Ryan McMahon
 ÒRed Man Laughing: Reflections on ReconciliationÓ

(transcript)


Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents
 

hosted by Initiative for Indigenous Futures April 6, 2018
Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology Concordia University (Montreal, QC) 
video available at http://abtec.org/iif/outputs/indigenous-futures-cluster-presents/#mcmahon info@abtec.org
 

















Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents
in collaboration with Art History
Ryan McMahon
Comedian, Writer, Media Maker and Community Activator
Concordia University
6 April 2018
Produced by the Initiative for Indigenous Futures in collaboration with Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC)Êabtec.org/iif.

0:00:12 Heather Igloliorte: I am Dr. Heather Igloliorte and I am the co-director of the Initiative for Indigenous... No, I'm not. [laughter] I'm Co-director of the Indigenous Futures Cluster. Jason Lewis is the Director of the Initiatives for Indigenous Futures. And I'm very happy to welcome you here tonight. This is an event that's put on in partnership with Department of Art History as well. I would like to begin by acknowledging that Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien'keh‡:Ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. Tiohti‡:Ke/Montreal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present, and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community. And that is Concordia's recently adopted new land acknowledgement. If you wanna learn more about it, we have a great website where local members of the Indigenous Directions Leadership group, spearheaded by one of our Haudenosaunee PhD wrote this. And then you can also look at... It will give you a... There's a drop-down menu where you get a breakdown of what the significance of each sentence is and what each part of that means.

0:01:25 HI: It's my distinct pleasure tonight to introduce Ryan McMahon, our guest of honor. Ryan is an Anishinaabe comedian, writer, media maker, and community activator from the Couchiching First Nation in Treaty 3 territory. Recognized as Indian country's most decorated stand-up comedian, Ryan has recorded five national comedy specials since 2010, appeared at the prestigious Just For Laughs festival a number of times right here, and later this year is showcasing for HBO as as his irreverent, forward-looking, and challenging brand of comedy spreads around the world. Ryan has written for the Globe and Mail, Vice, New York Times, and CBC. Ryan has just completed his first book, The Great Indian Paradox, published under Arsenal Pulp Press and Robin's Egg Books, and is currently shopping his second book, 2167: Future Reason for This Country, a seriously funny investigation into the next 150 years of Canada. It's McMahon's media work that has cemented his place in the current political social discourse on reconciliation in Canada, and the collision between Indian country and the mainstream. He is the CEO of the Makoons Media Group and is currently building the world's only independent Indigenous media platform committed to digital publishing and the internet. Please join me in welcoming Ryan.

[applause]

0:02:56 Ryan McMahon: Thank you everybody for coming here this evening, and taking time out of your schedule to share this time and space with us. I hope to present for around 40 minutes and then have a conversation about of some of the presentation and maybe take questions and comments. So we should be out of here by 7:30 or so. I wanna first say thank you for the invitation into the space here today and acknowledge the work that... I was a fan of Jason Lewis and Skawennati long before I ever got to meet you and gave them an award at the Imaginative Film Festival. So I was a fan before I was a peer in this space. So I wanna say thank you to both of you for the invitation, and a thank you to all of the students and all of the people behind the scenes that work to make this happen over the last couple of days. I'm always inspired to come back to this territory and this is a territory that has long inspired so many people in so many different ways. And to be here in Montreal and kind of earlier today, we were talking about the Kahnawake Survival School and a lot of the work that has happened on the other side of the river in response to this place existing. And so it's always inspiring to be here, and to kinda think about how we can take that story and inspire ourselves with all of that work that happens here in Montreal.

0:04:48 RM: We're gonna talk about reconciliation 'cause that's the time we're in. That's what we're talking about everywhere, all over. 'Cause Justin Trudeau said it's time to reconcile, to just move forward, and just do it. Let's just grab random Indigenous elders by the shoulders and stare deeply, [laughter] deeply into there eyes. Let's give Carolyn Bennett another Native scarf. Let's give her another scarf and have Perry Bellegarde talk about closing the gap close. We gotta close the gap. So we're closing gaps and giving scarves and staring at elders, and we're moving to this new town called Reconciliationville. Population: You and me, with the mayor being Justin Trudeau. And let's never forget that little asshole was probably in the room during the crafting of the White Paper. [laughter] So let's be on guard.

