Quiet Canines Podcast

Donald Trump wants to change the name of “Lake Ontario” to Lake America. But history shows that he’s going to fail.

Before Canada or the United States existed, this region was a massive, thriving geopolitical trade hub. On the south shore, in modern Upstate New York, lived the powerful Haudenosaunee Confederacy, including the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. On the north shore lived the Wyandot, also known as the Huron.

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big.” The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. For centuries, that name belonged to the water and the people who protected it.

But then came the colonizers. And Donald Trump is not the first politician driven by ego to try and stick his own brand on this water. In 1632, French explorer Samuel de Champlain renamed it “Lac de St. Louis.” Later, in 1712, French officials tried to rename it “Lac Frontenac.” But they failed.

Because you can’t erase hundreds of years of deep cultural geography with an orange crayon, which seems to be Trump’s favorite writing instrument these days. Back then, the world ignored the French kings, the local people kept using the original name, and by the 1660s, European maps were forced to switch back to a Latinized version of the native root: Lake Ontario.

Trump’s mandate only forces U.S. federal agencies to print the new name. Canada still owns its side of the lakebed. Canadians and the rest of the world will call it Lake Ontario “now and forever.”

But there is a bigger lesson here about Trump’s obsession with branding. History shows us that name changes imposed from above and driven by ego don’t stick. In fact, almost everything Trump has ever plastered his name on eventually gets scrubbed away.

Think about his bankrupt casinos, his failed airline, or the luxury condo boards across New York and Chicago that voted to rip the “T-R-U-M-P” letters off their facades. Just like his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” last year, “Lake America” is a temporary political stunt.

When Trump is gone, the executive orders will be overturned. The gold will be removed. If he does get his name on the Kennedy Center, it will just get ripped off as soon as he’s gone. Everything he’s tried to put his name on while he was president will be erased.

History will not be kind to Donald Trump.

And the lake? It will still be Ontarí’io. The lake is beautiful, the lake is big.

This 1000-year-old Indigenous concept exposes the flaws in Donald Trump’s trade philosophy. I don’t think Trump has any idea who the Greek historian Thucydides is, but he’s hijacked his philosophy: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

Trump’s strategy, where the winner takes all, assumes that by bullying Canada with massive tariffs, the U.S. can hoard all the wealth. But North America’s economy isn’t a pie you can steal because it is an integrated supply chain. When you try to choke out your neighbour, your own factories and consumers suffer the consequences.

Centuries ago, right on the shores of Lake Ontario, Indigenous nations figured out a much smarter way to manage shared wealth. It is called the Dish with One Spoon covenant. Originally formed between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and later extended to the Anishinaabek nations, the “Dish” represents the entire territory and its natural resources. The “One Spoon” represents the people sharing it collectively. There are no individual plates, no private boundaries, and, most importantly, no knives are allowed at the table. Excluding sharp weapons meant that nations had to settle conflicts through open dialogue and diplomacy, never through violence or economic coercion. The treaty had three strict laws: take only what you need, leave enough for others, and keep the dish clean.

This was a brilliant strategy because it recognized interdependence. If one nation suffered a harsh winter, they had a legal right to hunt in their neighbour’s territory. It guaranteed absolute food security, prevented the depletion of resources, and maintained total national sovereignty. No nation had to bend the knee to survive. And it ended years of hostility between warring tribes.

Trump’s approach fails because it brings a knife to the table, forcing a sovereign ally to resist. Indigenous history proves that true economic strength isn’t about dominating your neighbour in a zero-sum game. It’s about collaboration that makes the overall pie bigger so everyone leaves with more than they started with.

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

The US might have a bigger military, but Canada has always had a secret weapon.

I recently heard Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy say that Canada doesn’t have a military. And JD Vance said that Canada relies on America for protection. When I think of those two, and Donald Trump, I compare them to American Brigadier General William Hull during the War of 1812.

Hull had over 2,000 men inside Fort Detroit, but he was terrified of Indigenous warriors. British Major General Isaac Brock intercepted a letter from Hull that showed what a chicken s**t he was. Brock only had about 700 British regulars and militia. To make his force look massive, he dressed his local Canadian militia units in spare red coats belonging to the regular British army, tricking Hull into thinking he faced an elite, overwhelming British force.

And Brock teamed up with Tecumseh, who was an Indigenous Shawnee chief. Tecumseh had about 600 warriors. He marched his men in a loop, with the warriors in a single file, through a clearing in plain view of the fort. Then he had them disappear into the woods. Then he looped them back around to march past the fort again. This made it look like thousands of warriors were surrounding the fort.

