Autogenerated Transcript Canada’s aboriginal peoples are being used. Lawyers and activists make billions every year, bringing lawsuits before the government and spinning the false narrative that if only we gave our aboriginal peoples sovereignty and more money we would solve all of their problems. But it won’t work. We know this because it’s a game that’s been going on for centuries and it has yet to benefit them in any substantial way. I know. I’ve seen it first hand when I worked on one of Canada’s reserves as a paramedic when I was young. Of the billions spent by our government every year to supposedly help our indigenous population, almost none of the money actually gets to them. Professor Frances Widdowson is the author of several books, including ‘Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry’ where she reveals in detail the shell game of government assistance money and where it really ends up. Frances has also been cancelled for telling the truth. She was hired by Calgary’s Mount Royal University in 2008. At the time, the faculty appreciated her conservative stance and felt that it would bring much needed debate. Fast forward to 2021, and Frances was fired for those same views. She’s also had speeches at other universities cancelled by woke demonstrators. In this interview, Frances reveals why our current system for supposedly helping our indigenous population out of poverty will not and cannot work. She also explains how the woke left have adopted the same strategies as our aboriginal peoples, crying for more and more money and rights, while being unwilling or unable to contribute to our society. This is why Canada is broken. Frances, it's a pleasure to have you in the studio today. It's great to be here. Your books were so eye-opening for me. I have to say that I started out in this fight against the globalists and against the woke agenda, against all of that about four years ago. And if it had not been for your book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, I don't think I would have really understood what UNDRIP was when that came along. It's a very eye-opening book. So let's start with that. For our viewers who possibly haven't read your book, maybe even haven't heard of it, highly recommend it, folks. You really should read Dr. Widdowson's books. What is the Aboriginal Industry? So actually, the book that was written, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry, it was co-written with Albert Howard, who I met in the Northwest Territories in the 1990s. He was a consultant for Indigenous groups and a consultant for other entities, and I was working in the government. And we discovered at that time when I was in charge of examining the government's traditional knowledge policy, which was directing government employees to integrate all aspects of traditional knowledge into government policy, that there is a huge body of lawyers and consultants that work for Aboriginal organizations or Indigenous organizations that initiate grievances, make demands that can never be fulfilled. And then what happens is those grievances are sort of endlessly engaged in, in the courts, through bureaucratic processes. And that entity that is involved in perpetuating these grievances is what we call the Aboriginal Industry. It does include, to some extent, what I call the neo-tribal elites, which are the Indigenous leaders who are very well integrated into the existing system. So they're not representative at all of the target of policy, which is the marginalized members of the Indigenous population, which are suffering terribly in the communities. But these Indigenous leaders are interested in getting honorariums and so on to participate in these processes. So they are part of this whole, the nature of the industry as well. And what happens is things are proposed that transfer money to Indigenous organizations. This diverts money from much-needed services in the communities, such as housing, education, clean water, all these things that people need to survive and to thrive. And this maintains these isolated Indigenous populations in the state that they are, which is a self-perpetuating situation. And there's billions of dollars that are going into this every year. And the conditions in those marginalized communities are getting worse because those people do not get what they need to enable them to become productive members of Canadian society, which is how this sort of marginalization dependency, terrible problems such as fetal alcohol syndrome will be overcome, is only through some kind of meaningful existence, which does not exist in these communities. Right. I can attest firsthand to what you're saying, because when I was a young man, I was a paramedic and I worked on the Gleason Blackfoot Reserve, east of Calgary. And the people there are living in horrible conditions. There's an active tuberculosis. We would get calls to go to houses and we would go in and to attend to the patient, which was usually a child. And you're working as a team, so one person's the attend during that day and the other person's a driver. The driver would often sort of just look around just to sort of see what's going on in the environment. And more than once, I would go in there and I would open a fridge in a house that had four or five children in it. There's nothing in it. It's empty. It's horrible. And it's because the money is not getting to them. So as you say, there's billions of dollars, but it's this... I think aboriginal industry is the exact term should be used for it, built largely by white people who are profiting off of this, this idea that, well, all this money is going to help the aboriginals, but it doesn't reach them as it goes into the pockets of these people who are part of this industry. But you made a really good observation in one of your books. And that is that a lot of the people who are in this aboriginal industry don't really understand what they are part of. Exactly. And Albert Howard, that was the case with Albert Howard. So Albert was working as a consultant for indigenous groups. He thought that being a consultant was how he was going to assist the indigenous population in terms of dealing with the terrible conditions that existed. But he began to realize as he spent more and more time in his capacity with respect to being a consultant, that the whole thing was about trying to get money from the government for various projects, which really didn't have much to do with addressing the conditions in indigenous communities. So, and this is often what is the case with respect to, there might be the odd person in the industry who thinks that they're just doing it to make a buck, but that's not what I've experienced in talking to members of the industry is that they really do think that this is what they're doing is going to be helpful, but because they are benefiting financially off the system, they're reluctant to look very deeply into the effects that what they're doing is having on the indigenous population. Now we're going to get into in a little bit about how, from an understanding of your books, this system can never help them, will never help them. Yeah. But first I want to talk about your own history. Yes. Because you have been horribly censored for telling people the truth about this. Yes. Please give us starting with your history of your tenure at Mount Royal University. Yes. So I was hired in Mount Royal University in 2008. Mount Royal University when I was hired was a wonderful institution because it was making a transition from a college to a university and was really had a very, very good understanding of what an academic institution should be like. And we had great administrators like Robin Fisher and Manuel Merton who protected academic freedom. And although I was always kind of a bit of a dissident voice at the university, it was well understood that it was important that opposing views be heard and that this should be considered in any type of policy development. And then starting in around 2014, 2015, a number of factors completely transformed the institution. And the big one was we embarked upon a process of what was called indigenization in 2014, which was a directive that indigenous ways of knowing should be respected and valued. That was in the actual document. And I fought against this. I fought hard because I said, if you're going to have that as an official policy, it's going to have serious implications for people like me who are criticizing what's called indigenous ways of knowing, which are not ways of knowing. They are unsystematic observations, what's called local knowledge and the spiritual beliefs of indigenous people. That's what it is. And if you try to incorporate that into the curriculum of an academic institution, you will have all sorts of pieces of false information that are going to be accepted as being valid. And the unmarked graves situation that we're seeing across the country now is an example of what happens when there is an insistence that indigenous ways of knowing be respected and valued. So this went on for a number of years, about three or four years, and then we had a serious meltdown of the university system, not just at Mount Royal, but probably across the country with the killing of George Floyd in 2020. And this caused a massive increase in what was called anti-racism advocacy. And as a result of this, I was attacked by an indigenous scholar activist whose name is Gabrielle Lindstrom. She was unhappy about my criticisms of indigenization and went after me and mobilized an anonymous student-led, supposedly student-led group to attack me for my defense of the journalist, Lenny Mesley, who was pushed out of the CBC for referring to the book titled White Niggers of America. So that book by Pierre Valliere, who is a Marxist, who was arguing that it is not race, it is class, which is the most important factor when people get denigrated. And I just said, there's, Wendy Mesley did nothing wrong and everyone should be defending her. And this is ridiculous that you cannot refer to a book title. This is completely different than calling someone a racial slur and everyone should understand that. And if you can't understand that in a university, we have serious problems. Anyway, because of this, Lindstrom mobilized a bunch of people against me. And as a result of the interactions, I satirized Lindstrom's attempts to get me fired. And because of my satire of her attempts to get me fired, I was found to have harassed her. And this was a number of different factors that were related to this. And I was eventually fired in 2021 after a long kind of battle on social media with my colleagues. And it took a couple of years to get, it was only in January 2024 that we found the actual case that Mount Royal had against me. So we had to go through all of this to get the actual case, which was nine satirical tweets and one complaint. Because when I was found to have harassed Lindstrom and another person for social media activities, and I had been, had suffered for years of social media defamation against me, I filed 18 complaints against my colleagues for much worse activities on social media. And one of those complaints was found to be frivolous and vexatious and made in bad faith. So that and the nine satirical tweets, that was MRU's case against me, which I have documented on the Wukacademy.info site. So everyone can see what the actual case was. And I can't believe that it's still being accepted that this was valid for these satirical tweets to be seen as harassment when I was just responding, except for one tweet, which was about something with misgendering fatigue, and it was a trans activism stuff that I was satirizing. Because of that, it was deemed that I could not be a professor at Mount Royal University. And no one is taking this seriously. No one is evaluating those findings. And it's just all, you know, clamped down because the argument would be that because Gabrielle Lindstrom is an indigenous person, everything that she does is what's called punching up against oppression. So this is completely acceptable. And any attempts to defend yourself against this is punching down, and then you should suffer various disciplinary actions because of this. Now, I'm wondering, Frances, in your opinion, how much of this attack upon you was due to the woke ideology that's infecting our universities, and how much was spurred by the aboriginal industry itself wanting to silence the truth? Well, indigenization is part of the whole aboriginal industry kind of apparatus. So indigenizing the university was promoted by all the kinds of activities