0:06:05 RM: There weren't a time that I don't think most of us ever imagined being in, a time where we're actually looking at fundamentally shifting the Indigenous reality in this country. And we're looking at it from all points of view. Art is doing it, music is doing it. Our politicians now are starting to think more deeply about what it means when we talk about Nationhood and other things. So it's this sort of re-emerging of this space that we find ourselves in today that for me as a 41 year old that grew up in a time where our chiefs back home in Treaty 3 talked about blowing up the TransCanada Highway and cutting off the railway system in Canada to bring Canada to its knees economically... If anyone from CSIS is here, it's nice to see you again. [laughter] To bring this country to a standstill economically so that the Indian question is actually dealt with that. Those are the politics I grew up hearing in the early and mid '90s when I was a young person engaged in being in youth councils and youth planning in my community. And then that conversation starts to shift a little bit and we start talking about needing to work with Canada as partners and kind of being stuck in this relationship. And then it sort of evolves. Oka is behind us, Dances With Wolves is right beside us. [laughter]

0:07:44 RM: And so we start to see this future start to emerge. And for my people in my territory in Treat 3 at Couchiching First Nation, it was certainly in the late '90s where we started to work more closely with the Grand Council of Treaty 3 to look at what it means to call ourselves Anishinaabe in Treaty 3, and how we sort of assert ourselves in our territory. And I remember those times. I remember being terrified at youth council meetings, listening to these chiefs talk about blowing up the TransCanada highway, digging up the TransCanada highway, thinking, "I guess this is what we're doing. This is what we have to do." And leaving these meetings feeling so afraid of that option being on the table. And now here we are, there's checks floating around. The times have changed, and we're indigenizing everything, which is not what we're gonna talk about tonight, but I'm going to digress a little bit just to say stop indigenizing everything and just give us our land back. [laughter] And then we'll build our own universities on our own land and we'll all live happily ever after.

0:09:05 RM: But what I wanna talk about tonight is the fifth season of my podcast, Red Man Laughing. Which, because of the work of the TRC and because I come from my family members, I come from a long line of residential school survivors, I spent a lot of time in my practice through comedy and writing rejecting the system and being angry and not having a place really to put that anger and not really knowing how to work through it. And so, I decided in 2015 that if I was going to be angry all the time, and if I was going to sort of reject the Canadian state, that I needed to do something healthier with all of what was going on in my head and decided to turn the microphone on myself a little bit and work through season five of my podcast, which was dedicated to...

0:10:03 S1: We're gonna talk a little bit about these. But we're gonna talk a little bit about the path of season five of the podcast and sort of where I began at the start of the season where I ended it. And sort of the journey there, and... And when I started season five of the podcast, I remember I had just published this rant on my podcast basically a day after Sir John A. Macdonald's 250th birthday. There were celebrations across the country, large op-eds in the Globe and Mail celebrating this man, and then problematizing a little bit who this gentleman was, and I basically just released a rant saying, "Fuck this guy." I'm not interested in the celebration. And why do we keep... Why do we keep these settler myths, these settler myths that are so deeply enriched in the Canadian psyche? Why we keep these balls in the air when we have so much other work to do? And so, I released this episode of my podcast, and I got a lot of feedback with people saying, "Are you okay?" [laughter] Like, "What's actually going on?" And I didn't really realize how angry I had become. I didn't really realize how impatient I had become, and how really out of balance I had become with this conversation. And it was a friend of mine that said, "You need a healthy place. You need a healthier place to put this stuff."

0:11:45 RM: And hence season five of the podcast began. This is also the work... At the time, the TRC had just completed a... It's sort of at its halfway point. They had released their... I forget. What was the actual title of the document? I forget, but they had reached the middle of their work. I don't have words right now. Words aren't working in my brain. Yeah, well wasn't this summer it was like they'd reached the... Anyway, they reached the halfway point of their work, and they released an interim report. And then I read it. And I read it in two days and my grandfather was ill. And I was really thinking deeply about when we think about reconciliation, we always think about it outside of us. When I think about reconciliation, I think about what people are doing out there, where the resources are going in this reconciliation industry that is emerging. And I get stuck there, and I don't think about what's going on here. And so at that time when I read the summary I started to think about my family and think about what I'm actually practicing in terms of reconciliation, what it means to be in a family surrounded by residential school survivors. What am I doing to support them? What am I doing to reconcile inside of our own family? And it turns out not much.