Brock sent a letter to Hull demanding surrender. He explicitly stated that once the fighting began, the large force of Indigenous warriors would be completely beyond his control, hinting at an inevitable massacre.

General Hull completely panicked and s**t his pants. He surrendered Fort Detroit, his entire army, 30 cannons, and 2,500 muskets without putting up a fight. Tecumseh was widely admired in his lifetime, even by Americans who had fought against him.

His primary American foe, William Henry Harrison, described Tecumseh as “one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things.”

After his death, he became a folk hero in American, Indigenous, and Canadian history.

So, JD Vance, Sean Duffy and Donald Trump should learn a little history. We don’t care how big your military is. If your military leaders thought 600 Indigenous warriors was terrifying in 1812, they should know that we have almost 2 million Indigenous people living in Canada today.

The RCMP tried to cover this up. We all know about the devastating impacts of residential schools, but there’s another dark chapter of Canadian history. Between 1950 and 1975, colonial authorities and the RCMP systematically slaughtered thousands of Inuit sled dogs, known as Qimmiit. This was not about animal control. The Canadian government targeted the core relationships of Indigenous societies to dismantle their independence and reshape the North.

For millennia, the Qimmiq was the backbone of Arctic survival. These dogs were not pets; they were equal partners, providing vital transportation across the sea ice, tracking caribou, and offering defence against predators.

As the Canadian state aggressively expanded its administrative control into the North, officials implemented strict new animal control laws. These laws required all sled dogs within the newly established permanent settlements to be muzzled and chained. But these regulations were culturally foreign and they weren’t explained to the community. Rather than educating community members, authorities chose a policy of immediate enforcement. It became standard practice to shoot any loose or unchained dog on sight, often in front of traumatized families and crying children.

Without their dog teams, hunters lost their physical mobility. They could no longer travel to traditional hunting camps, access their traplines, or secure fresh food for their families. By stripping the Inuit of their primary means of supporting themselves, the mass killing of the dogs effectively forced independent populations that were partly nomadic off the land and into centralized government settlements. This created an immediate reliance on western welfare, administrative housing, and food bought from stores.

Faced with the demand for a public judicial inquiry, the federal Minister of Public Safety, Anne McLellan, ordered the RCMP to conduct its own internal review. This move backfired politically. When the RCMP released its final report in 2006 they concluded that there was no evidence of an organized mass slaughter. They attributed the killings to disease control and community safety. Inuit leaders rejected the findings as a biased attempt to hide the truth.

This dissatisfaction led the Inuit themselves to launch the Qikiqtani Truth Commission to uncover the real history. The commission found that the Canadian government used systemic indifference, paternalism, and aggressive, unconsulted enforcement of new laws to intentionally dismantle the Inuit way of life. The federal government and the Quebec government ultimately apologized in 2011, 2019, and 2024.

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

Canadians are outraged that Trump would threaten our French language and try to limit who we can trade with. Now he’s threatening to rename Lake Ontario, Lake America. JD Vance recently called Canada a state. This rhetoric goes beyond a trade dispute. Having our sovereignty threatened feels existential. Imagine how indigenous people felt when Europeans first arrived on their Shores.

Long before Canada was a country hundreds of distinct Indigenous Nations held inherent sovereignty over these territories. They felt a deep connection to their relatives and to the land and the animals they lived beside. The violation, helplessness, and fury you are feeling today over social media posts is a tiny fraction of the lived reality of colonization. For centuries, Indigenous Nations have faced and continue to reckon with the erasure of their language, culture and way of life. Except it wasn’t just done through truth social posts.

The government, through the Indian Act, systematically dispossessed Indigenous people of their lands, pushing them onto reserves that were ever shrinking while extracting wealth from the lands where they once lived.

Trump’s impulses are the same colonial impulses that existed in the 1800’s. For Indigenous Canadians, the idea of powerful nations carving up land without consent is nothing new. Treaties were signed under duress, then repeatedly broken when they no longer suited the interests of the government. The notion that a powerful nation can simply claim or buy another people’s land without consent is precisely what Indigenous people have fought against for centuries. It’s colonialism in the twenty first century.

For Indigenous communities, the battle against colonialism never ended. Today, it takes the form of legal fights over treaty rights, environmental activism against industries that extract resources, and efforts to reclaim traditional governance structures.

The reason Canadians are so angry with Trump’s rhetoric is because Canada is not just land and resources. It’s a home, a heritage, and a legacy. Indigenous Canadians understand this better than anyone. If we can agree that it is fundamentally wrong for a foreign power to disregard the boundaries of Canada today, then we must also acknowledge the enduring wrong of how Indigenous sovereignty has been treated. My hope is that this serves as a profound call to wake up for our collective empathy towards the First Nation People of Canada.

