular weak spot. We had this long period where we were a giant mystery where we were on reserves and nobody knew. I mean, I grew up an Indian in Calgary, a mixed blood, a half-breed in Calgary. It was always pointed out by white people that I was Indian and it was always pointed out by Indians that I’m Indian. I didn’t get away with it. I didn’t get away with not being, even when I tried to do what they call white facing or whatever, they wanted to refrain from it. But no, I didn’t get away with that and neither did the other kids who were more native looking than me. They didn’t get away with that. We had to bear the brunt of both sides of that burden growing up in that city. And the environment is that you have five reservations surrounding you.

There’s a lot of Indians that come to Calgary. You see a lot of culture, you see a lot of pride. You see a lot of what you hope or wish to become when you see the regalia come out and the stampede specifically or things like that that has this romantic, it’s helped create this romanticized viewpoint of our connection to nature, our connection to culture, our connection to even caring for ourselves, the care for ourselves. It’s astounding that we had to go through an unbelievable amount of hardship. I almost feel a sense of tears when I hear, when I’m sitting next to a Blackfoot person whose community was virtually wiped out down to 300 people at one point because of tuberculosis and other diseases and famine, forced famine. You have these, you can imagine when I think of it from growing outside of it because I’m a crusader for our people, for our tribes, for our nations.

And when someone pretends to be one of us and falsifies that it’s like spitting and defecating on our ancestors who had to go through horrible, horrendous hardships to be alive today. Talk about the violence and the impact and the feelings associated with it. It brings that all up to me. I’m fortunate that my bloodline did not have to endure that kind of horror and hardship. We had to endure different things. I mean, of course, I come from families that went to residential school and I’ve listened and read the stories that they’ve written. My elders when they surveyed in the 1960s went around to all the people who had attended residential schools within the regions and told their stories. I mean, some kids talk about how they were trying to convince the priests that you had to cure the fish to store it over winter, but the priests refused to let them do that, and they hung all the fish out to dry to rot.

Then they were left to eat rotting fish for an entire season. That’s absurd. No wonder these kids wanted to run away and didn’t care if it was minus 35 to do so. And then you have someone that comes out and says, oh, I am a part of this story. I represent these people and this is what they think and this is what they do and these are the things we should be doing. But then when you go down to learn experience, which is just what you said, which is well, where are the answers? We have all the answers. We’ve been caring for this land for millennials, and not only am I a crusader of our own people, but I’m also a crusader of our origin. We’ve been here for over a hundred thousand years, man, the bearing strait’s a myth pocket full of people crossing over.

We were in the hundreds of millions in population, and it was all decimated in a very short frame of time. And now I think that feeling of being upset right here and right now, you’re seeing a lot of natives being upset because we are watching ourselves being replaced by non-native people, people who do not have our learned experience, people who do not have our family history, and they’re claiming to create nations. They’re claiming to create communities, and they’re claiming that they belong to specific landmarks and places and they’re negotiating for deals, for mining and resource extraction, and it’s on our territory.

Jenny:

Thank you. That’s an important one to bring into this.

Jules:

It’s so expansive. I do talk on this subject a little bit, but I talked to it about trying to wake up. It’s like these people have been here doing this for a long time. Ardoch First Nation is a perfect example of it. One of your colleagues, a professor at Queen’s University claimed to be Chief of the First Nation, absolute fraud. Ardoch First Nation does not exist. And Ardoch went so far as to walk into court saying they were Algonquin and had Algonquin rights. And when the real Algonquin were at court trying to negotiate land and title relationship deals, Ardoch wanted a seat at the table. What did the Algonquin do? They shut the whole thing down. They said, no, we’re not having the discussion. Everyone in those communities is devastated by an action like that. When we talk about the repercussions of violence, I mean it spreads so far. You look at the people, the Abinacki, the Abinacki and Quebec, they’re on thin bloodlines. They barely have any true bloodlines left, and they’re holding on tooth and nail for their identity. But then you have the Abenaki in New Hampshire who won’t even allow them to come to their traditional burial grounds to see their ancestors, fake Indians who created a corporation calling themselves, let the real Bernanke come to the burial grounds.