0:13:20 RM: And any Indigenous person in this room can probably agree. You probably have those family members [chuckle] you can't stand, and you don't care to ever see again. And we have lots of those in my family it turns out. And I wanted to kind of think about how we could bring our family back together and look at some of this stuff. And it was that interim report that got me thinking more about family being the cornerstone of what I think is and will be the revolution. It'll be family. Rebuilding family, to me, is far more important than considering who the next Prime Minister is and what the Grand Chief is saying publicly in the media. It's family. And we can very easily look at the child welfare system. We can look at residential schools. What is more cowardly an act than targeting children and families as residential schools did. So I started to think about, well, family has to be front and center inside of the reconciliation movement that I wanna be a part of. And if that's true, then my family and I, we have a lot of work to do. And that work I did publicly on the podcast. I'm gonna skip a lot of this stuff.

0:14:43 RM: That work I did publicly on the podcast, through I believe it was 21 episodes of the podcast. And I started to think about so many people in our family in my community, we had just not talked. We had not carefully considered each others' experiences as we relate to each other. And that spanned decades, where our family members were just kind of broken up by a family in Minnesota that we haven't seen since the '90s, since the early '90s. And it's just that way for our family. And somebody sent me this quote one time. I didn't know why. And it's an Orwell quote from 1984, and when I started to look at the quote, I just thought, "Well, it's pretty simple." For me that's probably... For me, it's decolonization. This is a political quote and for me, it's about taking back control of our past for ourselves and our family, taking control of the narrative. What are the stories we tell ourselves? Stories are very powerful and the stories that we tell ourselves often become our reality. And so the story is that my family and my community, was telling itself very, very unhealthy. And I started to look about well, if we allow them or they or the white man or the government, however we frame it, if we allow them to control our present, but control what we are thinking now, they will not only control the past, but the future as well.

0:16:23 RM: But I wanted to sort of work with that and I rewrote it. They, because it's not all about us gentlemen, they who control the past, control the future. They who control the present, control the past. And then finally they who control the future understands their past and are present. And I added this last line kind of on a personal reflection of that's what we need to do. We need to wrestle with what is behind us in order to understand what is in front of us. And for me being present is the greatest gift we can give each other, time. And it's a resource and something that you can't go and buy at Walmart. You can't get time back. You can't get more time in the day. Time is finite, and so time is of the essence. And what more great a gift to give each other than time? And so I really wanted to through the season of the podcast really think about how and what kinda time we give each other. And what does that space that we build for each other really look like? And we started to wrestle with some of these questions through some of the episodes.

0:17:34 RM: I'm gonna jump through some of these slides a little bit, and I'll go back to some of them in a second, but we started to wrestle with the question of time and space as it relates to reconciliation through many of these episodes. And if anyone's listened to the podcast, you'll know what I'm referring to here. The Onaman collective, Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch just set out on their own to create a safe space to make art, and to center Indigenous languages and to give young people the time and the space to do so. And today through just an intense effort of fundraising for themselves and selling art and hosting events, they went and bought a piece of land outside of Sudbury. And they have a camp, they have a language immersion camp. And that was, to me, a profound act of love and courage where they just said, "Well... "

0:18:37 RM: Now we need to raise 75,000 for this parcel of land and we don't know how to do it, but we can make things and we could sell things. So let's try that. And they did, and probably many of you supported that either through purchasing t-shirts or prints, and they just went and did it. And then from the ground up built this beautiful camp. And the 4Rs youth movement is a multicultural youth movement through Canada that builds space for youth to come in and learn from each other. Another beautiful profound act of love where all of these youth can sit together and make mistakes, have awkward conversations. There's no wrong answer, there's no dumb question. Just really building this beautiful, beautiful space, and through the early episodes of the podcast in this season a couple of things started to emerge. A couple of main messages. Love... Love is at the core of everything. I went into this thinking about the politics, nationhood, getting land returned to Indigenous peoples, like I went into this just squarely thinking of the politics, and through the first few episodes, Christie Belcourt talked about giving gifts. We just have to keep giving. We have to keep giving. The more we give, the more we'll get back. The more we give the more we...

0:20:02 RM: And I was like, "That's insane. We've given too much, all we do is give. That's all we've ever done. To a fault, some would say". We've just given, and she said "Yeah, that's what we have to continue to do". And if you listen to that episode, episode one of season five, I say that this is preposterous, this is... I'm not down with that. We have to stop giving and start taking our lives back, we have to... So, I reject the premise outright, but through many episodes, this theme kept coming up. We have to continue to give, which was really interesting. I will touch on that in a little bit. Then something kind of funny happens, where we start to look at Lee Maracle and Dr. Marie Wilson fight on the panel, in this episode. And our... Not opposed, but are old friends, but have very different ideas, some... Lee is, I think a little more radical in her thinking. Dr. Marie Wilson certainly, as one of the Chairs of the TRC is more open to navigating the system and kind of working from within it, and in that disagreement that they have in the episode, it was like, it was really awkward 'cause then I was like... Well, are you going to sign the waiver so we can publish it? Because it's a public fundamental disagreement that they have.

