Quiet Canines Podcast

Hidden away for eighty five years, the tragic story of Minik, a boy who was said to have discovered his own father skeleton in a glass display case in the American Museum of Natural History, has come back to haunt the museum.

Lured to New York by false promises, exhibited to the public as a curiosity and forced to live in the basement of the museum, Minik died in 1918. His story raises unpleasant questions about the insensitivity of the scientific community of an era long past, when eminent anthropologists competed fiercely to bring live specimens of people to their laboratories.

The story is one of an alleged coverup at the turn of the century by museum authorities, including the famous anthropologist Franz Boas, and of deceit and betrayal by North Pole explorer Robert Peary. It involves a relentless campaign by a businessman from the Canadian Arctic to return dignity to Minik by having his father remains moved next to those of his son in a small cemetery in New Hampshire.

Details of the sordid treatment of Minik during his stay in New York were uncovered by Kenn Harper, a businessman who first heard the tale from his mother in law. She met Minik when he came home to his hamlet in Greenland in 1909. Harper spent eight years digging into the life of Minik, and he compiled his findings in a book titled: “Give Me My Father’s Body.”

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In May 1933, Nazi students burned thousands of books in Berlin. Among those books were works by Franz Boas, a scientist who spent fifty years proving that Nazi ideas about race were wrong. His journey began decades earlier in an Inuit snow house in the Canadian Arctic.

In the 1800s, scientists believed humans belonged to separate races ranked from best t…

Nine thousand years ago, Indigenous peoples engineered a crop that was man first and greatest feat of genetic engineering. Most crops like wheat and millet have wild ancestors that look like the crop. But in the Balsas River Valley in southwestern Mexico, the Indigenous people living there domesticated a plant that looks nothing like its wild ancestor. They were the Makaya and Mixe Zoque who took shelter in caves.

There was a wild grass that grew in the region called teosinte. Teosinte was a bushy grass with dozens of branches. Its seeds were tiny and enclosed in rock hard casings. These people likely threw this grass onto their fire to help it burn, and suddenly the seeds started popping, exposing a soft edible starch.

Once they realized the value of this grass, they began to change it. They noticed natural variations in the wild. Some plants had softer shells. Others had fewer branches. They carefully saved the seeds of the plants they preferred and began growing them. By choosing only the best seeds to replant cycle after cycle, they artificially guided the evolution of the species that became Maize, the top crop in the world, feeding billions of humans and animals.

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Here is why Donald Trump and Elon Musk are so afraid of communism.

The story starts in 1884 with the work of anthropologist Lewis H Morgan who spent seven years living with the Iroquois before publishing his book League of the Iroquois in 1851. Morgan wrote about their political structure where six distinct nations united under one great law. They formed a grand council of leaders that prevented absolute power and maintained peace across massive territories.

The Iroquois Confederacy was organized entirely through the mother. This matrilineal system dictated marriage rules and property laws. Children belonged to the clan of the mother and women held the political power to nominate male leaders and remove them from office. Multiple families shared large communal spaces and distributed their resources equally.

Karl Marx was fascinated with how the Iroquois organized their society without police or private property. He called this primitive communism. Frederick Engels argued that for most of human history people lived in egalitarian communities. Because everyone worked together just to survive they never produced excess wealth. Without excess wealth there was no division of society into classes.

But this all changed with the agricultural revolution. When human societies began farming land they started producing a surplus of food. This allowed certain individuals to hoard wealth which led to the creation of private property. To protect this new private property the wealthy created the state and the police.

I don’t know about you, but primitive communism sounds good to me.

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The link is in the bio.

Five thousand years ago the Andean people of Peru discovered something more valuable than gold. Countries eventually fought bloody wars over it. Six hundred years ago it inspired the first conservation laws in human history.

In the thirteenth century the Incas built the largest empire in pre-Columbian America. This massive civilization of twelve million people stretched across rugged mountains and dry deserts. Most of this land was completely infertile. How did they feed an empire?

They used a secret weapon left behind by coastal seabirds. These birds ate massive amounts of fish packing their bodies with nitrogen. Because they nested in enormous colonies on small islands their poop could reach fifty meters high.

The Inca empire was built on bird poop. They called it guano. To the Inca this was white gold. Using this potent fertilizer they transformed barren lands into agricultural miracles.

It was so vital that rulers placed the islands under strict state protection. They enacted the first conservation laws. Anyone who stepped foot on the islands during breeding season or killed a bird faced the death penalty. They protected the poop because it protected the empire.

When Europeans discovered it they stripped twelve million tons in just four decades. They extracted from a living ecosystem until it was dead. Today we can learn a lesson from the Incas.

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Deep in the Andean rainforest, indigenous peoples discovered a remedy that later became a major tool of European imperialism. The Quechua, Cañari, and Chimú peoples have lived in parts of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador for millennia. At high altitudes in the Andes Mountains grows the tall cinchona tree. Early indigenous botanists discovered that grinding its bark into a powder and mixing it with water stopped shivering from cold or fever.