Jenny:

Wow, that is extremely psychological.

Jules:

But I’ll end there. But that’s where I was saying that materialism is capitalism and it’s another form of capitalizing on us. It’s just been this nonstop capitalizing on us. And I think hopefully, I think finally seeing the Chiefs of Ontario stepping up and saying, no, the Metis Nation of Ontario is a fraudulent organization. It does not represent any truly indigenous peoples within these territories. And we’ve had enough. That’s what it takes. I think it does.

Jenny:

No, that was great. Please, Gabrielle, lead us. Keep going with that, please.

Gabrielle:

You talked about how we adopt an indigenous way of life, or what are ways to adopt, I don’t know if that is perhaps the language we should be using in terms of adoption and more of how we participate in ethical relationships with people who have different cultural realities than our own? How do we do that ethically while maintaining our own identity, understanding that we are all human beings first? With that, I mean we can get into the discussion of attending ceremonies. I’m going to tell you over the summer, I went to the Vatican. I went to Rome for a holiday, and I went into the Vatican, I went to Vatican City, and I went in there and the protocol was to wear a shoulder covering to cover your shoulders and to ensure that for women, that your knees are covered, at least your knees are covered.

You’re wearing a long dress and you are wearing a shoulder covering, you’re wearing a shawl or some kind of a covering. Of course I did that and it just made sense to me. It made perfect sense to me. Now, did I have to go in there and say that I’m Italian to do that? No, of course not. I did that because that’s the thing to do, right? It’s about respecting lifeways other than our own because we’re visitors to that territory. I’m an uninvited visitor on that territory. Rather than adopt, I think we need to think about how are we participating ethically in Indigenous lifeways, with Indigenous ways. How do we do that in ethical ways? Now, I’m going to say something. I’m going to bring it back to ethics. If we want to go even deeper right at the root, if we are acting ethically and honouring if we know who we are, if I know who I am, if I know where I come from, if I know my stories and I’m ethical with myself, I will be ethical with other people. That’s logic. I guess you could say. That’s how it works. If I don’t know where I come from and I am confused and I don’t have the appropriate capacity or there’s no community capacity, never mind community capacity, national capacity for youth to figure out who am I? That question is huge. I mean, who am I? Where do I come from and why does it matter?

And we need those to answer those questions and figure out to know where we’re going. Now, if we can’t have that kind of conversation with our youth if we can’t have that kind of conversation, that inner dialogue with ourselves, these are ethical questions. And then so, okay, this must be where I belong. Oh, I feel close to nature. I’ve always felt like I had a connection with native people. Oh, I just found out that my great, great, great grandmother is Cree. That’s where it comes from. I’m going to explore that part of my identity and then I’m going to take that identity on and then I’m going to pass myself off as Cree. This part, I’ll flip it over and I’ll talk about myself in terms of my identity. Okay, Blackfoot, clearly visibly, Blackfoot unmistakably. I’m an indigenous person in my ancestry.

I do have white ancestry. I do, but I know who I am, and I know where I come from and I know my stories and I know all of that. It’s going to be ludicrous in my mind to say, okay, I have English ancestors, I think I’m going to identify only as an English person, as a white woman, and then I’m going to go to England. I’m going to figure out where my cousins and my distant relatives are, and then I’m going to go to the rest of Canadian society and I’m going to say, no, I’m a white woman. I choose to identify as a white woman. Regardless, if I look as native as they come, you need to treat me as a white woman because that is what I choose to identify with. It’s preposterous, it’s ridiculous. My question is why do we accept that from white people?

It’s okay to have native ancestry. Sure. We’ve all had relations passed in somewhere along our ancestry. We’ve all Jules was saying there is that part of his identity. Who knows Jenny, if you reached further down the line, who knows what you’ll find? My point is to know who you are and we need to know who we are and we need to be able to have the capacity within our school system to allow our youth to explore those questions of identity, to know. And why is it not okay to start saying because of this, I’m all of a sudden Indigenous? Never mind the fact that you’ve never been raised that way. Now there are also distinctions there because there are people who’ve been raised or who’ve been taken as a part of the sixties scoop. They’ve been taken and they’ve been raised in white communities and white families.