0:21:43 RM: And I thought that they would want to protect themselves, they both have fairly high profiles and I thought that there was no way they would allow me to publish it, but then they said, "of course, this is what it's actually about. We can't be afraid of disagreeing, we can't all just get along and close our eyes and hope this reconciliation shit works out, because we're not gonna get a do-over". Those are Lee Maracle's words, we're not gonna get a do-over, we're not gonna go down this path of reconciliation, whatever it is or isn't, and five or ten years from now, go "Well, we may... Let's go, we have to go back. Sorry guys, come on, come on. No, no. No, I'm serious. Everyone let's go... " We're not gonna get a do-over. And I thought that that was really interesting and so showing the warts and all inside of that episode was really fascinating. We weren't... I was willing to protect them and not release that episode and not release the conversation, but they were really adamant that this is what the work is actually about. If there's one thing I can ask you to do when you leave here, if there is one thing, I invite you to listen to elder Dave Courchaine and his talk on nationhood.

0:23:09 RM: It is such a powerful expression of what it means for me in terms of reconciliation, and nationhood and how he very succinctly, and very carefully, sort of pulls at the fringes of this reconciliation conversation in terms of programs and services, sort of that's what we're seeing is like, there's this massive influx of programs and services and all these checks are being written and the industry is emerging and there's consultants and reconciliation experts and the voices that are being centered in this industry are... It's very interesting to look at, which voices are being privileged here inside of that space. And elder Courchaine very carefully pulls at those threads and completely dismantles this concept of reconciliation, so as to say It's not this public facing thing. And in fact, who gives a shit what white people think? It was like... Now I see some white people sat up. Well, just wait here. It's an interesting idea. And again, it felt dangerous, when he was talking like that. Because we have this idea that we're all in, that this records that we're creating a new status quo day by day, and there's no reconciliation handbook, there's no reconciliation for Dummies, right? Though that's a hell of a book idea right there.

[laughter]

0:24:48 RM: I gotta go. See you. [laughter] So we're supposed to tread very lightly. And I think if you're involved in this discussion at all, in any context, you've sat in meetings and your butthole's clenched tight, and you're like, "Oh I don't know what... If this is wrong or right, I'm gonna say the wrong thing, I can't pronounce this, I don't know... " It's like... It's hard work, and what Elder Courchaine is saying is like that it's way... That's hard, yes, but it's a distraction. It's way harder to rebuild your community, way harder to return to vibrant, healthy well and just communities, it's way harder for us to focus on ourselves than it is for us to focus on them. And it felt really dangerous to publish, and not because I don't believe him, I do believe him but I had never really heard it proposed in this way before, and... And so if there's one thing, if I can give you homework, you all have to email me and let me know you did this, go back... I invite you to listen to it just as an offer to you. I think it's very rewarding work that he put into that keynote.

0:26:10 RM: I wanna kind of stop going through this list and just kind of bring it back to a couple of different things that I think are really important. It's clear to me that if we are going to talk about reconciliation in Canada, we have to look at who's in the room, and you can go to essentially any reconciliation space across Canada, any given day of the week, and you will always find absent two things. Residential school survivors themselves, always absent, and you will find that Indigenous women and two spirit people, generally absent as well. And we have to look at why that is, and I'm saying that as a straight, able-bodied, university educated, privileged person. I realized that it's kind of fucked up that I'm like, "We need to center Indigenous women". Man up here to say "I get it". But we have to look at why that is, and how important it is that if we are going to make space and time for this reconciliation project, that we look at who's in the room. And for me, there is no reconciliation if we're not centering these voices, because these are the voices that have been most negatively impacted by the project. These are the voices that have suffered the greatest at the hands of this colonial project.

0:27:38 RM: And so if we're not listening to Indigenous women and two spirit people, through this effort of reconciliation, we're doing it wrong. And that for me is fundamental. There's no negotiation, there's no way around it. We have to listen to these experiences, and we know why. There's a national inquiry right now in Canada that's letting us know why. And so we have a lot of work to do to ensure that whatever space we're building is a space that center... Not only just centers Indigenous voices, but these voices, specifically, because we're very comfortable at thinking about reconciliation in a way that it has to be convenient. It can't be too hard. It can't be too hard. I get asked a lot to look at territorial acknowledgements. And like... "Can you talk to... " I'm like, "Hey did you talk to your neighbors? Do you know who you live beside? Who are they? What's their... What is their story? University's Dean, who are... Did you have called them? Did you make a phone call? No? Okay, you've work to do".