Meanwhile, malaria plagued people across the world for centuries. It ravaged empires and killed millions. Medieval remedies reflected the false belief that it was an airborne disease and ranged from bloodletting to limb amputations. In the seventeenth century, Spanish Jesuits arrived in Peru and suffered from violent shivering. The Quechua recognized the symptoms and shared the bark with them.

Miraculously, the patients recovered. The bark contained quinine, which kills the malaria parasite. The Quechua had introduced the first effective treatment for malaria. Ironically, European soldiers engaged in colonial wars frequently died of the disease. Quinine enabled soldiers to survive in tropical colonies and win wars. Obtaining supplies became a strategic advantage in the race for global domination. What started as an act of compassion by the Quechua ended up hurting indigenous peoples worldwide.

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A masked group from Second Sons Canada staged an event on the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc reserve near the former residential school. They held a banner reading “Got Bones” above the highway. These groups do drills in the woods to prepare for a vague threat to white people. The Prime Minister called them cowards on X. If they are brave men, why do they hide their faces?

In 2021 the Kamloops Nation used ground penetrating radar and found potential remains of 250 children. Since then right wing politicians have questioned if these were bones of children. This demonstration shows the residential school denialism allowed to fester because it is profitable and politically useful. These groups try to discredit individual facts to undermine the whole history.

The question is an offensive distraction. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed over 3200 deaths at these schools including 50 at the Kamloops institution. Reading the book Truth Before Reconciliation is essential to learn about settler colonialism so we can move forward.

I do not care about a few masked cowards. I worry when people with these views gain political power and embolden this movement. Dallas Brodie seeks reelection in Vancouver Quilchena this October. We must confront this movement.

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@niigaan_sinclair @sean_carleton @uofmpress

Three thousand years ago, an ancient civilization engineered a secret technology that eventually powered the global Industrial Revolution.

Long before European factories emerged, these brilliant minds had already mastered advanced chemical engineering.

They successfully manipulated a useless raw material into a futuristic waterproof marvel that shaped the modern world.

While Europeans were still learning how to mix basic metals to make bronze swords, creators across the Atlantic were executing brilliant molecular chemistry.

This hidden history belongs to the Olmec civilization in Mexico. These innovators emerged around 1600 BC, long before the rise of the Maya or Aztecs.

Anyone who defends colonialism is either ignorant or complicit.

Spanish politician Isabel Díaz Ayuso praised Hernán Cortés as a visionary who brought freedom to the Americas, claiming colonization liberated indigenous people from Aztec tyranny.

Here are the facts.

In 1519, Cortés ordered his troops to trap thousands of unarmed citizens inside a sacred courtyard in Cholula. Spanish soldiers massacred nearly 5,000 civilians in a single afternoon.

After entering the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Cortés kidnapped King Montezuma inside his own palace, using him as a puppet to extort gold.

When an Aztec commander named Cuauhpopoca killed Spanish soldiers, Cortés had him and sixteen other men burned alive in front of a terrified population.

During his campaigns, Cortés ordered his men to brand the faces of survivors with a hot iron. He kept Malintzin as an interpreter and concubine.

During the final siege of Tenochtitlan, Cortés cut off food and water supplies while smallpox decimated the population. He demolished every building in the capital city to break native morale.

Cortés then established the encomienda system, forcing thousands to work silver mines under brutal conditions.

So, Isabel Díaz Ayuso is either ignorant, or complicit.

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Seven thousand years ago, Andean indigenous farmers took a wild weed so toxic it could paralyze and kill you, and they transformed it into the most revolutionary food crop in history.

At extreme altitudes up to 4,000 meters in Peru and Bolivia as they are known today, wild potatoes carried lethal levels of toxins. Observing wild animals like vicuñas and guanacos licking clay to neutralize plant poisons, ancient Andeans replicated this behavior. They dipped wild potatoes in a mixture of clay and water, safely consuming them while selectively breeding thousands of diverse varieties that were not toxic.

This indigenous agricultural engineering became the foundation of South American civilization. By the 15th century, potato cultivation fueled the rapid expansion of the Incan Empire, sustaining its massive population, grand architecture, and extensive road networks.

In the 16th century, Spanish conquistadors invaded, decimated local populations, and extracted this indigenous intellectual property alongside stolen gold. The Spaniards utilized the potato because it was rich in vitamin C to prevent scurvy across their naval armada, eventually introducing the tuber to Europe.

The potato revolutionized European society by the 18th century. It yielded ten times more food per acre than wheat. This sudden and massive spike in available calories doubled the food supply of Europe. By freeing millions of people from subsistence farming, the potato provided the cheap urban labor force that powered the Industrial Revolution.

Today, the potato is the fourth most important food crop in the world.

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