Quiet Canines Podcast

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.

Donald Trump may soon get American alcohol back onto Canadian shelves, but that does not mean he gets our money. Canada and the United States appear close to a trade agreement, and Prime Minister Mark Carney has asked the premiers to restore American alcohol sales if an agreement is reached. Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew believes Canada still has leverage and should keep fighting.

Whatever governments decide, Canadian consumers still have a choice. Kinew is right. Putting American bottles back on the shelves will only help American producers if Canadians buy them. According to the Wine Institute, American wine exports to Canada fell 78 per cent between 2024 and 2026. Provincial restrictions created that pressure. If those products return and Canadians leave them there, distributors will have little reason to keep ordering them.

During the past eighteen months, we discovered beer, wine and spirits produced here in Canada. We began spending that money on Canadian farms, breweries, wineries, distilleries and workers. A trade agreement does not require us to surrender those habits.

Here is my challenge. Midterm elections in the US are on November 3. For at least the next 75 days, let’s keep choosing alcohol made in Canada.

Name your favourite Canadian beer, wine or spirit in the comments. If someone names an American bottle they used to buy, help them find a Canadian replacement.

Governments can decide what appears on the shelf, but we can still fight with our wallets. If American alcohol returns, leave it there.

Let’s make Premier Kinew proud.

And click the link in my bio to join our growing Substack community. We are currently welcoming new members to our tribe.

#LeaveItThere

According to the Haida people of British Columbia, a long time ago, a village on the island failed to live in balance with the land. The people disrespected the natural world and the spirits that lived inside. As punishment, a fierce, supernatural winter storm tore through the village. Only a young boy and his grandfather survived.

As they fled the village, the grandfather told the boy: “Don’t look back. No matter what you hear, look only forward.”

As they climbed into the hills, the boy heard the cries of his home and felt the power of the storm. Overcome by grief and curiosity, he turned his head to look back. Suddenly, his feet took root in the earth. His skin turned to bark, and his hair transformed into glowing golden needles. He turned into a golden tree.

His grandfather told the boy that he would stand there for generations as a reminder. He would be a warning of what happens when humans disrespect nature.

The Haida called it Kiid K’iiyas, which means “Ancient Tree.” To the rest of the world, it became known as the Golden Spruce.

Standard Sitka spruce trees have dark green needles that have evolved to absorb the limited sunlight of the Pacific Northwest. But Kiid K’iiyas was different. Because of a rare genetic mutation, its needles lacked chlorophyll. So instead of having green needles, it had golden yellow ones.

When the sun shone on the tree, it looked like it was glowing. A tree with this mutation shouldn’t survive. But this one did. And it stood as a reminder for 300 years.

This wasn’t a tree to the Haida people. It was a relative.

Until a disturbed man cut into the base of the tree with a chainsaw, and the wind blew the tree to the ground.

The Haida people were overcome with grief and anger. The sacred tree had been spared while all the other trees around it had been cut down over the years. They had cared for this tree for centuries.

If you want to hear the full story about this deranged man and his mysterious disappearance, I plan on releasing a long video this weekend on Substack.

I hope you join our growing community. We are welcoming new members to our tribe.

Ben Franklin didn’t design it, and George Washington didn’t dream it up. The story behind the American Eagle belongs to a man named Canassatego.

See the American eagle holding thirteen arrows in its talons? That’s a tribute to an Indigenous Onondaga leader named Canassatego. He is the forgotten influencer who gave the early American colonies the blueprint for their entire nation.

To understand his impact, you have to look at what the thirteen colonies were going through back in the 1740s. Long before the Revolutionary War even started, the British colonies were an absolute mess. They were incredibly weak, completely disorganized, and constantly fighting with each other over land, money, and trade. Because they couldn’t get along, they were highly vulnerable to rival European superpowers like France. They had no central government, no real sense of unity, and zero teamwork.

Enter Canassatego. He was a brilliant diplomat representing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. His people had successfully run a massive, unified democratic system for centuries. In 1744, he sat down with a group of squabbling colonial governors for a massive peace summit. Canassatego looked at these fractured British colonies and decided to give them some incredibly blunt advice.