that are happening with respect to indigenous politics. So it's related in that way. And that as soon as indigenization was led into the university, you know, my days were numbered in the university, because I thought I could just continue to fight against it. But it was a mentality that if you question what an indigenous scholar says, this is harassment and racism and discrimination. So that was kind of the mentality. And then, you know, the students were starting to absorb this. So they were getting very agitated at any attempts that I was making to discuss indigenization. So to the extent to which the aboriginal industry is related to indigenization, that would be the connection to that. But the main problem in the university system is universities are supposed to be neutral. They're supposed to be an institution that allows people with differing perspectives, differing evidence-based perspectives to come together and have arguments to try to figure out what's true. That's what the university is supposed to be about. If the university takes a position on a particular perspective and promotes that, then you're going to have an imbalance in that university. And you don't even really need to punish people, because the message will be sent that if you support this particular perspective, you will be rewarded within the institution. And if you don't, you will certainly not be rewarded, but you will probably suffer consequences in terms of your career. And then it's even worse now, because you are going to be disciplined, because you are going to be put in this untenable position of having to argue against a protected group. Their ideas are protected. And any criticism of their ideas is seen as being discrimination and harassment. And you will be subject to all sorts of investigations, and eventually you will be pushed out of the university. Right. So the thing that occurs to me is this all happened so very quickly. As you say, universities are supposed to be new. When you were hired in 2008, it was seen as a good thing, because you would stimulate debate. Fast forward, what, 13 years? And suddenly you're being fired for not saying anything different than what you were saying 13 years ago. Yes. Yes. How did this infect our universities so quickly? Well, it's been happening, you know, not overly. It really started in the 1960s. So in the 1960s, this is when we first, it was the beginnings of it, but it just took that long for it to reach what's often called a tipping point. So tipping points are when you have a sort of a build up of forces, and then at a certain point, it becomes so strong that it's like a dam bursting, and it just, the institution changes. For people, for viewers who are interested in that, that's Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point. It's an excellent book. Yes. So we had these forces building since the 1960s. The first thing that happened, it was a phenomenon known as postmodernism, which entered into the universities in the 1960s, which was the idea that there is no objective truth, and it's all subjective beliefs. So that knocking out of this idea of there being a truth to be pursued was the death knell that was not understood at the time. And I've been in the university system as an academic since, I guess, 1990. And when I first heard about this kind of idea, I thought it was kind of interesting and so on. That should have been, you know, challenged and not really allowed to gain a foothold. When it did gain a foothold in the 1960s, this started the beginning of what was called advocacy studies programs. James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose have referred to this as grievance studies programs. And what they are is they're not academic programs. They're there to put forward the perspective of groups that are perceived to be oppressed. And those were enabled to be in the university because of this knocking out of the pursuit of truth, which happened in the 1960s. And over a period of time, they became more and more powerful. And their identity politics is what kind of drives these programs. So identity politics, for people who don't know what that is, is these oppressed groups have beliefs, and they have conceptions of themselves. And the argument in identity politics is, in order for these groups to become empowered and overcome their oppression, other people should affirm their subjective views of themselves. And so that was kind of existing as not a very significant proportion of the university in the 1970s and the 1980s and to some extent in 1990s. Towards the end of the 1990s, that's when it became more prominent. And in the 2000s, identity politics captured the machinery of the institution through diversity, inclusion and equity offices, native centers, pride centers, women's centers, all these kinds of bureaucratic entities, which have the institutional weight behind them. These capture the institutions. And then it was pretty much over at that point. We didn't know it at the time, but it was. And that's when all sorts of university funded kinds of initiatives began to take root. And there was just no neutrality at all in the institution anymore. I have to thank you for that explanation, Frances, because you're not the only professor I've asked this of, and that is the clearest explanation I've ever heard. It makes a great deal of sense. And I'd just like to summarize what you've said, because it is so very important, this post-modernism idea that came in that said that there's no such thing as truth. And I think the way that was able to make headway was that if you are in any way an honest, humble academic, you would be willing to say, well, I might be wrong. And it's a short step from that to there's no such thing as right. And now, once again, taking that a step further, now we've got that post-modernist idea that you said reached this tipping point in the universities. So now that anybody who speaks out against the narrative, which is assumed, oddly enough, ironically enough, assumed to be right, even though the whole idea is based upon, you know, there's no such thing as right. Now we take that a step further, and that's where we get back into the traditional knowledge from the aboriginals, where there's no scientific or historical basis for their claims whatsoever, but you're not allowed to attack it. Yes. So indigenous knowledge or traditional knowledge, as it was called in the Northwest Territories, this is an example of identity politics. So it's one of the kind of strands of identity politics. And depending upon this kind of hierarchy of oppression that is developed in identity politics kinds of discussions, it can be seen as the most important strand. Trans activism is also another very, very important strand. Women's studies as well. And so they're all kind of tangled up together, but the indigenous knowledge, this is a very interesting point that you mentioned about the kind of subjectivity of postmodernism, which is, there's no objective truth. Each view is as valid as any other view. If that is the case, how is it that the indigenous knowledge perspective is, in fact, the right perspective that must be accepted by everyone? So it's an odd turn that happened between the prizing of the subjective and the denial of objective truth to the assertion that indigenous knowledge should be accepted as being true by everyone, or people should pretend to be accepted as true. And really the linkage is that it's this idea that the important thing is the empowerment of oppressed groups. And how you empower oppressed groups is that you pretend, at least, to accept their views as being true. So it's a strange kind of mind game that goes on where people don't really accept, deep in their heart of hearts, they don't see it as being true themselves, but they take it as a position, a political position, that they should pretend to accept it as true and tell indigenous people that they believe this to be true, because this somehow, this is their argument, will result in indigenous people being empowered. And the thing where we've seen this the most now, which is just totally in your face, and there's just no bones about it, is the Kamloops case of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The band, in May 2021, put out a press release saying that the remains of 215 children had been found on this site. This was their claim. It turned out in July 15th, about a month and a half later, that Sarah Bollier, the ground penetrating radar expert, gave a presentation for the Kamloops band and said that 215 remains had not been found. What had been found were 200, not 215, 200 anomalies or targets of interest on the ground penetrating radar. And the only way you would be able to determine if there were remains there is if you did excavations to determine whether there actually was physical, you know, kinds of bones and so on. And the reason why she downgraded her number from 215 to 200 was because it was discovered that 15 of those 215 quote-unquote anomalies or targets of interest were in an area that had been previously excavated by the Simon Fraser Archaeology Department and they had not found any remains there in their excavation. So those 15 anomalies that she found were disturbances that were caused by the Simon Fraser Archaeology Department. What is to stop those other 200 anomalies from being similar disturbances that have happened for 100 years on the site, the most significant being the septic tiles that were laid in the 1920s in the same configurations that you see that have been targets of interest on the GPR findings. So that's the situation we have now. And when this is constantly raised by me and my colleagues, and we did this in the book Grave Error, which is just under serious fire right now, we were saying that this is a fact that needs to be recognized and we have no evidence for these remains that were claimed to exist. It's highly improbable that there are remains in that apple orchard because not one parent has said that their child went missing from the Kamloops Indian Residential School. So therefore, who are the 200 bodies that are buried there? We're now told, oh, don't worry about you guys with your, you know, pedantry and you want to dot every I and cross every T and why are you so concerned about this? Why does this matter to you so much? And then we're just saying, but the truth matters. The truth matters and we've had what appears now to be fraud, absolute fraud that has been perpetuated by the Kamloops Band to obtain millions of dollars for their searches. Over $300 million has been dispersed for these, you know, ground penetrating radar types of exercises. Not one clandestine burial has been, you know, discovered in this whole process. And it's obviously an aboriginal industry inspired initiative to extract money for these initiatives and not to mention all the other initiatives that have come in its week. And this is benefiting the aboriginal industry and nothing, no aspect of this is going to have any impact on the actual problems that we are facing, which are the marginalized members of the indigenous communities. Right. And of course, as you say, facts don't matter. It's been suggested that they should dig these graves up, and of course they resist that saying, "Well, that would be with disrespect to the law of our culture," Despite the fact that at the Manitoba residential school, where I believe there was 14 similar disturbances that were excavated, they find piles of rocks. Yeah. There's no bodies there. There's no evidence whatsoever that there's bodies at any of these schools. Or that there was any kind of systemic abuse in the system. In fact, these schools, and I want to talk about this later, but these schools were trying very hard to help the indigenous peoples by providing them with education, which is the only way they were ever going to assimilate into our society. But I want to get back to that later because we didn't get to finish your story because you were talking about your tenure at the Mount Royal University, but there's more than that. And you informed me just this morning, there's now a second case, talks that you were supposed to give at a university where you were shut down, censored. Yes. So there's been two cases, University of Lathbridge, which happened happened in February 2023, and I was invited by Paul Viminas to give a talk there just after I finished doing 10 days of the arbitration hearings. We went down there, there's lots of opposition, and the president said that although he thought that my views were abhorrent, that I should be allowed to speak because