0:28:50 RM: We have to think about, if we're actually going to do this work, how difficult it should be, because what we're talking about is completely reframing this... Like, completely shifting the reality in this country. We're not talking about not being mean to brown people. That's not reconciliation. Also too, the Liberal government, doing the bare minimum right now, and disguising it under this reconciliation discourse is complete and utter bullshit. Oh, are you attacking the drinking water problem? Well, fucking congratulations. You're 150 years late. Like I'm not going to celebrate the liberal government for doing the bare minimum, for doing what they always should have done. I'm not gonna celebrate any government that is just fixing the foundation, because that's not what... We have to expect way more out of this country than the bare minimum, than fixing what is wrong, right? And so we have to look at who's in the space, who's talking about this. We're gonna get some aboriginalists that are gonna be the good Indians, they're gonna collect their check and make everyone feel good at the end of the day, and those good Aboriginals are everywhere.

0:30:17 RM: But if it feels too easy, you're being bullshited, 'cause it should be really hard. This project, at its core, is really difficult, because we're talking about making a more ethical and just place, we have to redistribute the wealth in this country, we have to look at how Indigenous nations are supported. Montreal is not going anywhere. So what is the Quebec... I know what the Quebec response is to Kahnaw‡:ke but we have to investigate all of these things. We have to make those relationships right, and that's really hard work, that's really hard work. And we're really good at privileging certain voices. We're really good at privileging certain voices. And we're comfortable with allowing certain voices in the room. We're really comfortable with picking faves and kind of just sticking with them. And we've seen this play out a number of different times with a number of different people, and I'll use one example that I have a personal connection to, and that's Joseph Boyden. And when Boyden is privileged over Indigenous women, and is now like a mouth piece for the missing murder Indigenous women movement, and has Justin Trudeau's personal phone number and can call the Prime Minister, but he can't answer back "Where you from?"

0:31:53 RM: He can't answer a fundamental question, that's a problem. But why are non-Indigenous people... Why is Canada so comfortable with people like Boyden's voice? Why is that so comfortable to us? It's a nonthreatening voice, it's a voice that is not rooted in community, it's a voice that is not rooted in a lived reality, it's a voice that is disconnected from the the truth, and so it's easy. And we saw the same thing play out respectfully with the final efforts of Gord Downie. And there is... We've talked about this last night at dinner. I cry when I think about Gord Downie. The musician, the person, the good work that he did at the end of his life, I have profound respect for what he did. We have to really think about why it was so easy for the country to go. "Yeah, I agree... Yep. Chanie Wenjack, Secret... Yep. Secret, path. I'm on a secret path now too, I'm in. Right?" Best-selling book. I mean we just consume it, and it's pretty easy. But Gord Downie had the chance to go, "Oh, okay, yeah, well, Secret path and Chanie Wenjack and I'm gonna put together this TV special and now a movie", and now the Downie fund was given five million dollars in the past federal budget for Indigenous education.

[laughter]

0:33:31 RM: But at the start of this, Gord Downie had the chance to go like, "Oh shit, let me hit Google, and then just Google it. If you Google Chanie Wenjack's name, there's a whole bunch of... Now, there's a whole bunch of stuff that will come up, but Gord Downie had the chance to amplify the voice of somebody that already wrote a song about Chanie Wenjack in '1970, and Gord Downie, through no fault of his own, goes through this transformative process for himself in his own life, championing this really good cause, reconciliation, creating a movement and an understanding around the time that we're in, in his final days. That's a pretty damn special project, but we missed an opportunity for Gord Downie to go, "This is my space that I have, I'm going to give it to Indigenous people", instead of keeping himself at the center. And what would have been different had he given that space to Indigenous people? Would Canada have responded the same way? I doubt it. So we have to be careful about the voices that we center. And if it feels too easy, it is. And I just wanna... I just wanna flag that because many episodes through 21 episodes of the podcast, a lot of the conversations in the podcast were very difficult, and that's how I knew I was on to something that was important for me.

0:35:10 RM: And that my learning was... At that time, it was profoundly impacting me, listening to people talk about reconciliation, it was very... Still is very uncomfortable.