That’s a whole other story, but I’m talking about the distant sort of argument that I’m indigenous in that way. There’s that. And I hope I was clear enough in that in my story, my identity, but I also want to talk about the reduction of Indigenous culture, that being Indigenous, is so easy to figure out. All you have to do is take a course in Indigenous Studies and all of a sudden they’re the expert. You can take an eight-hour Indigenous awareness training and then you can get a certificate and you are indigenously aware or you can become Indian. My point is it’s incredibly insulting for me and other Indigenous people, I would imagine our cultures and our life ways that are thousands and thousands of years old to be able to be figured out in a few hours, to be able to be appropriated just like that.

These incredibly complex and diverse lifeways are then reduced and packaged as this is indigenous. And what is even more sad is that we have people accepting that. The reason why these Pretendians persist and the reason why they continue and can get away with what they get away with is because people accept it. People accept them as indigenous, and they accept the cultural gatekeeping that they start doing what Jules was talking about with the Abinaki. All of a sudden the real Abinaki can’t go visit the burial grounds because of this gatekeeping by these Pretendians. I sometimes sit there and I wonder, is this for real, this existence today? Is this happening? And I look around at some of my colleagues, these Pretendians, and I sit there and I think to myself, “Are you doing this?” You’re doing this. It’s like a surreal existence. Even this is more bizarre than the Twilight Zone. I swear it is. I’ll stop there.

Jules:

No, that’s a hundred per cent true. That’s probably the most common thing that I hear is that it is more bizarre than the Twilight Zone. And I would agree because we both come from a place where nobody wanted to be us, and it’s like nobody wanted to claim. I mean, I didn’t even want to claim it at a certain point, but you grew up with it. You can’t help it, right? I mean, you go through, this is a thing that these people don’t understand. I can’t speak for other people’s experience, but my own experience of self-hatred, the horror, I was five years old when I heard the words. No good, dirty, stinking, drunken, fucking Indian, those exact words. And I was at a barbecue, a family barbecue of a friend, and neighbour, and it was describing kicking this guy off the bus who was a no good, dirty, stinking drunken Indian.

I was five, I visualized this man on the bus, and I remember walking home and I made a pact with myself that I’ll never be that. I’ll never be that. God bless. I’ve never been that. The crazy part is that I had to have that put into my face. I had to have this interpretation, this non-native interpretation of who we are when dealing with someone on the bus and then learning later that no good dirty stinking drunken Indian was colloquialism. That it was a popularized theme that these people who try and come in and present to us, that they, they didn’t live that. That’s why it’s like, this is cuckoo. This is crazy. I’m in Twilight Zone. This is nuts. Where did you grow up? I mean, Carrie Barasa is a fantastic example of that, A level of audacity. There’s a list. I just wanted to continue from your Twilight Zone because you’re not wrong. That’s how it feels. No,

Jenny:

A hundred per cent. And even if I may, from my perspective, one of the things that you spoke about, Jules, is the greenwashing in terms of keeping capitalism in place and doing more development in the name of Indigenous progress. To me, it is the most horrifying because from somebody who is from the oil and gas industry and wants to deal with the harm that we’ve caused and start restoring the environment, it’s painful to watch communities being put in this place where they’re, the only way they can participate in any form of society is to continue the harm and continue the destruction. There’s so much violence in it. And this idea of this, as you guys are describing, the stepping over of all the atrocities that led us here, it’s just there’s so many ways to look at it. I’ll stop there. Gabriel, I think you wanted to add more.

Gabrielle:

Yeah, I just wanted to also make the point that in terms of choosing this whole idea there is a choice in who you want to be. I mean, I remember I was having this conversation with one of my relatives and we were talking about just the identity, the misrepresentation, cultural appropriation of indigenous identity. And I remember my cousin, said, “There is no choice for us in who we are as Blackfoot. This is who we are. There is no choice. This is how the creator has gifted us, is with this being. There is no choice in that.” The way “choice” is thought of in Eurocentric culture that is imagining or that’s been made up. This idea is that you can choose your identity. That’s a privilege. That’s a privilege right there to be able to, I have a choice in being corralled on a reserve. I didn’t have a choice of learning my language or not. Both my parents were at the Indian Residential Schools. I didn’t have a choice in the amount of racism I faced. And the fact that this cultural appropriation of identity, is also about racism as well, and its violence and this idea that you can take aspects of indigenous culture and indigenous ways of being as if there garments to be dawned and garments to be put on and then represent yourself that way. That’s about racism as well. I wanted to mention that just in terms of choice. Yeah,

How Do Settlers and Indigenous People Build Ethical Relationships?