of the I would have to be allowed to speak because of the free speech policy and then more pressure mounted and He caved and not only Resented the space for the talk when I showed up there to give a speakers to corner type of format So because I didn't want to be pushed out of the university because of this. I was met by 700 a proud of 700 people, not all of them protesters, but about 100 of them wearing orange shirts and holding signs saying, you know, free speech is not hate speech and this sort of thing. He congratulated, he congratulated the students for their behavior. So that was an amazing, that's president man who is no longer the president now, but he should be absolutely ashamed of himself for how He not only caved and didn't uphold the academic principles in his institution, but he congratulated people behaving in an absolutely abominable manner who have no ability to listen to any arguments and evaluate those arguments. So that happened. The Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms is taking forward the case of me and Jonah Pickle, who is a student who wanted to hear the talk. And that's going to cordon in, I believe, February 2025. And we got emails, we got 200 pages of emails from the university, which shows an absolutely shocking perspectives from faculty members there who, there's about 14 of them who think it's completely acceptable not to allow people to speak if you agree with their views. These are professors at this institution, and this is all public, all this information. And then about a couple weeks ago, I was talking with Robert Thomas, who's the president for the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, and we thought it would be a good idea if I went to University of Regina to talk about my case and indigenization, how indigenization had negatively impacted academic freedom, because the Canadian Association of University teachers is having a conference celebrating indigenization the next day, and I was going to attend that, you know, because I think I just want to hear, and I, and I support, they say, indigenous people and their allies, I'm an ally of indigenous people, I want to hear about how there's horrible problems affecting them and if the problem is the industry that's stealing all the money that's supposed to go to help them. Exactly. And as we'll discuss later, the way they're trying to help them is never going to work. But we'll get back to that. Yes. And so I'm an ally. I'm trying to provide the best quality of education possible to a few Indigenous people. So the day before I'm going to go to this celebration of indigenization, which I know is not beneficial to academic freedom and the Canadian Association of University teachers, which is the legal side that's defending me, knows us as the case too, because they have seen how indigenization has resulted in my firing from Mount Royal University. So the day before I was going to go and give one talk on indigenization and academic freedom and how my case shows it actually destroys academic freedom. And then in the evening, I was going to give a lecture on the grave error at Kamloops. Should it be described as a hoax, which is there's a debate going on now, you know, whatever you want to call it, right? It's misinformation, perhaps disinformation, perhaps fraud is hoax because people are calling it people like Jaime Rubenstein. And there's a number of different people that are engaged in critical research that are calling it a hoax and what is the, is that a correct term to be used to describe this phenomenon of what's going on? That was going to be the evening lecture at the University of Regina. I just found out yesterday that the university has canceled the talks because they claim it's unsafe for these talks to be allowed to go ahead. And so they're going to get sued. And this is should, you know, we have now had a Mount Royal University. I went and talked at the University of Alberta, there were protests there, but the president got security. It went ahead. It was not unsafe in any way. It was people grandstanding and talking on their phones and doing stuff like this. And they just said their piece and they disrupted stuff and then they left. It was not a big deal what was going on there. I was able to talk there. We had a great question and answer session at the end. It's all been recorded. There's an audio of it. People can listen to it. So what the University of Regina is doing is it is pretending that it's about safety because they have no respect whatsoever for the academic character of that institution and they've been completely captured by wokeism because the University of Regina of course is ground zero in indigenization efforts and the level of education for indigenous students at that university will be incredibly low because no one is able to question anything that an indigenous academic says there. - Right, Frances, I want to get back later to this woke ideology, postmodernism, how it's destroying our universities. But for right now, I'd like to move on more with the Aboriginal industry itself. She gave us a very good summary at the beginning of this interview and why it is. But as I've made reference to you from reading your books, as you've made very clear in your books, the way they're going about this, throwing money at them, it is never going to fix the problems. Can we talk about that a little bit about exactly what they're doing with the money, where it's really going, and you didn't sort of make reference to that earlier, and how it just doesn't get to the people, and even if it did get to the people, it would just be in the form of handouts when it isn't gonna help. - Yes, so there's a couple of factors about this. One is that the money is going into Grievances funding grievances. So that's what it's all about is that you have a grievance that and this is start with camloops Now, this is the big aspect of the camloops case is that everyone went through this complete hysteria after me 2021 and this kind of loosened up any resistance to Money being dispersed to fund all sorts of suits, and fund all sorts of grievances that existed, so that's what the money's being spent on. Are these legal and bureaucratic processes that have nothing to do with on the ground support for indigenous people? The problem is, and this is what we talk about in this Roebin the Aboriginal industry, Albert Howard and I, is that it's not understood what the problem, the nature of the problem is, with respect to indigenous, non -indigenous relations. And the way it's been framed by the aboriginal industry, and that's like the subtitle of the book, is the deception behind indigenous cultural preservation. So indigenous cultural preservation is what is, are you to be the solution to the current problems that are being faced by indigenous people. So in order to deal with the fetal alcohol syndrome, the violence, the poor educational levels, all the kinds of housing and so on, these problems, how that's going to be solved is you fund cultural revitalization efforts. For example, the revitalization of indigenous languages. And this is a big thing now. And the most interesting part of that is not only do you revise Indigenous languages, which are pre -literate, so these languages were before there was writing, so their vocabulary is very small. You wouldn't really be able to translate modern textbooks into an Indigenous language because they simply don't have the words. They don't have the words, they don't have the concepts, you know, that syntax and everything, putting things together would not be very effective because because it's preliterate. What they're now doing is they are spelling out these indigenous languages in the international phonetic alphabet. So you probably notice this. If you see an indigenous word, it'll have a seven and it'll have a beta sign and all sorts of squigglys and everything like that. And you're going, "Whoa, this is a weird language that the indigenous people had." Well, it's not an indigenous language. It was something that was developed by linguists in the late 19th century, so that linguists would know, would have a symbol for every sound that humans had uttered, so that you could correctly identify the sounds that were being made. But no one, almost no one, like I'm not sure how many people, but it's be not more than a thousand linguists, know what this alphabet, how this sounds anyway, and especially indigenous people don't know how those symbols sound. So why is it that these members of the aboriginal industry want to have these names spelled out in the international phonetic alphabet? Well, that's what gets you the months from the government to go and spend, you know, months on end, you know, making dictionaries with the all done in the international phonetic alphabet. So language revitalization is an example of this where money is being spent on this kind of, these kinds of initiatives and not on the services that are required to, and this is the controversial part of disrobing the Aboriginal industry besides sides of the stuff on the lawyers and the consoles and everything are making the money is the developmental, the lack, the undeveloped character of indigenous cultures. So when contact occurred, you had a meeting of two levels of development that came together and this is what's been called uneven combined development. So you have hunting and gathering societies, which have low levels of productivity, stone age technology, so the kind of economic processes that are there is not gonna produce very much surplus. You have kinship forms of political organization. So the way, so the surplus is distributed is through kinship networks. So this means in the modern context, if you have a community where you have a powerful family in charge and that powerful family controls the money, they're going to distribute that money to those that are most closely related to them. That is corruption in modern governance. So, if Justin Trudeau uses his position to distribute public funds to his friends and relatives, that would be corruption. But in tribal politics in indigenous politics, that's not corruption. That is kinship -based forms of political organization. That is the traditional cultural feature that is being perpetuated by the kinds of programs and services that are being developed. And then the area that I'm most familiar with is the area of knowledge. So scientific methods are a very advanced way of understanding the world, indigenous people did not have any scientific methods because they did not have writing and you need to have writing to be able to have scientific methods because you have to record all your measurements and your observations so that you can avoid being misled by an unrepresentative observation and there is no capacity to do this within the indigenous culture. Or by the subsequent changing of that information. And you made a really good point in your book that, yes, history, and we're using this term academically correct, things that were written down, they're not always correct, but at least it's capturing a point in time. And once it's captured, okay, now we've got that record. And we can say, okay, that represents something that was happening at this point in time. It might be incorrect, but at least we've captured it. If you don't capture it, if you don't have a written language, as none of the Aboriginals did at the point of contact. Everything's open to being changed to oral histories. Yes, and that's what we see happening now all the time, is that we, and it's called, I believe, Alexander von Gurnett, who did all the best work on the oral history, the problems with the old histories, is you have documents that are, and they could be forgeries or fraudulent or whatever, but if they're not, they are pieces of history that have been frozen in time. Those documents might not be accurate, they might have been lies. You might have had a lie being frozen in time, but that lie that was told in 1517 is frozen so you can look at that lie and you can evaluate it and you can put it in the context of all other historical documents that existed at that time so this is a very very important tool for people who are trying to map out what actually happened in the past and if you don't have that you have no raw material from which to understand the past and try to develop some kind of objective understanding, not that you will ever get there, but that's sort of the nature of historical research, is that you have historians arguing with each other because they have different pieces of the historical record, and of course there is