[pause]

0:35:33 S1: There's a sense of, in reconciliation, there's a sense of movement that we're moving forward, that through this project, we're going into this brand new... This time, this new era, and that it's happening, in real time, every single day with the decisions that we make and as I was saying, there's no blueprint to this work, and so if we are thinking about "Well, we're moving this country forward or we have a chance to do better", we have to think about why. We have to think about why are we doing this, we're not... We're doing... 'cause, like, it sounds good, right? It's like it's the right thing to do. It's been... We should do this, we should do better in this country. But we have to ask why. And I'd like in reconciliation to... Like a bag of puppies. And if you've been to the Res or grew up on the Res, you know what I'm talking about, the bag of puppies. Sometimes it's a bag of kittens, sometimes a bag of puppies, you find them in the ditch, and like, "Oh fuck, who threw a bag of puppies in the ditch?"

0:36:55 RM: It's just 'cause your dog has puppies and you're like... "Nope, fuck this, that's too much work", and you just send that, and someone else has to pick up the puppies. And I think about reconciliation as the bag of puppies that showed up on our doorstep, and we can't just throw it out. "Well, fuck this, that's too hard". You're making the decision to pick up the bag of puppies and feed the puppies and love the puppies and nurture the puppies.

0:37:22 RM: And why are we doing this right now? Why are we doing this in this country? Well, because of the statistics and the data and everything that we know to be true in this country, is alarming. So that's one reason. But that to me is not personal enough. And so for me, I start to ask that through rebuilding community episode, ÒThe Sugar Bush FamilyÓ and a couple of other episodes, what does it mean to engage in this work? And I started to think about children, kids. Because at the core of the problem was the residential school system. Indigenous children. Is there ever... Can you think of a more cowardly act on the planet than specifically targeting kids? Is there a more cowardly act?

0:38:14 RM: And I heard Justice Sinclair talk one time saying, "Imagine going into an Indigenous community when all of the kids are gone to schools and there is no laughter, there's no kids playing." You might have heard him say this, he said that to me and I'll never be able to shake that, the image or the thought. So, is there anything more cowardly? And to me, in my view, there's not, there's just nothing more cowardly than targeting, specifically targeting children. And so children should be at the center of what we're doing, and that theme starts to emerge through many different episodes of the podcast. But for me personally, I start to think more about my children.

0:39:03 RM: And then the question of like, well, how much... So, what is this work about? Well for me, yeah, it's about family and children, but we have to make a decision. How much of this... How much of this stuff are we giving to young people and how much of it can we carry ourselves? So, for every Indigenous parent in this room, you've probably thought about this or had this conversation with your partner. How much do we have to tell our kids? How much do we have to burden our children with the weight of what is behind us in order to move forward? And that's a question I grapple with every day. And in my family, I'll use my own personal story. My family, before my grandmother died in 2007, she didn't get to see the apology and she would have been pissed off. She was like an old school Anishinaabe ninja.

[laughter]

0:39:53 RM: The best hunter I've ever met, the strongest woman, the funniest, most angry. Like you've seen these elders, they just look pissed off all the time?

[laughter]

0:40:05 RM: That's my kokum. I think they call it... Now they call it, what do they call it? You see that sketch, resting bitch face or whatever? That was her, just a permanent scowl. She would have rejected... She would have rejected the apology outright, I know that. But before she died, she told me, front to back, she told me about the day she got picked up to go to school and she told me her entire story. She gave it to me and it was really hard at the time. What I didn't know was that she wasn't gonna tell anyone else, she gave it to me. And what I've had to do is even consider what I'm... What I share with my mom, because my mom thinks she knows my grandmother's story and she doesn't. She doesn't. And so, when we carry these stories and we carry the responsibility of this work, we have to be very careful about what we give to other people.

0:41:04 RM: And this is a big question in the reconciliation space right now, especially as it pertains to youth. And it came up in the four hours youth episode is, how much are we willing to give to non Indigenous youth? 'Cause it's not their fault, they're not to blame. But they have to understand it. They have to wrestle with these questions, this is forever now. Like our children, your children, your grandchildren, the children that are yet to come, that will bless us all in this room. This is their project forever. We have to think about that, this is forever now. This is Canada's project and Canada can still say, "No, we're good, we're good." Canada doesn't need to recon... They don't need to. They would be completely fine if they didn't. The economy would clip along at a stubborn shitty pace. Canadians would still watch Don Cherry on Saturday.