To make his point, he picked up a single arrow and showed how easily it could snap in half. Then, he gathered a bundle of arrows together. He told the colonists that a single arrow is fragile, but a bundle of arrows bound together is completely unbreakable. He warned them that if they didn’t unite under one single government, they would be destroyed one by one.

Sitting in that crowd was a young printer named Benjamin Franklin. Franklin didn’t just listen; he was absolutely mesmerized. He took detailed notes on Canassatego’s words, printed the speech, and distributed it all across the colonies. Later on, Franklin used Canassatego’s exact philosophy of unified states to pitch the very first plan for an American union. Decades later, this identical concept became the foundation of the U.S. Constitution.

America took his political system. They took his powerful metaphor and stamped it directly onto the dollar bill. But they left Canassatego completely out of the history books. Share this video to help put his name back where it belongs.

Before Europeans arrived, hundreds of Indigenous Nations recognized, honored, and integrated a sacred third gender. Over 150 distinct Indigenous nations across North America accepted that some people possessed both masculine and feminine traits.

These individuals were not outcasts. They were central to the survival of the community. Because they embodied both perspectives, they were viewed as uniquely balanced. They served as the keepers of oral history. They were the matchmakers who oversaw marriages and the people who gave sacred names to newborns.

When Europeans arrived in North America, they brought with them the belief that God created only two genders. European missionaries and colonial administrators saw these people as a direct threat to their Christian theology and patriarchal governance.

Within a few generations, their sacred roles were driven underground.

In 1990, Indigenous activists and elders rejected colonial terminology. Anishinaabe activist Myra Laramee suggested a term that she said came to her in a vision. The term was Niizh Manidoowag, which means “Two Spirit.”

Despite five centuries of erasure sponsored by the state, violent religious enforcement, and legislative suppression, the tradition did not die.

I’ve created a long video on Substack that explores the full history and why these Two Spirit individuals were so important to indigenous communities.

This is a story about how one strong Indian woman helped force the Canadian government to eliminate a sexist law, and how I benefited as a result. I’m going to use the term Indian because that was the term historically used. But, I understand that First Nation is the term that we should be using today.

Long before European contact, Indians used kinship and community ties to determine their own citizenship. However, these traditional systems of governance were undermined and displaced by colonialism. When the Indian Act was enacted in 1876, its primary purpose was to forcibly control, civilize, and assimilate Indians into Canadian society.

The colonizers introduced legislation that determined who could reside on reserves. The legislation stripped Indian status from any Indian woman who married a man who was not Indian. And it prevented their children and future descendants from being recognized as Indian. The legal definition of “Indian” was no longer based on community ties. It tore families apart, forcing them to move away.

My mother grew up on the Millbrook Reserve in Nova Scotia. Both her parents were members of the Mi’kmaw Nation. Sadly, she and her sister moved to Boston as teenagers because the racism against Mi’kmaw people was intolerable at that time. They each married Irish men from Boston. As a result, they were no longer considered Indian.

My sister, my cousins, and I were not recognized as Indian when we were born. Mary Two Axe Earley faced this same injustice when she married an American engineer and lost her status. In 1967, she helped found Indian Rights for Indian Women and began fiercely testifying and protesting. In 1973 the Supreme Court upheld the discriminatory law, but she kept fighting for decades. Finally, in 1985, Bill C 31 was passed. She became the first person to regain her status, which paved the way for thousands of women and their children. Because of this strong Indian woman, my mother and her sister, along with my sister, my cousins, and me, were legally considered Indians.

Imagine a government telling you that you are not really Irish, Italian, or French, even though you can trace your family tree back through generations. The Indian Act remains a federal law today. While it has been amended, traces of its colonial past continue to discriminate against First Nations people in Canada.

If you want to learn more about indigenous Canadians, join our growing Substack community. We are currently welcoming new members to our tribe. The link is in my bio.