interpretation of those documents, but they have these documents. There is nothing like that with respect to indigenous culture. So all these, All these references to the indigenous knowledge keepers and so on, knowledge keepers are just people who have a memory of something that occurred. There's nothing that has been frozen in time that they can use to support that this is actually something that occurred. It's all based upon memory, which, and this is another problem with the oral histories, is that memories are not like you have a computer disk in your mind and you take it out and now that's what happened, is if you recall something within a particular context and it's very emotional, you can have your memory be shaped by what other people say and in things like the Truth and affiliation commission where you had hundreds of people all hearing other people crying and being very, very upset about everything that happened, then obviously the people who were listening to this, their memories of the residential schools also are going to be impacted by hearing these very, very emotional testimonies. So we are beasing a lot of the things that we are talking about with respect to what happened to Aboriginal people in terms of these testimonies, which, you know, you shouldn't disbelieve them. You can listen to them and sort of figure out where they fit, but it shouldn't just be believe the survivors and this kind of rhetoric that's being thrown around because that is not going to help us to understand things. And we have evidence of seriously wrong testimonies. The best one being the testimony of Billy Coombs, who book on an engraved error, my contribution to that book is this is the article that I wrote called Billy Remembers, as Billy Coombs is the subject of that. He claimed through the lens of Kevin Annett, who's this defruct United Church minister who's been spreading all sorts of horror tales about the schools for the last 20 years, that Queen Elizabeth II, with her husband Philip, had abducted 10 children from the Camloops Indian Residential School in 1964. Well, it turns out that Queen Elizabeth II was not even in Camloops. She was in Canada, but in Eastern Canada, but she was not even in Camloops. And even if she were in Kamloops, are we really supposed to believe that the Queen, who is going to have an entourage of many people, is going to have a busy schedule, she's going to be able to go on a picnic with 10 children and abduct 10 children? And who are these children? Like 10 children just all of a sudden went missing? Like these kinds of critical questions that should be asked about what's happened are stop being asked because you're told in order for indigenous people to empower themselves, you should pretend to believe everything that they say. And yet no one explains how that's actually going to empower indigenous people. How does lying to people, how does that empower them? It's just going to make them angry when they find that they've been lied to and manipulated by these members of the Aboriginal industry. That's what's going to happen. And you can see in any discussions with indigenous people, ordinary indigenous people, that there's a lot of anger and rightfully so. This is just completely unfair to everyone concerned and is not helpful at all in trying to figure out how to solve indigenous problems. Yes. And to back up what you've said, Frances, I myself have read Multiple studies that show that human memory is extremely unreliable, but the way we remember something, the way it actually happened, are almost always at least a little bit different. Now, and of course, as you say, if you get hundreds of people all remembering something, you'll remember it differently. So we've got that problem. But now I want to, and I'm going to just, a little public service announcement here, folks, if any of you watching this are on the left and you've managed to get this far, you might want to stop watching now because what I'm about to bring up is going to make your head explode. Let's talk about the fallacy of self -governance and resource management and how that's going to empower them because here's the problem. And what I'm about to say is politically incorrect, but it's scientifically correct. It's historically correct. And that is that they have a culture, which essentially has not really advanced since contact. And the reason it hasn't advanced is because we've been giving them handouts. They've had no reason to mature. Why do they live in houses? Why do they drive cars? Because we gave them to them. Not because they could go out there, most of them at least, and create the sort of infrastructure required to build all of that. And so what we have is this idea that if you just gave them the same jurisdiction, the same powers that we have that have built this society, that they would be able to fix all their problems. But they don't know how. They don't have that capability from their culture. As you made reference earlier, they've got these ideas of ownership and family and all of that that's going to create corruption within that system. It may be very politically incorrect to say it, but it seems to me that's the truth. Well, your listeners might be interested to know that I am a person of the left, so I am a socialist, a follower of George Orwell. So for people who don't know about the words of George Orwell, George Orwell was a socialist, but he was very, very concerned about the totalitarian characteristics of socialist movements. And I think he said, there's two problems with socialism. One, socialist, because you tend to have cranks, a lot of cranks. And two, the love of the machine that socialism has. So socialism historically has been very, very, you plant down the grid, you rip out all the traditional kinds of characteristics of the society. And this is very, very alienating for people because we have attachments to our histories and various organic kind of elements of human society. And so he was kind of grappling all the time with sort of some of the problems that you see of inequalities and, you know, people who qualities and people who are working in the coal mines and so on at this time were just terribly exploited and so on how to deal with these things. But when you try to rectify these problems with capitalist economic processes, you have a tendency for these kinds of totalitarian kinds of maneuvers to occur from the leadership and he was talking about this all the time. So I think that's the first thing is that I don't see wokeism as being left -wing at all. In fact, I see it as being further to the right, which is like the acceptance of inequality than what would be called classical liberalism, because classical liberalism accepts equality under the law, whereas wokeism does not. Wokeism as opposed to equality under the law, it argues that oppressed people should have more rights than people who are perceived to be oppressors. And that's how it's trying to reorient society and wokeism actually argues that you should keep sort of the catalyst system intact or it should exist, but you should have proportionate representation on boards and tractors and so on. If you look at like some of the biggest promoters of wokeism, you have banks, if you go into any bank, you're going to be hit with territorial land acknowledgments, pride flags, all sorts of promotional materials that are going to make sure that all the representations are black people and so on. And this is wokeism. This is like wokeism is diverting people away from class politics, which was kind of the original types of concern of socialism to identities like trans activism and so on. So that's the first thing. But Frances, just to be pretty continued, I feel folks, I should make something very clear. All of everything I just said about them not having the societal capability for self -governance is not in any way a direct quote of anything that Dr. Whittison said in her books. it's my own interpretation of what you said. So I want to make that clear. And that's what I'm getting at, but that's what I'm seeing. And if you think I'm off base, by all means, say so. Well, I think there's some truth in it, but it's more if you are a person who is being influenced by hunting and gathering cultural features. So that's the key. So if you are a person of indigenous ancestry, but you've been raised in a city, you've gone to you know, a private school. And the best example of this, which I've come across in the Powell River case is that there was a man by the name of Leslie Adams, who was a very, very well -known figure in Powell, the area of Powell of Powell River. He worked at the mill, the mill in Powell River. He was a tugboat captain for 37 years. He was a soccer star. He went to a residential school for, I believe, a year or so in Seashell. He met his wife there. They had several children. But because of his upbringing and He had a cultural features that he continued to embrace, but he was very well integrated in terms of being a working class person who was well educated, who had all these kinds of things where he could participate in modern society. So it's not really about sort of retaining your cultural features. That's something that gives everyone meaning. It's about to what extent are you able to participate As a producer as a productive member of society and he was able to do that He had several children one of his children whose name is Evan Adams Was a very promising student got sent to I believe it was st. Michael's University school in Victoria got the best education he goes on a scholarship So he got an incredible education went to McGillie University's is very very sort of famous person in the area now, this is all people who are indigenous in terms of their ancestry, but because of the connections that they made and their participation in modern society, they're being productive and so on, they're integrated just like everyone else and they have cultural features that they hold on to just like everyone else. So that's the situation which I think people have to understand is that the hunting and gathering cultural features, it's fine if they're just things which you pick and choose to give you meaning in society, and people should just be free to do that. The problem comes as when they become your foundational sorts of So, and the big one economically is, it's a very, very difficult thing for people to, and this is not something that we're born with, to work by the clock. So, this has been a huge problem for humanity since the Industrial Revolution is that people don't, that doesn't make a lot of sense to people working by the clock. Because you want to just do something you know you got to do something then you do it and then you take a rest. That's how people have lived for you know it's how everyone hunting and gathering and gatherers as well like this is the significant part of it that they go out and hunt and once they hunt they eat what they've hunted and then they're fine for a while and they go out so that's the rhythm but sort of the natural rhythm of humanity. Working by the clock is a very, very alienating process, which takes a lot of getting used to, and you have all sorts of cultural features that help you to get used to working by the clock. So when you finished putting that bolt on a car, you don't just say, oh, okay, I'm gonna take a rest now 'cause I've done that car. It's like, no, you're getting paid by the hour here and you're gonna work eight hours and you're gonna be on the selling line and you're gonna be doing that. Anyway, so this is a huge problem for people in hunting and gathering cultures because they get their paycheck and then they just disappear and they don't come back to continue the routines of that productive kind of aspect. So that's sort of, if you don't, if you aren't able to teach indigenous people how to work by the They're not going to be productive members of society if you can't show up for meetings on time You're not going to be able to participate in the society all these this kind of clock time And they have a word for it. The real commission was using it Indian time You know, you do things when the time is right. Well, the time is right is that Eight o 'clock is our meeting and if everyone doesn't show up for the meeting at eight o 'clock We can't hold the meeting Right. That is a product of modern civilization, very productive economies, and you need to be able to master that if you're going to participate effectively. Same thing with the political forms of organization. Now in indigenous groups, we have all these modern, highly advanced mechanisms for