0:42:03 RM: Generally speaking, we're very comfortable in this country, we know where our next meal is coming from, mostly. There's a level of apathy, we don't vote. We don't give a... We know it's gonna be the Liberals or the Conservatives, the NDP can't get their shit together. We don't give a fuck, we're fine here. So, this country doesn't need to do this, it doesn't need to engage in this work. So, we ask ourselves, "Well, why are we... Why are we in this room? Why are we engaging this?" And for me, it's the kids. It's the more work that we choose to do, the more of the weight that we choose to carry, the less the weight will be on our children and I think that's really important.

0:42:44 RM: I'm the first generation of my family that didn't go to residential school, me. And so I have a big round chubby shoulders. I'll carry that, I'll carry that weight and I have to be very careful about what I'm giving to my children, what am I giving to them to carry? And I think that that's a really important consideration in a lot of different ways. What are we giving to non-Indigenous Canadians to carry and how much of that weight and burden is yours to carry? How much of that weight and burden is ours to carry in Indigenous communities? And what do we do with that weight and burden? And I think that that's a really, really important consideration that was flagged for me many times throughout throughout the season.

0:43:31 RM: Last thing I wanna touch on before we open it up for questions and comments is when we joke about... I always joke about land, land over everything, just give us our land back, land, land, land. And I think it is politically, fundamentally, there's no question. Land has to be at the... Land and territory, water, where we live, we have to center that. And there's no doubt, and we don't have enough time to really get into that. But I actually saw this, why it was important. I saw it play out here in this episode in Nipissing First Nation and we brought together youth and elders to talk about Lake Nipissing. Lake Nipissing was considered a dead lake, just a couple of years ago. The fish stocks and the fish population drastically reduced, there are scientists from all over the world studying Lake Nipissing to find out what the hell's going on there.

0:44:34 RM: And a couple of different things are happening. There's a huge tourism industry in North Bay, that lake is fished every day of the week, every year, every month. There's just always people fishing it, there's sports fishing in the winter, there's like a little city that is built out there, they sell hot dogs and beers and it's like a red neck utopia. And it never stops. And the First Nation, one of their sources of own-source revenue is their commercial fishery. And so we're getting into a situation Nipissing where the local First Nation People are out there overfishing to provide money for their family, this is their jobs. They're over fishing the lake, and the tourists are coming, buying licenses from the province to fish the lake. Commercial fishermen are also out there, licensed by the province to fish the lake. And there's this huge clash.

0:45:41 RM: And so the community brought me in there to facilitate a storytelling project with youth and elders to talk about the lake and why it was important in an effort to just sort of remember how important and fundamental that lake is to their existence. And so I spent a week in the community. And day one, we decided we'll start with the others and I'll bring gifts and seek permission to be there and to do that work. And so I meet the protocol, I give out the tobacco and do everything that I have to do to even be allowed to be there. And then I go, "Well, let's tell some stories about the lake. Who's got a memory?" And just unanimously the elders were like, "I don't know anything. I don't know. Can we go? When is the bus coming back?"

0:46:33 RM: And I'm like, "Well no, we're looking for stories, any story, any story will do." And we're sitting in a conference room and no one's really... And I'm not the best facilitator, but I'm not shitty at my job, I'm decent enough that I can get a good conversation ripping around a room. Nothing, nothing. And I'm like, "Jesus Christ. Either these people hate me or they just really think this project sucks. I don't know what to do." And then a woman, one of the elderly ladies, she says, "Oh, well, let's go outside, get some fresh air. We'll take a break, and we'll come back." So, as we did and where do we end up? On the shores of the lake. So, we're outside and it's there where one old guy goes, "You see that island out there," I said, "Yeah." He says, "Yeah, they call it Thunderbird Island." I'm like, "Fuck, this is a story. What are you doing? What are you doing? You know all these stories." He's like, "Yeah, but you know... " The light bulb goes on, we have to be on the land, we have to be on... What the hell are we doing in a conference room? We have to be on the land telling stories and it transforms everything.

0:47:47 RM: We stay outside, we would bring the snacks, and the fruit and everything up for the elders. We stay outside and we spend the day outside and stories galore. By the end of it, I mean, we put up a map of the lake, was probably the size of these two boards, there was just sticky notes all over mapping the location of old fishing camps, and village sites and different things. And many of the... You get one person going, "Oh yeah, wasn't it, so and so that was at so and so?" "Yeah." And then boom, we start just building this complete community history, and in one afternoon, hundreds of sticky notes. The youth come in the next day and they look at that. And I said, "Well, on the back of the sticky note is the short sort of hundred-word version of the story. And what I would like you to do is pick two or three of them to think about and you'll be matched up with that elder, and we'll tell each other these stories in day four, five and six of the workshop. Same thing, no one's really motivated. I'm like, "I learned the trick. Let's go outside. Let's go outside.

