Quiet Canines Podcast

In the 1920s, the Osage Indigenous Nation in Oklahoma became the wealthiest people per capita in the world after oil was discovered on their land. Then, they began to die. Dozens of Osage citizens were mysteriously poisoned, shot, or bombed in a coordinated plot to steal their oil rights, a period known as the Reign of Terror. Local authorities were bought off, and the early investigators failed. It was out of this crisis that the modern FBI was born.

At the time, the agency was called the Bureau of Investigation, a small, weak department plagued by corruption and patronage. In 1924, J. Edgar Hoover took over as director at twenty nine years of age. For Hoover, the Osage murders were a moment that could make or break his career. If the bureau failed to solve the cases, Congress might abolish it. But if they succeeded, it would prove the necessity of a centralized, professional federal police force.

To salvage the investigation, Hoover appointed Tom White, a former Texas Ranger known for his integrity. White rejected the old ways of brute force and political favors, opting instead for methodical, scientific detective work. He orchestrated one of the first sophisticated undercover operations in history. White sent a team of undercover agents into Oklahoma. One posed as an insurance salesman, another as a cattle buyer, and John Wren, an American Indian agent, posed as a medicine man.

For months, these undercover agents secretly gathered evidence, eventually exposing the mastermind behind the conspiracy. By taking him down in federal court, the bureau proved it could defeat local corruption and overcome compromised law enforcement.

The Osage case transformed the agency. Hoover used the high profile victory to convince Congress and the American public that a modern, trained federal force was necessary for national security. It provided the blueprint for forensic tracking and undercover operations. In 1935, the agency was officially renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

I’m going to make a longer video this weekend about the full case where I will reveal who the mastermind was. So click the link in my bio and join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered on their land, they rode in chauffeured cars and lived in mansions.

Then, one by one, the Osage were killed. Mollie Burkhart watched as her family became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. Other Osage were also dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who investigated the crimes were also murdered.

As the death toll rose, the case was taken over by the newly created FBI and its young, secretive director, J. Edgar Hoover. Struggling to crack the mystery, Hoover turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White, who put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent. They infiltrated the community and exposed one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.

David Grann wrote a nook about it: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and Martin Scorsese turned it into a film starring Lily Gladstone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

I’m going to make a longer video this weekend that discusses the story. I’ll post it on my Substack. So, if you want to read the book and see the movie, you won’t want to watch my video because there will be spoilers.

But you’re always welcome to join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

Elias Hill was the only civilized Indian of the nineteenth century. This story begins with the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, which was passed before Confederation. This Act sought to assimilate Indigenous People into European settler society.

The government created a process whereby a male Indian over the age of 21 could apply for enfranchisement. Women could not apply. For an Indian to be deemed “civilized” and eligible for enfranchisement, an applicant had to be able to read and write in English or French. Applicants had to prove financial independence, maintain a farm free of debt, and secure a personal character reference from an Indian Agent or minister proving strict sobriety and Christian morality.

The colonial government appointed a committee of three people to evaluate each applicant. This panel consisted of the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, a local Christian missionary, and a third appointed official. The racist government of the time assumed that Indians would jump at the chance to become enfranchised.

The problem is, enfranchisement meant terminating an Indigenous person’s Indian status. The successful applicant had to break all ties with their home community, surrender their treaty rights, and divide communal reserve land into private property plots. If a man was successfully enfranchised, his wife and children would lose their Indian status and be removed from their communities, whether they wanted to or not. Because the penalty for Canadian citizenship was the total loss of culture, family, and treaty rights, Indigenous peoples overwhelmingly resisted the law.

Only three men voluntarily applied for enfranchisement. Of those three applicants, Elias Hill was the only one approved. Hill was a highly educated Mohawk preacher and teacher from the Six Nations of the Grand River in Ontario. Because he perfectly matched the Victorian ideal of an educated Christian man, the government approved him. The other two applicants were rejected for failing the rigorous morality and literacy checks.