Jenny:

Yeah, that’s so true, Gabrielle, the idea of choice being a privilege in itself. We are at a place of dilemmas in the world, as you guys have been saying, this battle is not new. This is since the 17 hundreds, if not before. That’s when this started, this issue of trying to, as you guys said, a race and replace. It’s just, that I see we’re getting close to the hour, I’m going to offer that if we can go into some of the ways we wish to learn together going forward. Gabriel, I really liked what you said, and I’ll offer this as takeaways and then you guys can do the same. I liked that you said we need to practice ethical relationships together rather than adopting ways. And I hear what you’re saying with respect to these courses. One of the things I said when people were challenging this conversation we held is that next year we’re hoping to take some courses together with participants in this.

And one of those was around truth and reconciliation. Now I wonder, putting this out there, what should it look like from your perspective? I’m not asking you to answer that today, I’ll put that forward to you. But one thing we have discussed is having another conversation about “What does decolonization look like?” I think that is a good way for us to start moving towards that practice of ethical relationships and understanding what that looks like together, the reduction of indigenous knowledge. I just went to the indigenous science night and some elders were speaking there, and it was very interesting because it was talking about protocols and then it was also talking about the fact that this can’t be taught in a way going to a ceremony. And this is a way of being, I think as you were trying to say, Gabrielle, you didn’t have a choice of being this way.

For the rest of us, we have to find our own way to reconcile who we are. I liked that you talked about where we’re going together. I think that’s a big part of it, I’ve been speaking in schools about green jobs and trying to incorporate the environment in all of the ways we work. And in those conversations, that’s what they talk about. Is being able to have those conversations about what does, what’s going on in the climate, what are we experiencing, how are we going to behave together, and how are we going to move forward together in that? To me, you’re right, it’s about having those conversations and having an expectation of them being ongoing. Those are my thoughts in terms of how we start carrying this forward. Again, I’m thrilled that I have had this opportunity. I’ve learned so much in this conversation. I’m looking forward to more. Gabrielle, would you mind leading off some of your thoughts in terms of how we move forward?

Gabrielle:

Okay, sure. I’ll try to be as brief as I can in terms of moving forward, I just want to back up and just say, okay, where do we usually find ourselves in terms of what is the usual, what is the status quo? Okay, how do we learn more about who indigenous people are? Typically it’s through our indigenous awareness training, professional development, all of that. And there is a problem there in the sense of the focus typically in the typical Indigenous awareness curriculum, and I’m not speaking for all facilitators, but it’s a problem when especially we have a Pretendian at the front of the classroom and is giving Indigenous awareness training and is doing nothing but saying that this is all you need to know about Indigenous people. This is how many people are in the jail system. This is how many people are in the child welfare system.

This is how many people are unemployed. This is how many Indigenous women are killed every year. This is a deficit lens that continues to be applied to Indigenous lifeways over and over and over again. And you can’t think your way to being in good relations with other people. That’s not a cognitive, the problem is the emphasis is all on the cognitive here, let’s do this, let’s do this. And then typically we might have an emotional exercise like the blanket exercise or something like that where people are like, oh, wow. Oh, I didn’t know this. And then they’re blown away for the afternoon and then they go back and then there comes the guilt, there comes the shame, there comes, I don’t want to go there. The way forward is understanding that what we’re doing right now does not implore transformative shifts. What you’re talking about is to look at the land as really the sustainer of life.

