Quiet Canines Podcast

When my mother chose not to teach my sister and me Mi’kmaw, she was trying to protect us from the racism she had endured. Years later, I began to understand that this protection also came with a loss. Indigenous languages carry more than words. They connect people to family, land, history, spirituality, and ways of understanding the world.

Across Canada, the United States, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, research has found links between Indigenous language use and stronger mental wellbeing, cultural identity, resilience, social connection, and access to healthcare. The suppression of these languages through residential schools and other colonial institutions disrupted the transfer of knowledge between generations. That harm continues to shape families and communities today.

This video explores why language revitalization is more than an effort to preserve culture. It is a way to restore belonging, strengthen relationships between generations, support healing, and give communities greater control over their own futures. It is a health project, carried forward in the words of the people who speak the language.

This Sunday, I will release a longer video that explores this topic in more detail. If you are interested in learning more about Indigenous culture and history, I hope you will watch.

And please join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

In November 1535, explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were trapped in the ice near Stadacona, an Iroquoian village at what is now Quebec City.

The men became so weak they couldn’t stand up. Their legs swelled like balloons. Their gums rotted and their teeth became loose. Purple marks showed up all over their bodies.

By February, of the 110 men who made up Cartier’s expedition, eight were dead and only 3 were healthy enough to work.

Cartier placed an image of the Virgin Mary on a tree in the snow and ordered everyone healthy enough to walk there in a procession. They sang psalms and prayed for an intercession.

Then Cartier saw the Iroquoian boy Domagaya.

The year before, Cartier had kidnapped him and his brother Taignoagny and taken them to France. They were the sons of Chief Donnacona.

The last time Cartier had seen Domagaya, his knees were badly swollen, his gums had rotted and his teeth were loose. He was in the same condition as his sick crew. But when Cartier saw him on this day, he was miraculously healthy.

Domagaya told him about a tree called annedda. He sent two women to collect its branches. They boiled the bark and leaves in water. The liquid was drunk and the remaining material was placed on the swollen legs.

Cartier’s crew drank the medicine and within days, they had recovered.

He wrote this about the incident.

“… had all the doctors of Louvain and Montpellier been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as did this tree in eight days…”

The Iroquois knew that the needles of coniferous trees cured the symptoms because they had been experimenting with natural cures from the forest for 4,000 years.

We now know that they were suffering from scurvy caused by a vitamin C deficiency.

This is the first documented use of Indigenous North American medicine by Europeans.

And it cured a disease that Europe had no answer for.

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Tim Thielmann has served as chief of staff for Tara Armstrong and Dallas Brodie. He’s been doing the podcast rounds defending colonization, saying it was good for Indigenous Peoples.

He said that before Europeans arrived, Indigenous people had short lives, constant war, stone tools and cannibalism. Apparently, he learned this from early missionary diaries, although he did not say which ones.

Missionary diaries can be useful historical sources, but they were not neutral. Many missionaries came to convert Indigenous Peoples. They described Indigenous societies through Christian assumptions about sin, savagery and salvation. Portraying Indigenous people as lost, violent or uncivilized made mission work look necessary.

So which diaries, written by whom, for what audience and for what purpose?

Were some Indigenous nations at war? Yes. So was England. Were some societies violent? Yes. So was Europe, where people were burned, tortured, conquered, enslaved and executed in the name of kings, empires and God.

Did some Indigenous peoples hunt and gather using stone tools? Yes. That does not make them inferior. A tool should be judged by whether it works in its environment. Fish traps, canoes, medicines, controlled burns and agricultural systems were all technologies.

Low average life expectancy often reflects high infant and child mortality. It does not mean everyone died young. That was true in Europe too.

Colonization brought land theft, forced labour, disease, starvation policies, outlawed ceremonies, residential schools and children taken from their families.