They found a settlement in Saskatchewan that is eleven thousand years old and existed before contact with Europeans. It’s one of the oldest known Indigenous sites in North America. This is right up there with some of the world’s most well recognized ancient sites, such as the Great Pyramids of Egypt, Stonehenge in England, and Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The settlement existed about six thousand years before the Great Pyramids of Egypt.

Some believe that the first humans moved into the area after the glaciers melted about ten thousand years ago. It was assumed that indigenous peoples were made up of small nomadic tribes, but this site contradicts this claim. The site is near Prince Albert in Saskatchewan, and researchers believe it could prove Indigenous people lived in the region about one thousand years earlier than they thought.

The site is called Âsowanânihk, which is a Cree word meaning a place to cross. And the site looks like a permanent settlement. There are huge and deep fire pits that suggest it was used for cooking for generations. There are wooden and earth structures that they believe were used to funnel an enormous extinct bison from the ice age weighing two thousand kilograms.

Once the bison entered the enclosure, escape became difficult and hunters could kill them. They found a massive collection of these animal’s bones in one location. They found evidence of tool making. They found distinct alternating layers of charcoal in the soil suggesting that they were practicing intentional forest and fire management to manipulate vegetation and clear land.

“This discovery challenges the outdated idea that early Indigenous peoples were solely nomadic.” The evidence of long term settlement and land stewardship suggests a deep rooted presence. Oral histories have long described the area as an important cultural and trade hub, and this discovery offers physical evidence supporting those accounts. This discovery is a powerful reminder that indigenous peoples were here, building, thriving, and shaping the land long before history books acknowledged them.

Sadly, the site is threatened by logging and industrial activities, with Elder Willie Ermine and the Âsowanânihk Council expressing concerns about potential destruction and advocating for immediate protective measures. If you want to learn more about the indigenous way of life, join our free Substack community. The link is in the bio.

Does it make you angry when our leaders say that the wildfires devastating our province are just the new normal?

Right now, we are told to move past politics. To rally around the flag and uncritically embrace bad policy choices. But how can we ask British Columbians to watch our province burn and look past the cause? How can we ignore that politics is the reason tens of thousands of our neighbours are huddled in shelters, unsure if they’ll ever see their communities whole again?

Those in power act shocked every year at the incineration of our province. But they hold the power to change our future and they choose not to.

I think of those on the front lines who see this firsthand. I think of the firefighter who said, “Climate change isn’t a prediction. It is the shift we are already working.”

Handouts are offered to LNG corporations, billions are spent on pipelines, and AI data centres are celebrated. The status quo is a lit match.

But we have the tools to stop this. We can fund FireSmart and implement the Abbott Chapman Report. We can ban glyphosate and manage forests without letting companies decimate the ecosystems that resist fire and help prevent wildfires.

We can cut off the endless subsidies to foreign and fossil fuel corporations and build the renewable future we need.

It’s mind numbing that decades of political choices have guaranteed the profits of the few and the suffering of the many at the cost of our future, our children, and all the creatures that are suffering because of these choices.

The BC NDP must listen to firefighters, to Indigenous nations, and to their own members who tell them that fossil fuel expansion, the very thing causing these wildfires, must end.

We have the chance to prevent these hellish summers from getting worse. But it comes down to a choice.

The BC NDP must make the right one.

At 10:40 on the night of June 4, 1971, police arrested Donald Marshall Junior in Whycocomagh. The case against him had been built by John MacIntyre, the Sergeant of Detectives with Sydney City Police.

MacIntyre already regarded Donald as a troublemaker. By the morning after Sandy Seale was stabbed, MacIntyre had decided Donald was responsible. He told an RCMP sergeant that Donald and Sandy had been arguing, which was a lie.

George and Alexander MacNeil had also seen two unfamiliar men in the park. Their descriptions matched Donald’s account. MacIntyre set their evidence aside, stopped looking for those men, and declined investigative help from the RCMP.

The Royal Commission later found that Donald’s Mi’kmaw identity was one reason MacIntyre made him the prime suspect. The Commission said MacIntyre became “blindly determined to prove his theory.”