This is a story about how deeply Indigenous survival and canine evolution are woven together. According to my dog Bentley’s DNA profile, he is one hundred percent Alaskan village dog. These dogs are the original domestic dogs. They evolved naturally alongside human settlements over thousands of years, adapting to their environments rather than being bred for specific looks or behaviors by humans. Bentley wasn’t a mutt. He belonged to a category that came before modern breeds. Every single one of his ancestors belonged to that same isolated, indigenous pool of Arctic dogs, completely untouched by European canine expansion.

These dogs have shared a deeply interconnected history with Indigenous communities. Within these societies, dogs were not pets; they were integral, working members of the community. They provided transportation, security, and warmth in harsh climates. Because village dogs roamed freely within the camp, they acted as a constant, communal alarm system and an immediate line of defense against environmental hazards.

We often think of DNA purely in terms of physical appearance, but it also serves as a blueprint for behavior. Sometimes, a dog will exhibit a reaction so specific and intense that you are actually watching thousands of years of survival instincts activate in real time. One thing that stood out to me about Bentley was his relationship with children. Take a look at this footage.

Whenever children jump into the water, Bentley’s reaction is intense. He goes completely berserk. Notice the specific sound he makes, which is not a standard bark. It is a distinct scream with a high pitch. Immediately after sounding this alarm, he jumps into the water and swims alongside the child, carefully monitoring them and refusing to leave until they safely make it to the shore.

This is not just a quirky behavioral trait; it is an instinct rooted in his ancestry. In the extreme, unforgiving environments of the Arctic, if a person, especially a child, fell through the ice, the freezing water meant rapid death. A dog possessing the instinct to sound a piercing, unmistakable alarm and rush to the edge of the water was an invaluable asset to an Indigenous community.

The dogs that successfully protected the next generation of the village were the ones valued, kept, and allowed to pass on their genes. When Bentley screams and leaps into the water today, he is executing the exact job his ancestors were naturally selected to do. It is a living, breathing demonstration of Indigenous history and how deeply human survival and canine evolution are woven together.

Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island, is in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometers west of Chile. The island was permanently settled around the years 800 to 1200. It was a tricky place to live in. Rapa Nui is subtropical. It gets less rainfall than most Polynesian islands, and that rain is erratic.

When surgeon J. Linton Palmer landed there in 1868, he found what he thought was a disaster. The island was barely inhabited. There were only around 100 people living there. But it was clear that there had once been a larger, organized society.

Rapa Nui had hundreds of stone statues of elongated human faces. Some were 30 feet high. Palmer called them gigantic stone images. Someone had carved, moved and raised them. But by the time Palmer arrived, he wrote that many of the statues “had been thrown down in all directions and were all more or less mutilated.” Something had gone terribly wrong.

For decades the story that many learned about Rapa Nui was one of environmental ruin. It was popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. He claimed that the people cut down their trees, degraded their land and squandered scarce labor on the construction of hundreds of statues. Hunger followed. So did violence.

But recent research is proving that this narrative is not true. It’s looking more like a small society that sustained itself for centuries by adapting its farming methods and water management to one of the most isolated places on Earth.

The catastrophe came later, after European ships brought disease, slave raiding, forced labor, annexation and confinement.

New evidence shows that the Rapa Nui created rock gardens using a process called lithic mulching. Chemicals such as phosphorus and potassium leached out of the rocks into the soil, helping to nourish crops.

There are also visible remains of two massive walls built into the riverbed and the rim of a megalithic water tank. Excavation revealed a larger system of dams, basins and even underground aqueducts channeling water from the crater lake on the Terevaka volcano toward the southern coast.

This shows a people “mindfully planning” and “making the best out of very difficult environmental circumstances.”

This story is fascinating so I’m going to create a longer video later this week. Join our growing Substack community to watch the full video and learn more about Indigenous culture and history. We are welcoming new members to our tribe.

For centuries, a single Sitka spruce stood on the banks of the Yakoun River in Haida Gwaii.

But this tree was different.

Its needles were golden instead of green, the result of an extraordinarily rare genetic mutation that should have made survival almost impossible. To the Haida people, however, Kiidk’yaas was far more than a botanical curiosity. Its story reached back through generations of oral history to a boy who disobeyed his grandfather, looked back, and was transformed into a tree.

Then, in 1997, one man entered the forest with a chainsaw.

What he did devastated the Haida community, baffled people across Canada, and ultimately led to his own mysterious disappearance.