When I say Europeans relied on Indigenous Peoples for survival, I am not guessing. Jacques Cartier’s account describes Indigenous knowledge saving his men from scurvy in 1536. The National Park Service states that the Powhatan provided food to starving English colonists at Jamestown. These were not helpless societies waiting to be saved.

Thielmann also said reserves were created to protect Indigenous people from gold miners. That ignores how the reserve system restricted Indigenous Peoples to small portions of their territories, made land available for settlers and imposed colonial control.

You do not prove colonialism was good by listing things Indigenous societies did not have. You judge colonialism by what it took: their land, their governments, their children, their languages and their freedom to decide their own future.

That was not help. That was conquest.

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This guy should not be platformed.

I watched two podcasts with Tim Theilman as the guest, talking about reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

On May 6, he was interviewed by Chief Aaron Pete, Chief of the Chawathil First Nation. On May 22, he was interviewed by Kenora council candidate Karla Treadway, who is trying to get elected on October 26.

I think Chief Pete did a good job pushing back against Theilman’s b******t. But I disagree with the fact that he platformed him.

For people thinking of voting for Karla Treadway, I encourage you to watch that interview. She hardly challenged a word Theilman said.

He said reserves are racialized trailer parks. He said Indigenous Peoples were cannibals before Europeans arrived. Karla just nodded along and even agreed with much of his b******t.

In the book Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, the authors say it is important that people engaging in denialism are not viewed as acting in good faith.

They warn that we must reject the tendency “to take individual episodes in isolation, reading them as distasteful incidents which are largely due to ignorance, misinformation and forgetting.”

That kind of thinking “implicitly tells us that the deniers deny because they do not know, and that, if they knew, they would not deny.”

That is not the case.

We need to see this as a pattern. It is being encouraged and supported by a network of pundits and politicians who are committed to stirring up racism against Indigenous Peoples and undermining truth and reconciliation for their own benefit.

Residential school denialism has grown in popularity, especially on the political right. Media outlets such as Rebel News, True North, Juno News, Western Standard, and even the National Post have promoted or amplified it. Some people have gone on to monetize that misinformation through books, podcasts, documentaries, and political campaigns.

That is exactly what Tim Theilman is doing.

Last year, Theilman made the documentary Making a Killing: Reconciliation, Genocide and Plunder in Canada. That documentary got Dallas Brodie expelled from the BC Conservative caucus in May 2025 after she mocked residential school Survivors.

Guess who Brodie’s former Chief of Staff was.

Tim Theilman.

Now he is the Chief of Staff for Tara Armstrong, who used a Nazi slogan during a debate about a First Nation treaty. She is also a residential school denier.

They are all cut from the same cloth.

Then I came across a powerful open letter to Karla Treadway by Robert Williamson, an Elder from Grassy Narrows First Nation.

Here is part of what he wrote.

I am an Elder of Grassy Narrows First Nation. I have lived my entire life on reserve. I have never thought of my community as a danger to Kenora. I am writing this letter because I heard the comments you made on the podcast, and I need to respond.

I understand you are running to lead the people of Kenora. That is a serious responsibility. A leader is supposed to bring people together, not tear them apart. A leader is supposed to speak the truth, not spread stories that are not true. A leader should never speak about people they do not know as if they know them.

You said reserves are dangerous places. You said people on reserve are likely to die from causes unrelated to health. You said money is being wasted and that everyone is getting paid.

How would you know?

Have you ever lived on a reserve? Have you ever spent time in our community? Have you ever sat with our elders, attended our ceremonies, or walked through our roads? Have you ever asked us what our lives are actually like?

I have lived here my whole life. I know my community. I know our struggles. Those struggles come from decades of mercury poisoning, government neglect, broken promises, and the trauma of residential schools. I also know our strength. I know our families. I know our children. I know our culture. I know our elders.

You do not.

What you are doing is assuming. You are taking a few things you heard and turning them into a story about all of us. That is not leadership. That is not truth. That is spreading hate and division.