Upon approval, Hill was officially stripped of his Mohawk status. He was legally evicted from his nation and severed from his treaty rights. So, let me get this right. Elias Hill’s ancestors were living their lives for at least 24,000 years, but none of them were civilized until Elias passed a test administered by a priest, Indian agent, and some other white schmuck?

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

This Indigenous lawyer is participating in classic residential school denialism, whether he means to or not. Alberta lawyer Leighton Grey spoke at the Alberta Separatist rally in Edmonton over the weekend. He told the story of how his grandmother was “grateful” for her sixteen years at an Indian residential school. He said it allowed her to become a nurse and raise her family out of poverty.

He may well be telling the truth. Maybe his grandmother did have a good time. But as an Indigenous lawyer, I would think he would know better. Using isolated, positive anecdotes to reframe a genocidal system is a textbook example of residential school denialism.

When people highlight individual success stories, they are subtly shifting the narrative away from documented trauma to frame a destructive institution as a benevolent tool for advancement. But the truth isn’t up for debate. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada spent years gathering thousands of testimonies that proved residential schools were never about education. They were designed to strip children of their culture, language, and family bonds through forced assimilation. Thousands of children never made it home.

When public figures use an exception to obscure the rule, they minimize the horrific reality of systemic abuse, starvation, and intergenerational trauma. It suggests that the cultural genocide of an entire population was somehow a fair price to pay for basic literacy.

Leighton Grey is just one example of a much larger, global pattern. We see this same tactic used to minimize the horrors of slavery, segregation, and colonialism worldwide. It’s an attempt to rewrite history by substituting a mountain of evidence with a handful of convenient stories.

I don’t know about you, but I find it particularly egregious when the person doing the whitewashing is an Indigenous lawyer. I’m not here to defame Leighton Grey. But if you google the reasons he was forced to resign from the Alberta judicial vetting committee, maybe it’s not such a surprise after all.

Look at these two losers poking fun at Canada’s military.

We know the American military is bigger and more powerful. But if you think an invasion means rolling tanks into Ottawa, you don’t know our history.

The Canadian military has already modeled exactly how it would respond to a US invasion. It would use unconventional warfare. It looks just like how Indigenous Nations historically defended their territories against much larger empires. Canada wouldn’t fight battles in open fields. Instead, small groups would conduct ambushes, sabotage, and raids. We would weaponize our massive, unforgiving geography to make occupying the country mathematically unsustainable.

Centuries ago, the Mi’kmaq nation faced a similarly lopsided conflict against British forces. Outmatched in sheer numbers and heavy artillery, the Mi’kmaq avoided traditional European battle lines. They executed swift ambushes and vanished back into dense forests and waterways that foreign troops could not navigate. They trapped British soldiers inside their own fortified outposts. A modern Canadian resistance would do exactly the same to a conventional occupying army.

We would also pull pages from Shawnee leader Tecumseh and British General Isaac Brock during the Siege of Detroit. When severely outgunned, use psychological warfare. Deceive the enemy into believing you are everywhere. Break their nerve before firing a single shot. To pull this off, the military plans to mobilize a massive reserve force of 400,000 volunteers. This decentralized network would constantly disrupt supply lines and bog down invaders. It mirrors the tactics of hitting and running the Mujahideen used to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

But guerrilla tactics alone don’t defeat superpowers. You also need leverage. Just as the Mi’kmaq aligned strategically with the French, and Tecumseh aligned with the British, Canada would look to allies armed with nuclear weapons, like France and the United Kingdom.

Retired Major General David Fraser, who commanded Canadian troops in Afghanistan, said that an unprovoked attack would trigger a powerful global response. You would quickly see German ships and British planes arriving to reinforce Canadian sovereignty. People care what happens to Canada, unlike Venezuela.

If you come after us, you aren’t just fighting our army. You are fighting our brutal geography, a massive armed resistance using asymmetric tactics that are centuries old, and eventually, the rest of the world.

In the 1940s, the Canadian government discovered that Indigenous children in residential schools were suffering from serious malnutrition. They found low body weight, vitamin deficiencies, anemia, inflamed gums, decaying teeth and other signs of poor nutrition.

