Quiet Canines Podcast

Ailton Krenak is an indigenous leader, environmentalist and writer.

Born in 1953 in the state of Minas Gerais, in the Middle Rio Doce region. At the age of seventeen, he moved with his family to the state of Paraná, where he learned how to read and write, and became a graphics producer and journalist.

In the 1980s, he began to devote himself exclusively to the indigenous movement.

During the Constituent Assembly of 1987, Ailton produced a striking scene: in a speech at the podium, dressed in a white suit, he painted his face black to protest against what he saw as a setback in the struggle for indigenous rights.

Ailton Krenak’s speech in 1987:

“We see publications in print media and on television networks, seeking to portray the indigenous people as an obstacle to the country’s development, and as a threat to national security.

This forces me to come to this podium.

I do so to express the thoughts of the thousands of men and women who have lived this process of systematic destruction for five centuries.

I am certain that those present here cannot remain indifferent, nor detached, from yet another aggression driven by economic power, by greed, and by ignorance regarding what it truly means to be an indigenous people.

The indigenous people have a unique way of thinking and living. They possess the fundamental conditions for their existence, their tradition, their life, and their culture, none of which place the existence of animals or other human beings at risk.

Yet we are the targets of an aggression that seeks to strike at the very essence of our faith and our confidence.

It targets the belief that dignity exists, and that it is possible to build a society that respects the weak, a society that respects those who do not possess the financial resources to fund defamation campaigns such as those being waged against the indigenous peoples of Brazil.

A people who inhabit thatched houses, who sleep on mats on the ground, should in no way be identified as a people who are the enemy of Brazil’s interests, and who jeopardize any development.

The indigenous people have watered every hectare of Brazil’s eight million square kilometers with blood.

You gentlemen are witnesses to this.”

Krenak’s literary and philosophical work continues to influence global conversations on the environment and capitalism.

His books, such as Ideas to Postpone the End of the World and Life Is Not Useful, reframe Indigenous philosophy not as a relic of the past, but as a critical guide for the ecological survival of the future.

In recognition of his contribution to literature and culture, he was elected to the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), becoming the first Indigenous person to hold a seat in the institution’s history.

If you want to learn more about indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still accepting new members to our Tribe.

Did you know that apartheid South Africa borrowed Canada’s playbook?

Both countries had large indigenous populations before European colonizers arrived. Both wanted to separate the indigenous population from white settlers and prevent them from owning land or voting. South African officials visited Canada to study how Indigenous people were controlled and managed separately from white citizens.

South Africa took what it needed and applied it to its own segregation policies.

In Canada, the Indian Act pushed indigenous people onto reserves. The government owned the land and indigenous people became wards of the state, unable to vote or trade. South Africa followed suit with the Native Land Act, restricting Black land ownership to less than 10 percent of the country. Later, Black citizens were stripped of citizenship and forced into designated homelands.

The Indian Act also created the Indian Register and status cards to define who qualified as a Status Indian. South Africa adopted this idea through the Population Registration Act, categorizing citizens into racial groups to dictate where they could live, work, and move.

Canada also used a pass system requiring written permission to leave reserves. Police arrested anyone found without a pass to control movement and restrict trade. South Africa created passbooks to restrict the movement of Black citizens under the same threat of arrest.

Oppressive, racist policies are rarely designed from scratch. Colonial governments share their playbooks. Today, when I see the oppressive policies of the Trump administration, I know that they are just following someone else’s playbook.

The good news is that every strongman playbook has a playbook for how to defeat it.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still accepting new members to our Tribe.

Tomorrow’s election could be a catastrophe for indigenous peoples and the world’s climate. Voters in Brazil head to the polls to elect their next president. Flávio Bolsonaro is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who was Brazil’s former president.

For indigenous groups like the Yanomami and Ye’kwana, a return to Bolsonarismo threatens their survival.

Jair Bolsonaro stripped environmental protections and allowed an invasion of over 20,000 wildcat gold miners into protected Indigenous lands. Miners used toxic mercury which poisons ecosystems and food chains.

92% of indigenous residents showed dangerous levels of mercury contamination. The miners brought disease, violence, widespread malnutrition, and preventable deaths among indigenous children. President Lula called it a genocide.

Flávio Bolsonaro’s campaign promises to pick up where his father left off, legalising mining on protected indigenous lands and dismantling environmental enforcement agencies. A victory tomorrow would unleash thousands of miners back into these territories, effectively signing a death warrant for traditional ways of life.