recording meetings, having meetings, all these sorts of things, yet these are constantly being subverted by tribal forms of organization where you just operate according to who you're related to. This is difficult for people who are still immersed within the hunting and gathering culture at a fundamental level, not just they smudge here and there or they have a medicine wheel in their office or at least these very superficial things which just are kind of cultural markers and make people feel more comfortable in the world. This is all fine, as long as it's not imposed upon other people and demanded that you accept it as being valid. For example, I think smudging is just an absolutely terrible thing. I don't want to be at a meeting and have people smudging. I don't want people to demand that I smudge. I think it's based on all sorts of rational ideas that the smoke is going to clear away the evil spirits and so on. But if people want to go off on their own and do smudging, well, that's up to them. That's no problem. But it's always being imposed, and not only being imposed, you've got to pretend that you think it's a great thing, which I will not do that. Lies are not going to go through me, and this is constantly being imposed all the time. So I think that's the kind of key is that it's true what you're saying that indigenous cultures that were hunting and gathering did not have metallurgy, did not have the wheel, did not have a written language. So when we look at all the trappings of indigenous communities, this was technology that was developed in very advanced modern societies. However, there were indigenous people like Leslie Adams who were participants in the building of these places and they could be involved in producing it or they could be involved in inventing some new things that would assist people in various ways. Human beings, our minds are very, very similar. There might be some genetic differences that exist, but generally all human beings in the planet, if you give people the cultural supports where they can economic kinds of interactions, advanced political interactions and advanced intellectual interactions, they will be able to master that but you have to put in place programs and services that have that understanding and that is not happening at all with respect to indigenous politics. What's being argued is the kind of thing that you're saying is that if we just turn everything over to you to indigenous communities and everything's run by knowledge keepers and elders and so on, then somehow everyone's going to become empowered and be able to participate just like everyone else is in modern society and that's not going to happen. These communities, this is something that is very, very important, are are completely dysfunctional, the northern communities, these isolated communities, and I'm not talking about some communities that are very close to urban centers who like the people that can kind of escape have escaped and they're there participating, you still have problems there, but it's not the situation that you see in the north, where you have to fly in, fly out is no economic base at all, and you have unbelievable suffering that's going on in those places with no hope of anything in the future. And there's been some proposals, and this is a huge problem and a huge question as to how to deal with that. Right now, they're just pretending that if you just throw more money at those communities and suddenly they'll be able to deal with it and they'll be able to become functional, but that's not rational to think that's going to happen. Even moving a community from one place to another and providing new infrastructure, which happened in Davis Inlet, you still have the same problems. It makes sense because the problem is not the fact that you didn't have a nice house with a bathroom. It's nice to have a new house of the bathroom, but it's about your ability to participate and to be someone who contributes to society and knowing that what you do matters. If you don't think that what you do matters to other people and to society, you will suffer terrible psychological problems, and that is what's happening to young people in these communities. They have no idea how they fit in modern society. And so you have, you know, and they have estimated this is not no one because no one could do research on this subject because it's so controversial and it's just clamped down on and you have to get often have to get consent from indigenous communities to do research in those communities, fetal alcohol syndrome rates in those communities. I've heard estimates of 40%, I think that that would be a... My own experience is working on the Mission Blackfoot Reserve almost 40 years ago, in the paramedic. I would say that's probably pretty accurate. So let's think about that. What does that mean when 40 % of your population has fetal alcohol syndrome? What are we going to do about that? And what is required is massive intervention right now to stop It from happening in the future, but because it's such a sensitive topic, no one can even really discuss it. Right. So, at this point, I'm going to string together a whole bunch of stuff we've been talking about. And some of them, I want to make it clear, some of this is my own perspective. Let's start with my own experiences working on that reserve. And as you say, there are certainly individuals who are able to assimilate. We had on that reserve, I would say about 10 % of the aboriginals there had farms that ranches their kids to a teen university and they were maintaining their culture, but they were also participating in ours as productive members. But then you have the other 90 % who were quite frankly, completely useless. Couldn't even look after themselves, let alone contribute to society. And before anybody starts accusing me of being a racist, I myself am Metis, my great -grandmother's McMack. So, you know, I have that history as well. And I do know something about my own Aboriginal history. So now we've got, so we've got, we've established that now the claim has also been made that if we don't give them the whole package that we're destroying their culture. And this is painfully ridiculous because you can go into any city in Canada and you will find an Italian Canadian center, a Polish Canadian center, an and Canadian Centre. There's nothing stopping them from continuing to practice their culture while becoming part of ours and as you say, productive members of society. And you made this wonderful allegory at the beginning of your second book and I should say second book. I know that you've co -authored several, but we're talking specifically about your books on aboriginals. Where you talked about how from the aboriginal perspective, They want to talk about their their native rights as two ships sailing side -by -side down River. And neither of them should be messing with the other. But the problem with that allegory is that it assumes those ships are moving all on their own. Well, they're not. They're moving because people are rowing them. Productive members of society are making those ships move. So if we followed that allegory and we gave them all the things that they want, what's actually going to happen is that the people who are in our cultural ship are towing them because they're not contributing. And you've even made this point in one of your books that, yes, there's lots of instances of aboriginals who are in jobs, you know, ordinary jobs. But almost all of these jobs are administrative or clerical, then you don't actually produce anything. And so this brings us back full circle too. How do we solve this? Because the spirit system, which is just going to keep giving the money to not produce anything, to not stimulate them to learn how to produce anything, it's absolutely just going to make things worse. But if we even talk about not continuing to hand over all that money. Well, what happened to you? How do we fix this? And I'm asking this question from the perspective of wanting to help these people because I saw firsthand the horrible conditions on that reserve when I worked there as a paramedic. It's awful. The conditions these people are living under. No one should be living under conditions like that. We treat animals better. So I would genuinely like to see these people get helped, but the way we're trying to do it. It's not going to work Yeah, so that Analogy or the the what's put forward it's called the two -row wampum So this was a in separate but unequal which is the book that I did in 2019 which was based upon my PhD dissertation It's more it's It's the same, similar kinds of arguments as just roping the aboriginal industry, it's just got a more academic kind of theoretical. It's a more scholarly book if you should deeply understand it. It has a theoretical, but it's the same, it starts from the same place. But anyway, that has been put forward as the solution to indigenous, non -indigenous relations is what's called the two row wampum. And it's a beaded, this is the beaded belt, the wampum belt, which has two blue stripes and white beads in between. So the two blue stripes are canoes, which are the two vessels that are going side by side. And right off the bat, it's an interesting question as to why would you assume that you could have two people within the same kind of society, two peoples, you know, going parallel paths and not having anything to do with one another. That doesn't happen in any other context, like you don't have that happen. If you have people within the same society, they influence one another. It's true that often one, you know, some groups will oppress others, but what happens is that through that, you have exchanges that occur, and then you have a gradual intermingling of the two people. But that's generally what happens in societies. The assumption that's being made that is incorrect in this whole thing, besides assuming that people can just go on parallel paths indefinitely, is you have some a nation, what's called a nation to nation relationship. And this has been a fabrication of the aboriginal industry, which has insisted, beginning I guess in the 1970s, because of the Quebec sovereignty demand. So Quebec sovereignty, this was demands for Quebec sovereignty was occurring in the 1960s and 1970s. indigenous, the aboriginal industry saw that and said, "Aha, this is we can get in on this action too." And so therefore they insisted, certain insisting on being called nations as well. But indigenous groups are very, very different from the Quebec nation. Like Quebec is actually a nation. Whatever people's views are on Quebec politics, you have a group that has got millions of people that if it wants to form a state, it's going to be able to form a state. Now there's going to be all sorts of complications in terms of its arrangements with the rest of Canada and so on, but it is a possible situation that's going to happen, that can happen. That is not the case with You know six hundred and thirty three or whatever it is a small group some of them are five hundred people they have no as you're mentioning no economic base at all they know you know all sort of landmass that they're going to be able to form some kind of state like thing. So what you have is some sort of this right to self determination for nations is assumed. To exist in the indigenous context when it doesn't. And then everything is going on this faulty assumption and you have indigenous, the aboriginal industry making claims about indigenous sovereignty. There is no such thing as indigenous sovereignty. Sovereignty is when it's a concept in international relations when You have the ability to have legitimate coercion over your internal population. So that means that you have a police force, you have laws, you have the ability to enforce those laws, all the institutional apparatus to be able to maintain the entire society. And then you have externally your ability to defend yourself from external army, some kind of army and so on. So none of that exists for indigenous groups. But there's a, again, this is part of wokeism, which is in order for indigenous people to empower themselves, you should pretend that they have sovereignty, because then that will give them the strength and the self -confidence and so on to build themselves up and to become part of, you know, like numbers of their quote unquote nations and so on. So that misunderstanding of like, first of all, the two parallel paths that can happen, which is not going to, even in the case of Quebec, like you could say, okay, well, you know, you got the Quebec nation and then you have