The words you speak out loud in front of the Anishinaabe people are very hurtful. You said these things because you think the people of Kenora will agree with you and vote for you. But the people of Kenora are better than that. I know them, and they would never talk like you.

I am writing this because I am an Elder, and I have a responsibility to speak the truth. I have a responsibility to defend my people when they are being spoken about unfairly. I have a responsibility to call on leaders to do better.

If you want to lead Kenora, you need to know Kenora. That means knowing the First Nations around you. That means sitting down with us, listening to us, and learning from us. It means building relationships and respecting the First Nations people who live in and around Kenora.

I ask you to stop spreading information that is not true. Stop painting our communities with a brush you have never earned the right to hold. Stop dividing the very people you want to lead.

A leader brings people together. A leader speaks truth. A leader respects all the people, not just the ones who look like them or live where they live. A leader is kind and humble.

Indian Removal

Some refer to this as the Trail of Tears. The Choctaw Nation uses the term “removals” instead of “Trail of Tears.”

Early in the 19th century, the United States felt threatened by England and Spain, who held land in the western continent. At the same time, American settlers wanted more land. Thomas Jefferson proposed the creation of a buffer zone between U.S. and European holdings, to be inhabited by eastern American Indians. This plan would also allow for American expansion westward from the original colonies to the Mississippi River.

Between 1816 and 1840, tribes located between the original states and the Mississippi River, including Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, signed more than 40 treaties ceding their lands to the U.S. In his 1829 inaugural address, President Andrew Jackson set a policy to relocate eastern Indians. In 1830, it was endorsed when Congress passed the Indian Removal Act to force those remaining to move west of the Mississippi.

Between 1830 and 1850, about 100,000 American Indians living between Michigan, Louisiana, and Florida moved west after the U.S. government coerced treaties or used the U.S. Army against those resisting. Many were treated brutally. An estimated 3,500 Creeks died in Alabama and on their journey west. Some were transported in chains.

At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the most prominent female writers and social activists of the time was Emily Murphy. She wrote magazine articles and books under the pen name of Janey Canuck. Her book Janey Canuck in the West was very popular.

Murphy would go on to become a suffragette, one of the Famous Five who secured the right for women to be considered “persons” under the law.

Well, some women, but not Indigenous women.

They were left out of the efforts by the Famous Five, women who are lauded all over Canada now as fighters for equality. There is a statue of the Five on Parliament Hill, and there is even a Famous 5 Foundation, which describes the Five as “champions of the rights and welfare of women and children.”

Emily Murphy spent some time at Elkhorn in 1902, at the request of the principal of the Elkhorn Indian Residential School. She did not have anything kind to say about the young Indigenous women she encountered there, calling them lazy and loose.

This is what she wrote:

“A freshly recruited girl from the Reserve is not always promising material, she is often taken from a hut or tepee. She is wretchedly ignorant of the simplest sanitary laws and the yoke of restraint lies heavily on her. Very often her vocabulary seems restricted to the words ‘I dunno’ or ‘I won’t.’”

She saw nothing but destruction in the future of Indigenous Peoples. She believed they would someday become extinct.

She wrote:

“Regarding his future, we may give ourselves little uneasiness.”

“This question is solving itself. A few years hence there will be no Indians. They will exist for posterity only in waxwork figures and in a few scant pages of history. However brave and game they may be, there is nothing for them in the end but death. They have to reckon with invincibility.”

Emily Murphy was a believer in and supporter of eugenics, which is the practice of preventing Indigenous reproduction through forced sterilization to control their population.

She was made an honorary senator by the Canadian Senate in 2009.

So, the next time you’re in Ottawa, go check out her statue.

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

What do Macklemore and Wounded Knee have in common?

Quick recap: Macklemore says free Palestine on stage at an Ed Sheeran concert. Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft colludes with stadium owners to get Macklemore kicked off the tour. Let’s go back 137 years and you tell me if you see parallels.