Instead of feeding these children proper nutrition, Canadian officials and researchers such as Dr. Lionel Pett, a chief architect of Canada’s Food Guide, saw an opportunity to study them. Beginning in 1947, they turned six residential schools into sites for a nutritional study that continued for several years.

In one experiment at the Port Alberni residential school, children’s milk rations were reduced to 8 ounces per day, instead of the recommended 24 ounces because government employees wanted to see the effect of an improper diet on children’s health. Even after researchers found problems, the low milk ration was maintained for two years to provide a baseline.

Another intervention included testing an experimental fortified flour mixture on residential school students. There was a federal ban on fortified flour at the time, and there was debate over whether to legalize it. Pett and his colleagues introduced an experimental flour mixture which included substances like bone meal. Pett and the researchers found increased incidences of anemia among the students who were fed the experimental flour.

But perhaps the most disturbing part involved their teeth. Researchers viewed cavities and gingivitis as indicators of nutritional health. That meant dental treatment could interfere with their results. So, researchers ordered local dentists to withhold certain dental care including sodium fluoride treatment and dental prophylaxis.

So, as children developed painful cavities, gingivitis, and systemic infections, their suffering was just documented instead of being treated. In other words, researchers were studying health problems in children while restricting interventions that could change the conditions they wanted to observe.

And this was happening as international standards for medical research were changing dramatically. The Nuremberg Code was established in 1947, and it placed voluntary consent at the centre of ethical human experimentation. But these Canadian studies continued for several more years.

Pett used the opportunity of hungry kids in residential schools who had no choice in what they were going to eat and whose parents had no choice in what they were going to eat to attempt to answer a series of questions that were of interest to him professionally and scientifically.

We all know that Trump loves tearing up Democratic agreements. He replaced NAFTA with USMCA just to stick it to Bill Clinton. He abandoned the JCPOA just to spite Obama. On his first day back in office, he revoked 78 orders issued by Joe Biden. As he and MAGA Republicans like to say, he owns the Libtards or Dumbocrats. But why on earth is he tearing up a deal made by George Washington?

In 1794, Washington ratified the Treaty of Canandaigua with the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee. Article One established perpetual peace and friendship. Article Three described Seneca territory through a boundary “beginning on Lake Ontario” and promised the Seneca Nation free use and enjoyment of those lands. George Washington ratified the Treaty of Canandaigua because peace with the Haudenosaunee was essential to the security of the young United States. He chose diplomacy, recognized their lands, and pledged permanent friendship because America needed that friendship.

Trump’s executive order commands the federal government to replace Lake Ontario with Lake America across maps, contracts, documents, communications, and the federal geographic database. The leader of the Seneca Nation in upstate New York, President J. Conrad Seneca, called the order aggression toward Seneca culture and a violation of the commitments made at Canandaigua. It violates a treaty that is more than 225 years old and shows a “blatant disrespect” for the Indigenous people who gave it its name in the first place. In Seneca, the lake is “sga:nyodai:yoh,” meaning “beautiful lake.” “The President cannot assert ownership over our culture or erase it through irresponsible political action,” he said in a statement.

The Seneca are one of the six nations of the confederacy, also known as the Iroquois Confederacy. The name Lake Ontario comes from the Huron Indigenous people’s word “oniatarí:io,” which means “lake of shining waters.” The Canadian province of Ontario, founded in 1867, took its name from the lake. In the traditional Seneca language, the lake’s name is “sga:nyodai:yoh,” meaning “beautiful lake.”

By blatantly disrespecting Indigenous people and tearing up the deal made by George Washington, Trump has definitely lost his chance of ever getting his face on Mount Rushmore.

For decades, Rapa Nui was presented as a warning about environmental destruction. According to the famous collapse story, the people cut down their forests, exhausted their resources, descended into conflict and nearly destroyed their own society.

Archaeology, ancient DNA and new research now tell a very different story. The Rapanui developed ingenious ways to grow food, conserve water and survive on one of the most isolated islands on Earth. Even the enormous moai reveal a society capable of remarkable planning and cooperation.