the English Canadian nation and they're kind of separate because you know, I mean, Quebec has built up its, you know, language laws and all these sorts that that doesn't even that that whole idea of the way of thinking about it is not the correct correct anyway because what's occurring if you go to Quebec and you go to places like Montreal is everyone is is becoming bilingual and that's that's going to be the future of Quebec is that it's going to be the intermingling of the two things to become a bilingual nation that that's the future of Quebec. And in terms of the indigenous population, the intermingling is that, you know, most indigenous people are functional, are already completely intermingled. Yet you have a huge underclass, a very, very marginalized dependent element, which is not participating at all. So if we're going to see one of the blue lines, it's going to be this underclass that is not going to be able to thrive at all. At best, it's going to be maintained as a welfare class that is just living off money that's transferred, and that does not provide any psychological benefit to people at all because they know that they don't matter. What they do has no ability to contribute to society and as you said, many people were in that state, they're just totally trying to keep themselves alive. They're not contributing to the rest of society and it's not trying to say that they should be discriminated against, things should be done to them or anything is just a recognition of the terrible psychological conditions of people who are not able to contribute to society and that's really what needs to be the focus is getting in place some kind of strategy that is going to be able to deal with sort of the dependency and the inability to participate for urban indigenous people. So that's one kind of problem because there are large areas of cities now where you have indigenous people living in kind of a ghettoized existence. But the more significant problem are, I'm not sure how many communities were talking about, we're definitely talking about a couple of hundred of these communities in the isolated northern parts as to how interventions can be done in a way that is going to improve circumstances there and not just perpetuate the terrible social conditions which exist in those communities right now. Yes. And as you said, that's a real great challenge because the only way we can make these people productive members of society so they can have that sense and value is to educate them so that they can contribute. But as you point out, we ensure for something like the Gleeson Black Reserve where I work, well, that's an hour upside of Calgary. And their kids went to university here for the most part and the ones that did. But if you're one of these isolated northerly communities, how they have to give these people an Keisha, how do you even begin to address this problem? Yes. Well, first of all, recognizing it, so this is the problem is you cannot solve a problem unless you correctly identify its cause and that is not happening at all and it's going to become more and more difficult. It was difficult when "Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry" was written, you know, we were writing it in the early 2000s And that got published, that book would never be published today, separate but an equal, never published today. So those books got published, they stand on their own, there's a few things that would be changed if they had to be rewritten, but pretty much they are very truthful books. But nothing like that can be said anymore. And now you can't even go and give a talk at a university explaining some of the problems because the whole thing has been captured by this quote unquote woke mentality which is you cannot say anything that is upsetting to indigenous people because that is going to cause them to suffer from self esteem problems, then that means that they're not going to be able to have the self -confidence to be able to thrive in their educational environment and so on and they're going to drop out and so we need to do everything that we can to protect them to ensure that they only hear things that they agree with. And this, of course, is a recipe for disaster because the things that they actually think are true, are false, and will actually not enable them to understand the bigger picture of how people actually are able to become psychologically and socially connected into not just Canadian society, We're dealing with a global society now, so you need to be able to function by meeting people you don't know, like strangers, and developing some kind of ways of interacting with people so that we can recognize one another as human beings who all have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else, but that's not how Indigenous communities function, people who live in Indigenous communities and are immersed within these traditional cultural features. If they go outside of their community, this is a very alienating environment. Yeah. And I've got an anecdotal story about that that I think is very, very relevant. When I was training to be a paramedic, we had in our class a member of that community that I ended up working in. He was a good medic. He graduated. He was very good at his job. He lasted six weeks before he quit. Why? Because the other aboriginals attacked him, calling him the term leaders is an apple. You're right on the outside, right on the inside. He couldn't take the societal pressure. Here was a guy who would have had a promise and career to get him was very competent as job and quit because of the societal pressure from within in the Aboriginal community itself. Yeah. And I've heard it in other contexts, it's about the lobsters trying to escape out of the lobster bucket and then people are pulling them back in like I can't exactly remember that. But it's human psychology. If your full group is down and you're down, you hate to see anyone get, because it points out to you as you've been making this point, that you're useless, that you don't have any value because you're not contributing. And I'd love to say that if we've reached the point where we've plumbed the depths of the problem but we haven't because we have to look at it from another perspective now. Just about everything we've been discussing so far is the problem as it affects our originals. But we haven't really talked about how it affects our society, aside from all the money it's costing us that's not doing any good. And it's going to get worse because of UNDRIP, United Nations Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And I could give my perspective on that and have to my viewers more than once, but I'm more interested in yours. Yeah. So I did do some work on this when it was just a declaration. And you've probably explained this to your viewers. And this is not a current area of research that I'm doing. I'm just hearing things, people talking about it and raising the alarm about how it's going to tear apart the Canadian society, which we already have a few kinds of indications of this. The one that I know about most specifically is in British Columbia. So it's the worst in British Columbia. Because the British, we had the Declaration of the United Nations, which was a symbolic gesture and had all it was a sort of an aspirational kind of idea that, you know, indigenous cultures should be recognized. It had disturbing language, which is why there was great resistance for a long time by Canadian politicians to sign on to it, because there was language such as Indigenous people have a right of ownership to their traditional territories, and this idea of free prior and informed consent on their traditional territories. So if that was incorporated into actual legislation, it could have serious consequences for property rights in all across Canada. It was eventually signed on to as a symbolic gesture, but this is how these Aboriginal industry initiatives always work, is that you get some kind of symbolic thing happening, such as Territory land acknowledgment isn't really good example of this, so here you have people standing up in all contacts imaginable Putting things on their email signatures and so on saying that I'm happy to be a guest on the lands of various indigenous groups Well, if you're gonna say that you're a guest on the land of an indigenous group, don't be surprised if You at some point you're asked to pay rent Because you have admitted that this is not your, you don't have any rights in this area. And people were always saying, "Oh, this is just, it just makes Indigenous people feel good and so on." And I'm going, "Well, even if that were true, which I don't think is the case, it's not honest for you to be doing it." And it's horribly, as you say, it's horribly damaging. damaging, and it's driven by this continual pattern of white guilt, because you're not a guest, you're a conqueror, let's be historically accurate. We conquered that. Now we did it in comparison to other conquerors, conquerors that happened in history, I think in a very, very civilized manner, but that's still the facts. Well, sovereignty was So, concrete, like there was no military conquest, there was like an assertion of laws and you know, we occupied the land, we created a sovereign state, we put in place all of everything you talked about, we've built all of that, whether they want us to or not. Yes. Well, I take of Jack, like I think the way you're phrasing it, my own view is sort of seeing it a lot in terms of we, like I don't really see it as does a we, I see it as a historical fact that you had people come from European countries, they asserted sovereignty over the land, this is de facto implanting of a regime which is coercive over the population. So that happened. Now there's all sorts of disputes that are going on in terms of what was required by the British, especially the British crown, which had specific legal requirements for them to fully be able to assert this, like in a legal sense. So In legal terms, there's two terms, one is de facto and one is de jure. So de jure is the legal, you ticked all the boxes for the legal requirements to be met. De facto is you've just done it. So for 100 years, there's been laws operating, there's been treaty payments given, there's been all these things that have happened. So in all sense and purposes, there was Canadian sovereignty that was being asserted over this territorial entity. That is a de facto position. The du jour position is, well, in order, it says in British law that in order for you to be actually sovereign and to have legitimacy, you need to have all these treaty arrangements signed and so on and has to be done in this particular way. And then there's all sorts of legal disagreements going on about whether those sorts of things were met. The most significant being in British Columbia, because the treaties that were signed in British Columbia are not seen as being as officially Canadian law types of arrangements as happened in, for example, the numbered trees on the prairies and so on. But for all sense and purposes, like, It really makes no difference to the marginalized indigenous people, whether the treaties signed in BC were proper treaties or not, because everything that has to do with that is going to all be Aboriginal industry, lawyers all arguing if one another and millions of dollars being spent. And if you look at the BC treaty process, the whole thing is just You know arguments that are going on So in terms of under it We had this United Nations thing which which indigenous groups starting with George manual in I think was the 70s and his Aboriginal industry associates because it wasn't him. It was all his You know advisers and everything saw kind of a bit of an opening with the United Nations So they were lobbying hard in the United Nations for this, they convinced the United Nations, which is very sympathetic to internationalist types of initiatives anyway, because the United Nations is about, to some extent, getting nation states to give up somewhat of some of their sovereignty to become part of this international thing. And the indigenous side is very much an internationalist thing as opposed to, you know, sort of accepting the nation state kind of concept. So that happened, KEMDA resisted, eventually it signed on because it was getting all this pressure and it was told that it's not binding anyway. So like, what are you opposing this, you know, indigenous, make indigenous people feel better if you did this and so on. So eventually everyone gave in and did this and then the original industry started to get to work on getting