MacIntyre then turned to two teenagers.

John Pratico was sixteen. In his first statement, Pratico told police that he heard a scream and saw two men running away. On June 4, MacIntyre took him through the park and questioned him again.

This time, Pratico’s story changed. He now said Donald and Sandy had been arguing. Then he claimed that he watched Donald stab Sandy.

The Commission found that MacIntyre suggested the argument, Donald’s role, and even the place where Pratico supposedly stood.

MacIntyre next travelled to Louisbourg to question Maynard Chant. Chant was fourteen and on probation. He had reached Donald only after the attack.

MacIntyre falsely told Chant that another witness had seen him in the park. After an intimidating interview, Chant signed a statement that matched Pratico’s story. Chant now claimed that he had also seen Donald argue with Sandy and stab him.

The Commission found that MacIntyre supplied those details. MacIntyre was the only connection between the two stories.

Those statements led to Donald’s arrest.

MacIntyre handed the entire file to the Crown prosecutor. That file contained the earlier statements that contradicted the new stories. The prosecutor carried the new stories forward while the contradictions remained unexamined and undisclosed to the defence.

On July 5, Pratico and Chant repeated their false stories at Donald’s preliminary inquiry. Donald’s lawyers asked neither witness a single question.

The judge ordered Donald to stand trial for murder.

MacIntyre’s false theory had become the case against Donald.

Join our Substack community so you don’t miss out on Part III.

In 1971, Donald Marshall Jr. was wrongfully convicted of killing his friend in Nova Scotia. And even after the conviction was overturned, he was still blamed for the judicial error.

In 1971 the Mi’kmaw community of Membertou sat on a hill roughly three kilometres above downtown Sydney, Nova Scotia. It had been placed there in 1926, after prominent Sydney residents spent years petitioning to have the King’s Road Reserve removed from the expanding city core. They argued that their Mi’kmaw neighbours drove down property values and endangered public health. The Exchequer Court of Canada ordered the move, the first time a Canadian court legally compelled an Indigenous community to relocate.

Donald Marshall Junior grew up there, the son of the Grand Chief of the Mi’kmaq. He was seventeen and had a few minor brushes with the law.

Shortly before midnight on 28 May 1971, Marshall left a dance and met Sandy Seale by chance. Seale was also seventeen, Black, from a strict family, expected home by curfew and carrying enough money for the bus. The two barely knew one another. They walked into Wentworth Park.

There they met Roy Ebsary, 59, a former ship’s cook with a reputation for violence and a knife conviction, and James MacNeil, 25, an unemployed labourer. Ebsary and MacNeil began the conversation. After several minutes one of the younger men asked for money. Ebsary said, “This is for you, Black man,” and drove a knife into Seale’s stomach, then lunged at Marshall and cut his arm. Marshall’s wound was slight. Seale died within a day.

Four constables answered the call: Leo Mroz, Howard Dean, Richard Walsh and Martin MacDonald. They left the scene unguarded, searched nothing and questioned nobody. No autopsy was ever performed on Seale.

Marshall told the police what had happened. By the next morning Sergeant of Detectives John MacIntyre had settled on a different account: that Marshall had stabbed Seale during an argument. Two witnesses, George and Sandy MacNeil, described two men in the park matching Marshall’s description. MacIntyre set those statements aside and never went looking for Ebsary.

He turned instead to teenagers. Maynard Chant was fourteen and on probation, frightened of jail. John Pratico was sixteen and unstable, known to invent stories. Both first gave accounts supporting Marshall. MacIntyre took Pratico to the scene, supplied him with a version of events, and obtained a second statement, then pressed Chant into corroborating it.

Donald Marshall Junior was charged with murder on 4 June 1971. The Royal Commission later found that MacIntyre shared what it called “a general sense in Sydney’s White community” that Indians were worth less than whites.

I plan to make this into a series that documents the police corruption, the systemic racism, and the wrongful conviction that robbed this young man of 11 years of his life.

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