The Ghost Dance was a Native American religious movement that spread rapidly across the western United States in 1889 and 1890, during a period when Indigenous nations were experiencing dispossession, confinement to reservations, destruction of the buffalo economy and aggressive assimilation.

Its central figure was Wovoka, a Northern Paiute spiritual leader from Nevada. During a vision, Wovoka taught that Indigenous people should live peacefully, behave morally and perform a ceremonial round dance. He taught that a transformed world would restore the dead, renew the earth and reunite Indigenous people with their ancestors.

Among the Lakota, the movement exploded. Some Lakota adherents wore what became known as Ghost Shirts.

This frightened federal authorities. Does that sound like Robert Kraft shitting his pants?

In November 1890, Indian agents requested military assistance, reporting that Indians were dancing and were “wild and crazy.”

Thousands of US troops were deployed around Lakota reservations. Tragically, at least 150 Lakota people were killed at Wounded Knee. Many of them were children.

The Ghost Dance allowed an Indigenous religious and social movement to spread across enormous distances without newspapers, radio, internet or cellphones. The dance brought people together. The songs transmitted the teachings.

And Robert Kraft and his Zionist friends are afraid that the free Palestine movement will spread the same way the Ghost Dance spread.

The United States tried to suppress the Ghost Dance. They sent in the Army. They killed Lakota people at Wounded Knee. But they couldn’t kill the idea.

More than a century later, people still remember the songs, the dances and what they represented. And maybe that’s what powerful people still don’t understand.

You can take away someone’s stage. You can silence their microphone. You can even use violence against them. But once an idea takes hold in millions of people, you can’t kill it.

The Ghost Dance survived. And I don’t think Free Palestine is going anywhere either.

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

These impressive structures predate the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge. But Australian Senator Pauline Hanson calls the people who built them the most primitive race on earth.

This reminds me of how Canada justified Indian residential schools. Both countries rely on a myth that Indigenous peoples were savages or primitive peoples who needed civilization through Western education. Here’s the truth.

While other civilizations rose and collapsed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures represent the oldest continuous living civilization on Earth going back 65,000 years. Anthropologists understand that there is no such thing as a primitive race. Societies evolve by adapting to their environments.

One of the finest examples of ancient aquaculture and hydraulic engineering are found in Australia. The eel traps at Budj Bim comprise a vast network of weirs, dams and stone canals to manipulate water levels in various lake basins. These structures force eels and other aquatic life into traps as water levels rise and fall. The canals also appear to have been used to create holding ponds to keep eels fresh until they were needed for food. Not only did this provide the region’s Gunditjmara people with a food supply throughout the year, it was also important for trade.

The site also features the remnants of almost 300 stone houses. Located in southwest Victoria, Budj Bim has been carbon dated to 6600 years old, meaning it predates the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge.

They also created a kinship system that is widely regarded by anthropologists as some of the most complex, mathematically sophisticated social structures in human history. This prevented incest and maintained genetic diversity. This is more than we can say about the incestuous Royal families of Europe.

Just as residential schools in Canada were designed to erase prior sovereignty and justify land dispossession, Hanson is fighting against a school curriculum that includes Indigenous history because it challenges the myth that colonial settlement was somehow a benevolent gift. Hanson is using an old assimilationist playbook weaponized to protect a fragile colonial narrative. The same playbook is used in Canada, Gaza and the Amazon. It’s propaganda meant to frame colonizers as superior and more civilized than the Indigenous population they subjugate.

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

The Ed Sheeran and Macklemore story has got me thinking about an Indigenous leader named Opechancanough. And I wonder how many young Opechancanoughs there are currently living in Gaza and the West Bank.

In 1561, Spanish explorers kidnapped a Powhatan Indian youth named Opechancanough and brought him to Spain to meet King Philip II. The King considered Indigenous peoples heathens and saw it as his sacred duty to convert them to Catholicism. They baptized him, educated him and gave him the name Don Luís de Velasco.