The result of this election will also impact the world’s climate. The Amazon rainforest is a climate regulator, sucking up large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere.

Bolsonaro’s policies supporting mining and agribusiness destroyed billions of trees. When his son unleashes these extractive industries into the rain forest again, it could push the climate past an irreversible tipping point.

Watch Greta Thunberg’s message by coping and pasting this into your web browser:

www.instagram.com/reel/De2sc_gM8mN/

If you want to learn more about indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

There are at least 196 uncontacted Indigenous groups living in the world today, amounting to around 10,000 people. Most live in the Amazon rainforest. They know the modern world exists, but choose to avoid contact. History shows that first contact often leads to catastrophe. Following Columbus’s arrival in 1492, disease, warfare, and forced labor wiped out about 90% of the Indigenous population in the Americas.

But that did not stop wealthy, US backed evangelical organizations like New Tribes Mission. They believe the Second Coming of Jesus Christ will not happen until every uncontacted tribe is converted to Christianity.

During the 1970s and 1980s, they carried out “manhunts” targeting the uncontacted Ayoreo Totobiegosode people in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco forest. Pilots located settlements from the air before armed groups tracked people down and forcibly extracted them.

Missionaries viewed the Ayoreo’s nomadic lifestyle and spiritual traditions as savage. They believed forcing them to settle down was necessary to save their souls.

Military dictator Alfredo Stroessner used missionaries to clear Indigenous people from their land, opening the northern Chaco to foreign loggers and ranchers. Those who resisted were often killed. Many captives died from shock or disease. Survivors were sent to mission bases, where their traditional way of life was dismantled.

New Tribes Mission is now called Ethnos360. Today, solar powered devices broadcast biblical messages in Portuguese and Spanish inside protected rainforest territories to attract and evangelize Indigenous people.

What is happening today repeats what Indigenous people experienced during colonization.

Nothing has changed.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still accepting new members to our tribe.

This law allowed white people to kidnap Native American children and turn them into slaves.

This is the genocide you’ve never heard of.

The year was 1850 when the California legislature passed An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.

Under this law, any white person could declare Indians who were simply strolling about, who were not gainfully employed, to be vagrants. They could then take them before a justice of the peace, who would have those Indians seized and sold at public auction. And the person who bought them in, would have their labor for four months, without compensation.

There was a person who was found with a young Indian child. When they asked, “What are you doing with this child?” he said, “I am protecting him. He’s an orphan.” They asked, “Well, how do you know he’s an orphan?” He said, “I killed his parents.”

In the early days of the Gold Rush, white miners formed groups of Indian hunters to exterminate the “red devils.” They attacked native villages, killing the men, the women, and the children.

The Maidu peoples of Northern California developed a physical telegraph of lookouts. Whenever they saw dust on the trail, they knew white men on horses were coming.

The government paid $25 for a male body part, whether a scalp, a hand, or the whole body, and $5 for a child or a woman.

I wonder how many Americans know there was a genocide in California during the Gold Rush that was subsidized by the government.

I promise that not all my videos are disturbing like this one. I like to tell stories about amazing feats of ancient Indigenous people around the world.

If you want to learn more about indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

It makes me sad that this bear was destroyed.

This is my cousin Allan Sylliboy.

I’ll just read what he wrote:

Today I am posting a Bear Drum surrounded by eight pointed Stars. A bear in Mi’kmaq is Mui’n. The Bear is one of the most intelligent land animals of North America. As a Spirit animal it stands for courage and strength.

The Human foot represents our need to live in close harmony with the Bear. It reminds us to trust our instincts and to be protective of our families and faith.

The Eight Pointed Star has been a symbol of the Mi’kmaq People for centuries. It is a symbol for the sun which is a powerful figure in traditional spiritual life.

I want to let you know about a dispute happening between the BC government and wildlife rescue organizations.

For 30 years, rescue organizations worked closely with conservation officers in the field. But recent changes to government policy have removed the power from conservation officers. Now these organizations have to go through the government to get permits to rescue animals.

Rescue groups say this centralized control creates deadly red tape. Many animals need to be rescued quickly and they can’t wait for bureaucracy. Meanwhile, organizations report the ministry refuses to expand permit limits, despite shelters having empty space and public funds to care for animals in need. Northern Lights is taking legal action to overturn these restrictions.

If the NDP wants my vote next week, they should care about what I care about. I agree with the rescue organizations. The ministry should reverse course and restore emergency rescue authority to officers in the field.