We need to be able to understand ourselves as the sustainer of our own happiness and who we are. It starts with self because facts and statistics about who Indigenous people are, all of that and what is reconciliation and all of that, that’s great, but it’s like we’re asking people to jump ahead with this knowledge before they’ve even learned to crawl with who they are. It’s starting at the roots of what is, how did we get to where we are right now and what are those big ideologies or ideas that we’ve internalized and maybe we’re not entirely conscious of, but they certainly drive us and then we end up being on autopilot a lot of the times and just kind of going full force in this whatever it is we’re our job and just getting caught up in the modern day society.

But my point is how do you move forward ethically? Well, first we need to participate in ethical relationships. That starts with self, what is important for me who am I and why do I want to do this? And Jenny, it sounds like you’ve done some of that work. And for Indigenous people, it’s the same thing too, because we’ve been influenced, especially the younger generation, been influenced by settler colonial society that so many don’t even know of even just the basic community protocols or even of who they are. It is a return to self, and I know that’s super abstract and super general.

Jenny:

No, there’s actually science to this too, Gabrielle, one of the things I just read is that behavioral science or knowing how we operate, even how our minds work is crucial to change. It’s crucial to adoption. Like you said, it’s too fearful otherwise. I’m sorry I needed to interject.

Gabrielle:

No, that’s fine. But I’ll leave it at that.

Jenny:

If you don’t mind, KJ, I’d love to hear some parting thoughts from you.

Jules:

I would agree. I am really glad that you brought that up because I’ve been hammering on that one for a better part of seven years now, where reforming our perception of Indigenous ethics, like cultural ethics, I had to try and refrain from this blanket term because we’re cultural and we’re also locational. We’re geographical beings and our relationship with our ethics stems from our relationship to our place. Even though that in itself, I mean these are the two lenses, right? You have the colonial lens and then you have the indigenous worldview. And I prefer the term worldview because it eases the mind into understanding that it’s broader, that it’s much larger than something that you can take and learn a lesson. It’s much broader, and it’s true.

That’s probably our biggest challenge where do we go from here? And I think we’re finally at a stage or we’re entering, finally entering maybe a stage. I’m 55 years old now, I was born in 1970. We were not in a stage where we had good indigenous relations. I think we’re finally now entering a stage where we can start to have our worldview and our perception of ethics incorporated into our schools, incorporated into our reintroduced, into our way of being. And this is going to be a challenge for all the reserve communities to try and adopt because they do have a very, very strong colonial perception of how things should be done. This is a long road. And right back to her point that there is no three-week boot camp or six-week boot camp to take to understand it because the best way that I could frame it is I remember going to counselling, like partner therapy, like marriage counselling type thing.

My partner kept on having these complaints and complaints and we finally, went to a native-run Anishinabe led counselling center. And when they would talk to her about her complaints, they would keep telling her that her complaints about me were cultural, that my worldview was, it was cultural, and that I was just not going to fit into that stream that she wanted me to fit into. I’m not going to row the boat, as they say. And probably the reason why the analogy of the Two Row Wampum is the way it is, is that you have your road to go down and we’ll have our road to go down. We’re rowing two boats at the same time, and we’re going along the course together. And we’ve been at this philosophically for 400 years now. We’re not coming up with answers, but we’re going to need to come up with answers fast.

We have an incredible depletion of caribou. Populations are bison are finally making a little bit of a comeback. We’re still just devastating all the riverways. We’re still running into ecological decline in terms of wildlife. These things like the reintroduction to the swift fox in Southern Alberta and in Montana and the Dakotas among First Nations are a big deal. These little things like that, I see that being were real changes because somebody made the choice to finance that program to say, you know what, that cute little swift fox, that cute little red fox that used to run and dominate the prairies, it needs to come back and it needs to be a part of our ecology again, and we need to do the work to assist it to get there. And you look at the antelope coming back into your territories now, what was it? Almost a hundred years that the antelope was not seen 75 years in some cases. And yet the antelope is emerging now. We have invasive species like the wild hogs from California coming up into Alberta.