The king believed this intelligent young Indigenous man could help Spain convert his people and establish Spanish settlements in his homeland. But while the Spanish were educating him, Opechancanough was learning about them. He spent years among the Spanish and saw what conquest and conversion had done to Indigenous peoples.

Nine years after his kidnapping, the Spanish sent him back home with Jesuit missionaries who intended to establish a mission that would become the foundation for Spanish colonization. Within six months, Opechancanough led Indigenous warriors who killed all eight Jesuits, only sparing a young servant boy. Opechancanough completely destroyed the mission and the Spanish plans to create future settlements in the Chesapeake Bay.

His motives for the betrayal aren’t difficult to understand. While living in Mexico City and Florida in the years before returning to his own land, he’d seen firsthand how Spanish conquest and conversion to Catholicism had destroyed Indian ways of life and beliefs. He knew if he let Jesuits establish a beachhead in the Chesapeake, more soldiers and settlers would follow, eventually taking the land and destroying his people.

Then, in 1607, English colonists arrived in Jamestown. Instead of confronting English soldiers in conventional battles, he convinced the colonists that he wanted peaceful relations. Then, in 1622, he and a group of Powhatan warriors violently attacked the English settlers. They didn’t spare anyone, man, woman or child.

About 350 English settlers were killed that day, roughly one quarter of the colony. But the English kept coming and Opechancanough simply did not have enough warriors to counter wave after wave of new arrivals. Within a few years, the English began establishing settlements across the region, beating back Indian people as they expanded.

Driven by bitterness and despair, Opechancanough managed to inspire another generation of warriors to rise up against the English, killing approximately 500 settlers before he was captured. Opechancanough was almost 100 years old when an English guard shot him in the back and killed him.

The Spanish called him a heathen. The English called him barbarous. His own people called him a hero.

If Opechancanough were alive today, I wonder what Robert Kraft would call him?

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The Ed Sheeran and Macklemore story has collided with three parts of who I am.

I have been a New England Patriots fan my entire life. I have probably watched every Patriots game since I was a child. And for all those years, I never really thought much about the owner Robert Kraft.

I cared about the team.

But this week, something happened that made me look at the man who owns that team very differently.

Macklemore was removed from Ed Sheeran’s tour after speaking publicly in support of Palestinians.

Macklemore says billionaire Patriots owner Robert Kraft told Sheeran that Macklemore would not be allowed to perform at Gillette Stadium and rallied other stadium owners against him.

Kraft has confirmed that Gillette Stadium refused to allow Macklemore to perform, saying his rhetoric crossed the line into antisemitism.

Then something happened that made this more personal for me.

Four supporting acts have walked away from Ed Sheeran’s tour in solidarity with Macklemore.

Billie Eilish’s brother Finneas pulled out.

Danish band Lukas Graham pulled out.

And two Irish acts, Aaron Rowe and Beoga, pulled out.

Rowe explained why.

“As Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation.”

That sentence hit me.

Because my father was Irish.

And my mother was Mi’kmaq.

Those are two histories shaped by violent colonialism.

In Ireland, British rule brought centuries of dispossession, suppression and violence.

During the Great Famine, about one million people died and another million emigrated.

Indigenous peoples in Canada have their own history of dispossession and attempts to destroy their cultures, languages and identities.

Children were taken from their families and placed in residential schools as part of a system Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as cultural genocide.

So when an Irish artist says his history makes it impossible for him to remain silent when he sees another people suffering, I understand what he means from both sides of my family.

Robert Kraft has been a prominent supporter of Israel for decades.

He has known Benjamin Netanyahu for years.

When Kraft received the Genesis Prize in Jerusalem in 2019, Netanyahu said, “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft.”

Kraft is entitled to his beliefs.

Macklemore is entitled to his.

And I am entitled to decide what I am willing to support.

I never imagined that I would seriously consider walking away from the New England Patriots.

This is a team I have loved since I was a child.

But there are moments when the things we inherit from our childhood collide with the things we inherit from our history.

For me, this is one of those moments.

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