I plan to contact the Minister of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship, Randene Neill, to let her know my position. If you plan to do the same, please make sure you keep it respectful. The people answering the phones are just doing their jobs.

And if you’re interested in learning more about indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

Mount Rushmore was built to foster national pride and tell future civilizations how America was built.

That is not what Indigenous people see. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 granted the Black Hills exclusively to the Lakota Nation. To Native people, the monument is a symbol of broken promises.

Imagine two children standing side by side looking at the four carved faces.

The white child sees George Washington as a heroic general. The Lakota child sees a commander who destroyed Native villages and put bounties on Indigenous lives.

The white child sees Thomas Jefferson as the author who wrote that all men are created equal. The Lakota child sees a leader who spoke of hunting Native people like wolves.

The white child sees Theodore Roosevelt as a great conservationist. The Lakota child sees a president who seized fifty million acres of reservation land.

Then there is Abraham Lincoln. The white child sees Honest Abe, who ended slavery. The Lakota child sees the president who authorized the largest mass execution in United States history, hanging thirty eight Dakota men on December 26, 1862. Six days later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

We do a disservice to white children when we hide the true nature of these four men. Shielding them from reality strips them of the chance to build real empathy for others. True education requires facing our whole history.

If you want to learn more about indigenous history, join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

You probably have not heard of the Holocaust that did not take place in Germany and did not involve Jewish people.

That is why it is called the silent Holocaust.

In the 1970s, the Guatemalan military began a genocidal campaign of mass killings and disappearances of the indigenous Ixil Maya population.

In 1982, they employed a scorched earth campaign. Soldiers hunted down leftist guerrillas and systematically killed the Ixil Maya. Most of them were not part of guerrilla movements. They were teachers, farmers, students, and civilians.

Women, children, and the elderly were targeted.

The military carried out at least 626 massacres against the indigenous population. They destroyed more than 600 villages and killed most inhabitants.

In 1977, the human rights situation in Guatemala was so bad that U.S. President Jimmy Carter stopped military aid.

Can you guess which country kept supporting them?

Israel supported the brutal army. Israel began selling weapons in 1974. By 1983, there were 300 Israeli advisors in the country. They were embedded in security structures.

Israeli advisers helped hunt underground rebel groups. An Israeli computer became the nerve center of the armed forces.

The military forced the Ixil Maya into restricted model villages modeled after Israeli kibbutzim. Guatemalan military officers even referred to their campaign as the Palestinization of the Ixil Maya.

Some responsible leaders were later convicted of genocide. The judge noted that the Ixil Maya were victims of racism.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous History, join our growing Substack community.

Did you know that Adolf Hitler got his inspiration from America?

Hitler was obsessed with Manifest Destiny and the conquest of the American West. He saw Eastern Europe as Germany’s version of the West and viewed the Volga River as his Mississippi River.

He looked at how the U.S. government cleared millions of Indigenous peoples off their ancestral lands through mass slaughter and forced displacement. He used that exact blueprint for expansion into Europe. He noted in his journals that Slavic and Jewish populations should be treated like “Redskins”.

This Indigenous man is the only person in history to create a system of writing from scratch by himself.

What makes this even more remarkable, is that he invented it without knowing how to read or write.

The man’s name was Sequoyah. And the year was 1809.

At that time, the 300 diverse languages spoken by Native Americans did not have a written form. Sequoyah had seen white soldiers reading from what he called “talking leaves.” And he was determined to find a way for the Cherokee Nation to do the same.

He worked so obsessively that his neighbours thought he was practising witchcraft, and his wife grew so frustrated that she burned some of his papers.

But in 1821, he finished the creation of his writing system and successfully taught his first pupil: his daughter, Ahyokah, who was six years of age. It was called the Tsalagi syllabary.

Once a Cherokee speaker learned the 85 syllabics, they could immediately read and write, because the symbols corresponded exactly to the sound of the spoken words. With English you need to learn the alphabet of 26 characters, then learn to put those sounds together to form syllables and words.

Within three to five years of its introduction, 90 % of the Cherokee Nation could read and write which was a much higher literacy rate than the white settlers of America.

The news that an illiterate Cherokee had created something so impressive spread around the world. It also inspired other indigenous groups across Canada to do the same.

Pretty impressive for an illiterate Cherokee man in the 1800’s.

If you want to learn more about Indigenous History, join our growing Substack community. We are still accepting new members to our tribe.