But the death of Kiidk’yaas was not the end of its story.

Scientists had taken cuttings from the tree before it fell. What happened to those cuttings created an extraordinary and sometimes uneasy relationship between science, conservation, and the Haida people.

This is the story of a tree that should not have existed, a sacred relationship that survived its destruction, and the remarkable effort to ensure that Kiidk’yaas might live again.

Canada is at war with the United States because they don’t honor their agreements. The Mi’kmaq First Nation knows exactly how the Prime Minister feels. In 1726, they signed a Peace and Friendship Treaty with the British. The deal was that the two nations would peacefully coexist. Britain would build some settlements. And the Mi’kmaq culture and traditional ways of life would be respected.

But over time, the British behaved as though the Mi’kmaq were British subjects living inside British territory. Does that sound familiar? The dispute became one over sovereignty, territory and whether Britain could be trusted to honor the agreement they had made. Then in 1749, Governor Cornwallis arrived with 2,500 settlers and established Halifax at Kijpuktuk, which was an important Mi’kmaq location. That was the turning point for the Mi’kmaw. They saw British expansion as a threat to their territorial independence. So, the Mi’kmaq formed an alliance with the French and they went to war. They launched naval raids. They used guerilla warfare to attack colonial outposts. And they defended their territory for decades, even after the French were driven out. Eventually the Mi’kmaq signed the “Burying the Hatchet ceremony and the Halifax Treaties in 1760.”

Unlike later treaties signed in other parts of Canada, the Peace and Friendship Treaties did not involve the Mi’kmaq surrendering rights to the lands and resources they had traditionally used and occupied. In fact, there are Maritime Peace and Friendship Treaties that contain treaty rights that have been recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. In other words, they made a good deal with a new administration.

Fast forward to today and the same dynamic is playing out. The US and Canada had a deal. But the US did not honor it. The Americans threatened Canada’s sovereignty and culture with their rhetoric about a 51st state. Mark Carney has formed new alliances with partners he can trust. And these new tariffs of 50% were a turning point. The Prime Minister has decided to go to war. But instead of muskets and ships, he’s using tariffs. Matching the US, tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar. He’s defending Canada’s sovereignty, culture and territory, just like the Mi’kmaq did. The Mi’kmaq waited a decade before burying the hatchet. Judging from the physical appearance of Donald Trump. I don’t think Mark Carney will have to wait that long.

DATE: 1864

For a time, English colonization in what is now British Columbia had little direct effect on the Tŝilhqot’in First Nation. The colony was centred in Victoria and New Westminster, while the Tŝilhqot’in lived far away in the Interior.

That changed with Alfred Waddington. The British aristocrat arrived in 1862 with money from investors in Victoria and a plan for a road between Bella Coola and Fort Alexandria. The Cariboo Gold Rush was at its peak, and the road would give miners a shorter route to the goldfields. It would also cross Tŝilhqot’in territory.

Victoria had recently experienced a smallpox outbreak. Waddington’s crew travelled north carrying the disease and infected the Tŝilhqot’in. According to Tŝilhqot’in oral history, about two thirds of the nation died within weeks.

Survivors faced hunger while the crew continued building the road. In 1864, several Tŝilhqot’in men came to the camp, asked for food, and offered to work for it. After flour disappeared from the storehouse, a worker accused them of taking it and threatened to bring smallpox to their community.

Klatsassin, a Tŝilhqot’in Chief, gathered 24 warriors. They attacked the camp early in the morning while the crew slept and killed 12 men. The warriors later attacked the road builders twice more.

Colonists on the mainland and Vancouver Island responded with anger. Governor Frederick Seymour, newly arrived from Britain, raised a volunteer force composed mostly of American newcomers and sent it into the Interior. The force failed to find the Tŝilhqot’in warriors and returned without accomplishing its purpose.

By the fall of 1864, colonial officials had changed their approach. They invited the Tŝilhqot’in to Quesnel, where Klatsassin believed peace negotiations would take place. Eight of the 24 men made the trip. Officials arrested them when they arrived. They were tried for murder before Chief Justice Matthew Baillie Begbie and a jury. Five were convicted and hanged. At the time, a murder conviction carried a mandatory death sentence. Chief Ahan, the sixth man, was hanged in New Westminster later.

Before his execution, Klatsassin said, “We meant war, not murder.” It seems that the Tŝilhqot’in won the war. Waddington’s road was never built, and little of their territory was settled by outsiders.

In 2014, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark apologized for the hangings. In 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized and exonerated the six men. The Tŝilhqot’in maintain that exoneration was unnecessary because the men were warriors defending their territory during a war.