this actually codified into some kind of Canadian legal system, and that's where we're going to have serious trouble. Not so much with the Canadian law that was passed, like that's bad in its own right because there's going to be various Canadian policy initiatives that are going to have undrepped as being the principles that they got to abide by. But the provincial ones are the ones that are very, very damaging because that gets into various kinds of economic development initiatives are generally provincial in terms of their jurisdiction. So you're going to see all of this attack. And the worst thing I've seen so far is the docks In some part of British Columbia, coastal part of British Columbia, all these people had their properties, they had built their docks to have their boats and everything. And then the indigenous groups were saying, "Well, these docks are interfering with our clamming practices, our traditional clamming practices, so those docks are all going to be ripped out because we need that area from our climbing practices. And because of UNDRIP, the kinds of wording that's in UNDRIP, there was mobilization to start doing this, and then there was pushback against it. And now they're saying, "Okay, well, we're going to grandfather all those docks into." So if you have a dock already, okay, well, we're going to leave that alone. The problem is, is if you want to have any future, if you've got a place and you want to build a dock, that's when you're going to have problems because now you're going to have to get consent. Was it free, prior, and informed consent from the indigenous groups? And that is going to cost a lot of money. And not just money, now there's a lawsuit going on from residents. It might be about the docks, but They're fighting various aspects of UNDRIP that are being imposed. So this is again, this is what the industry wants. They want more lawsuits, more money to lawyers. Now we're going to have the indigenous lawyers fighting for them and we're going to have the residents lawyers fighting for them. It's just a win -win for the legal profession all across the land. And it is a terrible thing for working -class Canadians and marginalized indigenous people because they're going to be the ones who are either not getting the services because all this money is going to be diverted or in the case of ordinary citizens, Canadian citizens, they're going to have to be footing all sorts of legal bills to fight back against whatever is going to be done to them and who knows where it's going to go because it was the language of traditional territories that is the problem. So we've gone through all these processes in British Columbia and in Pearl River, which I've had a lot to do with over the last few months because of the name change issue that is blown up completely, which was initiated by the Kamloops, The false claim in May 2021, that's what got that moving is that the name change should happen because of the 215 bodies that have been found at Kamloops, and this has now got a life of its own. But in Pal River kind of context, and I can't remember how I was relating to UNDRIP with respect to this, but we have all sorts of politicians that are doing things on the traditional territory of the group there, which is the Klammen group, what they call the Klammen Nation, which is not a nation, it's an indigenous group. It has traditional territories, which include Powell River, They've got their treaty that they signed for their land that they now entered into this legal arrangement, which took 20 years to sign and it was a classic Aboriginal industry kind of thing, but that's just the beginning. They've got that treaty, they've signed that treaty, but they expect to have influence and control over things that happen in their traditional territory, which is a much wider area. That's the area that they have roamed over and clammed in and collected berries in and all these things, all these hunting and gathering activities historically. And so, because it's their traditional territory too, they should be consulted, they should have the ability to control what goes on there. And you know, this is people think, you know, this will just be, you have some meetings and you talk things through. That's not what it's about. It's about what's called in the economics literature rent seeking. Rent seeking is the word. So you use your legal position as indigenous and the undripped, which is, you know, you have these rights to ownership of your traditional territories. that is used to demand compensation of various kinds. So that's the big problem with UNDRIP, is that it gets this traditional territories language put in there, and then it says that there must be free prior and informed consent, which no one knows what you need to do for consent to be meaningful, The lawyers are going to figure it out through endless court cases. So that's the biggest problem the second Largest problem which has been pointed out by Bruce party Bruce party is a law professor from Queens He's done some work on this is the inequality under the law So this is a huge principle that is under attack mass of attack and in Indigenization, And in indigenization, indigenous people should have more rights than non -indigenous people because of their history of oppression. But wokeism generally attacks freedom under the law for all oppressed groups. So the argument is that in order for oppressed groups to overcome their oppression and be empowered, they need more legal rights than everyone else. That then completely destroys the foundation of democratic rights within a country. And then once you basically demolished your democratic rights, you're going to have the real kind of thing which is behind it all, which is going to be the assertion of more and more authoritarian types of measures over the entire society. So, you So on the one hand, the thing that is kind of the most disturbing about wokeism is it uses compassion to get people to go along with this. So if it weren't using compassion, people would be more resistant to it. Maybe going, "I don't want to give up my rights, I want to don't want to give up my freedoms. These are important." And then you're told, "Well, if you just go along with this, Then this will be helpful to these oppressed people and you're a kind person aren't you you want to help oppressed people That's the little that's the kind of thing you go. Yeah, like I'm a kind person. I want to help people Okay, well and what's the harm anyway? You know, you're gonna change a name or you're gonna do this and and so you you do this kind of slight Movement to give up some foundational principles And then before you know it, you have no ability to fight back against what's going to be coming behind it, which is not far away. And so I'm saying to people, look, this is not about just being a nice person. That's not what it's about. It's about an anti -democratic force that is using the indigenous people and all these other woke initiatives to soften people up So they will accept this and then once you accept this You're not going to be able to get back what you've lost because you won't have any you won't have any way to do it It's going to be gone. So I'm watching all this happening and I'm going oh People wake up wake up about this. It's not you know, and I'm a socialist So I'm not I'm not saying this as a pro -capitalist pro, you know, but I'm just saying democracy is important whether you're a socialist or a libertarian or conservative, you know, freedom of speech. This is the first thing to go. Yes. You know, and Nazi Germany was not always Nazi Germany. There was a period before that where all sorts of freedoms were being corroded freedom of speech. There's the first one that went, and all these efforts to knock out freedom of speech, that is where ground zero is in these fights, and we have to fight hard and fight now, or we are going to lose what we're going to need to build back the kind of democratic processes that we need to figure out how to solve all these problems that are facing just between indigenous and non -indigenous people, but there's other issues as well in terms of how to deal with trans rights and all these kinds of questions. But we need freedom of speech. It's the highest value because that's what enables us to determine all the other values. And if we don't have the freedom to be able to discuss things, we're not be able to, you know, consider a variety of different lenses on these problems. And then therefore, the solutions that we develop to solve these problems are going to be incredibly flawed because we haven't heard all the different viewpoints that we need to hear about what to do. Right. And it's because it's government by the minority for the minority. And to make that work, they have to silence, the majority, which is why the censorship, but now I want to tie a few things together here. First of all, I want to back up a little bit to my comments about conquering versus guests. You very aptly said, "If you're a guest, don't be surprised when you're told you have to pay rent." Exactly. Whereas if you're a conqueror and you can use whatever term you want, I'm going to use that term because it just makes sense to me. And the people you conquer living in squalor, it's your default and you better fix it. And both you and I feel, yeah, we have a responsibility to fix what was done to these people and the horrible conditions they're living in right now to make them, to put them in a position where they can be contributing members of society, where they can have value and still keep their culture if they want to. By all means, go ahead. But the way it's being done is completely wrong. Now then we get into the Aboriginal industry and you were talking about BC. I'm sure you know Layton Gray, the lawyer, who is himself aboriginal and he has been fighting very hard against UNDRIP. And one of the things he's told me in interviews is that BC, and I believe there's one of the territories as well, I think there's none of it, are one legal penstroke away from ceding all control of resources to the aboriginals. And you pointed out what's the worst province in Canada for all of these lawsuits going on in BC because they already have a huge amount of influence. But control or video power is not sovereignty. As you pointed out earlier, it's not the same thing. So it's going to lead to all this contention. And then we bring along UNDRIP, which in my view is just the The aboriginal industry mm -hmm where outside forces outside our country now want control of those resources through them And they're they're the ones that are going to be manipulated and used and there's going to be yet more and more of this in fighting and legalization going on and and lawyers and all of that It just keeps getting worse now and It saddens me that I'm not sure there is a realistic solution. So, as I said, first of all, there's a recognition of it, and there really is not an understanding of what's happening. And it's a bit of a complicated problem. So, especially the international, there's an international dimension to this, which is very important, which I'm trying to figure out, and I think my own view on it is you have national sovereignty, so the sovereignty of the Canadian state, the ability of the Canadian state to exercise what's called legitimate coercion over its citizens, and it has all sorts of things like issuing of and things like this, right? So that's kind of an example. And then you have the ability to defend yourself from other states. And it's never been, it's never pure sovereignty because, for example, North American Free Trade Agreement or any kind of thing like that, you're giving up some national sovereignty to enter into some kind of cooperative arrangement with Mexico and the United States. So they can they can say through that agreement that Canadian laws, these Canadian laws cannot stand because they interfere with this international agreement. So that's the international agreement to some extent corroding Canadian sovereignty or lessening Canadian sovereignty and so on. But still, you have a lot of control over internal internal matters, Canada did. The indigenous, the Aboriginal industry is intent on really, really reducing Canadian sovereignty. So it's not about indigenous sovereignty, it's about reducing Canadian sovereignty. There is no such thing as indigenous sovereignty. It is just a wrecking ball for Canadian sovereignty. So when we see this with all the disputes over economic development that are happening, not just in British Columbia, I know there's terrible things happening