I could go on. But the point that she’s making about ethics that’s internal, I’ll land with this. One last thing that I used to argue about language and the Indigenous worldview, like our worldview versus the colonial, worldview is the word trust. And trust is a powerful word because it’s manipulated, it’s leveraged, it’s placed upon someone. You broke my trust. We don’t have that word. It doesn’t exist. And yet we lean on it so much because trust is internal. You have to trust in what you are doing, the decisions you are making, the friends you are making, the places you’re going, and the things you are doing. You have to make those choices. But how do you make those choices without knowing yourself? You don’t make bad choices. And it’s one bad choice after another bad choice after another bad choice. And I think that’s what we’re talking about, reverse the bad choices.

Gabrielle:

Yeah, absolutely. Can I just say one thing quick? I know we’re right out of time, but I just want to say one thing based on what Jules was talking about in terms of we’ve been talking about these things now for 400 years and then now, yeah, we’re slowly making this sort of chipping away at this fortress, chipping away at the fort, but for all of the progress that we’ve been making and all of the information that’s out there, the age of information and all the amount of research dollars and research funding that has gone into theorize and how do you bring Indigenous lifeways, how do you do this, how do you do that? And then we’ve got all of these theories and it’s like we are continuing to even move even further backwards because now more than ever, we’ve had more kids in the child welfare that are indigenous more than ever.

We have more indigenous people who continue to die every day. Where is the disconnect? It’s at that juncture where we need to spend our time, and that’s where we start bringing in the play space. That’s where what is happening, the conversations about land. Are we talking about that? Are we returning to that? And it’s not necessarily like this indigenous people. There’s this, and I’ve heard it from my students and I’ve heard it from other people that, oh, indigenous people just want all the land back and they’re just going to do the same thing that we did to them. Well, that’s just applying that lens, that capitalist lens of violence and all of that. It’s like it’s not necessarily, and I heard this from a brilliant First Nation scholar from Australia who says it’s not necessarily about land back. It’s “everybody returning to land”. We need a return back to land. That’s what we need to do. And so, yeah, I just wanted to say that briefly. Thank you.

Jenny:

What a wonderful way to wrap this up, Gabrielle. Yeah, thank you guys. I am floored. I am just thrilled. Thank you so much. I am looking forward to our next conversation in December. I hope that’s what we’re looking at. Yeah, I have a lot I could say on this, but I do feel, the one thing I just want to add is these two paths. And I agree with you. I feel like it’s all coming to a head. We have to make some decisions together and that’s why I’ve been operating in this space and looking for this ability to work together. And those conversations are on the cusp of really erupting, I think, where we have those difficult conversations about, I see this is the forefront of a crisis that’s been happening for 400 years. You guys are the ones who have seen it, experienced it can know. I also feel like our age group, I am pretty similar to your age KJ, has an important bridge to fill too, I think as well. Because as you said, there’s a stopgap between where the knowledge has been lost in a lot of ways, even from my perspective and my peers from a scientific standpoint.

Gabrielle:

And I just want to say quickly that in terms of age and everything like that, I’m only 21, but I’m doing my best here.

Jenny:

You look fantastic.

Gabrielle:

I’m not 21, but yeah, I get it. Yeah. But we have a lot of young people, even though we got some youth that are drifted away, but we also have some young people that are also doing some amazing things for us. 50 plus folks,

Jules:

No, they’re there are. There’s a lot of great youth doing some incredible work. I, on the positive note of this, speaking personally, if you asked me 25 years ago if we would be in the space where we are with all the youth doing what they’re doing from all the various nations across the continent, I would’ve said, nah, it’s no way. No way. Not going to happen. And here it is. We have all these incredible, young, talented, smart people who are doing just amazing things and even amazing things out on the fox thing that I mentioned. And that’s a powerful thing. And going to your point to finalise it, that the moment that we have someone that introduces themselves into those sectors, those networks that are hungry for culture and guidance, those young, amazing, talented minds, seeking that guidance from someone who’s a fraud is devastating.

Jenny:

Yes, a hundred per cent. Oh yeah. This has been wonderful. We could go on for another hour, but I’m so glad to be able to talk to you.

Jules:

That’s it. That’ll be it. Yeah.

Jenny:

Okay. Have an excellent night, guys. Thank you so much for everything. Thank you

Gabrielle:

Hapaway

Jules:

Yeah, hapaway, thank you.