So how did a thriving Indigenous society become a population of barely one hundred people by the nineteenth century? The answer takes us from Polynesian voyagers and walking statues to European disease, slave raids, colonial rule and the transformation of an entire island. Rapa Nui is a story about adaptation, survival and what can happen when history blames the people who endured the catastrophe.

To watch the full video, join our growing Substack community. We are still welcoming new members to our tribe.

Indigenous Canadians understand the danger of allowing Donald Trump to steer the ship.

In 1613, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy met the Dutch and created a diplomatic blueprint known as the Two Row Wampum, or Kaswentha. This belt features two parallel rows of purple beads set against a bed of white. It represents two distinct vessels traveling down the river of life together. One row is the Indigenous canoe, holding their laws, culture, and traditions. The other row is the European ship, carrying their government, laws, and religion.

The core philosophy of this agreement is that the two rows never cross. The vessels travel side by side as equals in peace and harmony. Neither group is permitted to steer the other’s vessel, interfere with their internal affairs, or force their own laws onto their neighbor. It was designed as a framework of coexistence, meant to endure for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the waters flow. It was an acknowledgment that two entirely different societies could thrive simultaneously through mutual respect and noninterference.

Now, contrast this ancient wisdom with the trade war between Canada and the United States. We see escalating tariffs, closed borders, and aggressive economic maneuvers.

This friction is a direct consequence of modern governments forgetting how to travel in parallel. Instead of respecting boundaries, Washington routinely attempts to reach across the river to steer the Canadian vessel. They impose sweeping economic penalties, manipulate shared supply chains, and try to dictate how their closest neighbor should regulate its own industries and domestic markets.

By treating trade as a game of dominance with a zero sum outcome rather than an exercise in balanced coexistence, modern leaders violate the very spirit of the Two Row Wampum. A trade war happens when one ship decides it has the right to crowd out the other, forcing its neighbor out of the shared water.

The Kaswentha reminds us that true continental prosperity does not come from economic assimilation or political bullying. It comes from maintaining independent paths that respect the sovereignty of each nation.

If we want to survive the turbulent economic waters of the modern world, we must look to the wisdom of the belt and learn, once again, how to navigate our own vessels without trying to capsize each other.

Indigenous Canadians know why Donald Trump’s skin tone is the colour of rust.

Centuries ago, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and European settlers established a diplomatic framework known as the Covenant Chain. Initially forged in iron and later upgraded to silver, this chain was a living and breathing metaphor for international relations. The choice of silver was deliberate because it reacts to its environment. If left ignored and exposed to the elements, or taken for granted, it begins to tarnish. To prevent this, the treaty required a continuous ritual known as “polishing the chain.” The nations had to regularly meet in person, exchange gifts, smoke tobacco, and address grievances. Polishing the chain meant recognizing that a treaty is an active relationship that demands constant maintenance, mutual care, and intentional upkeep. If one partner was hurting or under threat, the other was obligated to step in and help before the tarnish could turn into permanent corruption.

Fast forward to today, and we look across the border at the escalating trade war between Canada and the United States. Punitive tariffs are being slapped on essential goods, supply chains are being severed, and political rhetoric is being weaponized. It is clear that modern Western leaders have entirely forgotten this foundational lesson of continental diplomacy. Instead of polishing the chain, Washington treats international agreements as disposable, transactional contracts. They view trade as a zero sum game to be won or discarded based on the political winds of the week. They have abandoned the generational obligation of mutual care, choosing instead to retreat into aggressive protectionism and economic hostility.

By ignoring our shared history and treating our closest neighbor as an adversary, we have collectively walked away from the council fire. We have stopped doing the hard, daily work of maintaining our vital alliance across the border. When economic partnerships are reduced to bitter political theater that is short sighted, the foundational bond between our nations is stripped of its luster. The relationship is neglected, exposed to the elements of greed, and allowed to completely corrode. When a historic alliance is left to decay like this, it is no coincidence that the relationship was allowed to rust. Perhaps it’s a stroke of poetic justice that a completely rusted relationship is being managed by a clown with a matching skin tone.