in Ontario where the government, the Ontario government is just basically with, I think it's called the Ring of Fire, which is mineral developments in Ontario. They actively went out and undermined their own ability to, you know, have control over permits and so on because of, and that's an interesting question. Why would they do that? And part of it is a connection to an international kind of framework. So there's a split in all countries now in what I would call, because of my uh, a national nationalist capitalist class in an international capitalist class. So the international capitalist class are things like, uh, Google, Amazon, all the social media companies, banks, banks are seriously international. And so their interests are tied with breaking down Canadian sovereignty because that allows them to not have as many controls put over their profit -seeking activities internationally. And then you have the nationalist capitalist class, which is fighting to some extent in conflict with that, because it's trying to maintain protectionism over its industries within the national context, and the international types of forces are breaking down the ability for you know, engage in profit -seeking on the basis of a nationalist kind of thing. So, I think this is part of it. And wokeism is tied to the international capitalist class, and this is why most of the social media companies are woke, the banks are woke, all these things are because they are trying to get people to identify internationally in various ways. Again, that's another question is why, what is the benefit of doing that? How do they increase their profits by getting people to see themselves as an international citizen as opposed to a national part of a nation state? There's also the question of immigration, which is tied, so the international capitalist class wants to just remove all border controls and have all sorts of immigration happening, I guess to lower labor costs to some extent, whereas the national capitalist class wants to solidify the border. So this is tied to wokeism in a kind of a complex way, which I don't have a complete understanding of, but I certainly do see it happening in politics. Trudeau government is very, very tied to the international capitalist class. Poliev, the conservatives are more tied to the nationalist capitalist class. Trump tied to the national capitalist class, but still, like Poliev is still courting indigenous kind of Aboriginal often. So it's not exactly all that clear, but that seems to be a bit of a fault line in Canadian politics anyway, but woke ism is internationalist in its character. And so it's part of that as well. There is with woke ism. And there's one of my colleagues who wrote a book called the secular fundamentalist Christopher Nagel. I find his work fascinating. He talks about this stage, the woke ism is part of a particular stage of capitalism where you're encouraging people to consume all sorts of things regardless of the negative consequences that it's going to have for society. And trans activism is what he's zeroed in on on this. So here you're encouraging people to believe that they can change sex. You're encouraging them to do that and you're going to provide them with all the medical services that they want to be able to have this fantasy that they're able to realize. And so you've got the whole medical system now that is kind of involved in promoting all these incredibly socially destructive things. And the educational system has been influenced by this. So, you know, we have a massive tragedy that is unfolding with respect to this. Of all the issues that I've seen on the woke side, this seems to be the one that is going to be pushed back against the earliest. And it's happening a bit, but it still continues. Anyway, that's all tied with the international kind of capitalist class, the medical system, the whole pharmaceutical industry. This is consumerism breaking down of traditional kinds of attachments and replacing it with these kinds of wish fulfillment kinds of strategies, which is part of it as well. And I guess the indigenization thing is got a bit of that because it's saying if then you should agree with that because this will help them to overcome their oppression. And then you're going to do all sorts of things to facilitate them believing that. And there's all this kind of irrational kinds of things that are flowing in the wake of that. Yes. And I would throw in my own comments here that it's all tied together, as you said, the attack upon our sovereignty, the the rapid immigration that's watering down our culture, the attack upon our youth with woke ideology, the pinnacle of which is transgenderism, because the very first thing that we notice about ourselves as children is our gender. Not so much that I am male or I am female, but I am not the other, and that's the foundation of our identity. If they take that away or they take away everything, and if they can take away our identity, now we become very easy to control. We can be programmed with any kind of idea. But you know, we could go on with this for a long time. And you've been very generous with your time. So I wanted to finish up with this question because I said earlier in the interview, I wanted to cycle back to the woke as I'm inspecting our universities, which all came with the postmodernism that you talked about starting back in the '60s. I reached a tipping point. And I think that the most important question I could ask is because you make reference to those who are sort of going along with it because it's politically correct. What it led to is this idea that, as you said, there's no such thing as right. But a university shouldn't be there to advance knowledge and what is knowledge but truth as best as we can determine it. If we've got a humility, we recognize that sometimes we're wrong. In fact, the best definition I've ever heard of science is the study of what we were wrong about. But at least we are attempting to determine truth. And as soon as you get this ideology, there is no such thing as right. Well, now there is no truth. There is no knowledge. And that is a complete undermining of everything that a university should be doing. And so I think the question I have is those people within academia, I mean, you have fought It's just because you insist upon speaking the truth, but there's a whole lot of them that are going along with it. Do they not understand that they are destroying the very thing they're supposed to be building up? I don't know. I don't think they don't understand, I don't think. It's a little bit of the frog in the water that is, you know, the temperatures raised and then before you know it, you're in a pot of boiling water. So there's that. So it happens gradually. Many people think that it's not going to hit, it's not going to touch them. So they'll just be able to continue doing their own thing in their little corner of the university and be able to pursue the truth in their own little enclave, but what's happened now is that the capture of the institutions is so pervasive that you have all sorts of things constantly occurring that are going to have an impact on what you do, even if it's not really closely related to your particular small isolated area. And it's just, it starts with all sorts of ceremonial things. We used to, for many years, the idea of having a prayer in a public institution was not accepted. And we understood why is because people have different views. And if they want to They can do it like that. You shouldn't be having this part of your public event unless you're in a religious institution But then with the indigent indigenization that started to happen at indigenous events, right? So you go to and I study indigenous policies So I'm going well just because we study indigenous policy doesn't mean that we have to buy into all the You know the superstitions of the indigenous groups the indigenous groups and so on, like we're an academic institution, so what are we doing here? This caused a lot of upset, me making statements like this, and you know, we have religious studies as an area in the university, and the religious studies people don't have prayers in their meetings, it's understood. And now you see the prayers are in all events, like the faculty association, which is the union that is representing us all. They have prayers at their gatherings of various kinds. So that's the kind of creep that you see. And then now that when it happens, if you don't recognize where it's going and try to stop it and allow it to happen, when it happens, you really don't have a lot of ability to fight So, you know, I think that is a big part of it. But then I think the biggest problem is wokism's use of compassion, like it really has been very effective in framing itself as this kind and just kind of movement when it is nothing but it is the opposite. It is incredibly vindictive and coercive and totalitarian, and it has no concern whatsoever with justice of any kind. It's a tool that's being used. And I think that the diehards and the true believers, they're just useful idiots in the larger kind of play that's gonna happen. And that is gonna be when you really start to see that the fascistic kinds of maneuvers that are gonna come in in its week, when people have just knelt down before woke -ism because they think it's the compassionate thing to do, you have a destroying of all the democratic institutions, and then now you're right for the pickings of the fascistic kinds of elements which are going to begin to assert control over society. So, you know, this is why I'm amazed people are not more upset about what's happening. And this latest thing at the University of Regina, you know, I'm going to get on this today to start publicizing this to say this is what's happened, how much concern is going to be expressed about this, and really, there was a bit of a blow -up about the University of Lafbridge, but nothing really. And the government, why did the government not do something about it? They sat on their hands. They did nothing. Everybody in this country should be livid. It's a suppression It's a suppression of freedom of speech. So, this is kind of the big problem is people are comfortable, they don't realize what's coming, and they should really be very, very worried about what the future is going to look like if this is the trend that continues. And in my own armchair psychologist analysis, the reason why they're using compassion is if you have compassion for someone, it's because they're an innocent victim. And as you were talking, you talked about many times in this interview when you're bang on with this, that a big problem that's facing their average from communities is they have no sense of value because they know they're not contributing, but they continue to take handouts. So the difference between somebody who takes a handout and feels justified about it, and someone who doesn't, is the difference between a victim and a dependent. So if you're a victim, you can take those handouts, and you feel perfectly justified on a title to this. And that's why they're pushing that. Because it not only empowers those who are collecting that money, but empowers the entire amperage industry. Well, we're helping these victims. Francis, I have to thank you so much for your books and for your time today. We've covered a lot of great and this is It is an incredibly complex problem Mm -hmm one to which as I said I despair that there may not be a solution, but it's not a realistic one But if you had some final thoughts for our viewers From all this extensive research and done from all the experience and you've had of being censored and trying to get people to understand the real problem? Well, I think the first thing is coming back to the idea of freedom of speech and freedom of speech being the highest value because it allows us to determine all our other values. And if we could just get people to understand the importance of that, it can't be balanced. You hear this all the time about freedom of speech is that freedom of expression, that's the charter rate, should be balanced with all these other concerns, but that is not the proper way to look at this because those other concerns trying to figure out whether they are valid or not, that can only be done if we have freedom of expression and so all these attempts to water down freedom of expression really should be fought against as hard as we can fight and we are in serious danger of losing that ability to discuss all these other important elements of Canadian society because of these clampdowns on freedom of expression.