0:48:51 RM: So we do one better, we get some boats, we get a couple of big pontoon boats and we take the youth out there. And at that point, I had acquired these stories and I said, "You guys need to really understand how rich you are here with this history." And the youth never really considered... I mean, they go swim in the lake, they... Some of them go fishing, but some don't, is really, really beautiful. They all select their stories. Day three and four, the elders and the youth are paired together, and they start telling each other these stories. And what starts happening is that the youth start to understand their place in the community, because we're using the Indigenous place names of the lake, we're using Anishinaabemowin to use those place names as teaching tools, and why they are called certain things. And the youth had never experienced it where I could feel the pride of the young people just emanating out of them, where they were actually... They learned something. It wasn't like, "Oh, I did... This is great but I have to be here 'cause my parents made me come here." They were excited and happy to be there.

0:50:06 RM: And the word remember is a word that I love so much. And an old man, I wish I knew his name, I wish I could tell you who it was. He came up to me after a talk one time and he said, "I want you to think about the word remember." And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Just tell me what that word means." And I said, "Well, it's to recall," and I'm like trying to come up with a definition for him, I'm like, "Well, it's to remember through memory. Remembering memories and then telling, sharing the memory by remembering," and he's like, "Nope." But also he did this, he was like, "Separate the word remember." When you are telling stories to each other, you are bringing your people back to the circle, you are remembering your community. And I was like, "Fuck." I felt high and I wasn't. I was like, "Whoa." And he just turned and walked away, he was like, "See you later." I was like, "Come back, I wanna buy you dinner. We have to talk about this word, we have to talk about this word."

0:51:25 RM: And to remember is, for me, for my money, for the reconciliation work that I want to do, I want to remember, I want to continue to center these stories, so as to put these circles back together and think about how we remember our communities and consider the stories we tell ourselves. Because the stories we tell ourselves, we often speak in this deficient language, we lost our language, we lost our culture, we lost our ways, we lost... And that deficient language is not just self defeating, it becomes the truth. And so we don't have to talk about how important representations in media are or have the mascot debate or anything like that, but representations and the stories therein are massively important.

0:52:15 RM: And so we have to remember, we have to center our voices and our stories in this project, if we are going to rebuild our communities to bring them back to whole again. And story telling to me is such a beautiful, beautiful offer. It's a doorway that allows people to walk through. And on the other side of the doorway, they discover this world, this experience and they hear voices and stories that they may not have had access to before. And it's then up to them to stay in that room and to find the other stories in the room or to walk out, close the door behind them and never go back in. But for me, Indigenous storytelling film, media, podcasting, music, art. These doorways that are being built right now are some of the most generous beautiful doorways imaginable. And so I invite Canadians to just continue to walk through these doorways, continue listening to Indigenous people. Stop fucking talking.

0:53:15 RM: I'm sorry about your feelings. It's really heavy to learn about this shit. I'm sorry you're crying, but you have to hear these stories, you have to hear these voices, they will make your life better. They will improve this country, they will fundamentally shift. Finding Cleo. Connie Walkers' work and her podcast series. It's a story about a family and this girl that goes missing, but it takes apart the 60 scoop in a way that if you listen to that, and you still are telling me to get over it, you're a fucking asshole. You have access to perspectives and experiences that just will fundamentally change your life. It will change the way you see this country and that's what we need. We can't stay safe behind our privilege, behind our own little safety net, our inheritance. And there's a massive inheritance that Canada has benefited from for the last 150 years. And we have to look at that inheritance and start getting uncomfortable, to kind of be cheap about it. We have to unsettle the settler. It's not my word. Don't be mad at me.

0:54:32 RM: People get mad at that word. "Fuck you, I didn't settle... " "Well, your people called yourselves that. Fucking, don't yell at me. It's your word." So, centering Indigenous voices, remembering for me is the project, that's the project. And by Gord Downie not mentioning the name Willie Dunn, who Willie Dunn wrote that song in 1970. He made the first music video in North America through the National Film Board. Willie Dunn is a Mi'kmaq singer-songwriter that should have been celebrated through the Secret Path, Chanie Wenjack story. You never heard that name once from Gord Downie. Why didn't we center Willie Dunn. Would Canadians have responded the same way if Mi'kmaq people went, "You know what, our guy Willie Dunn wrote this song and now you're gonna hear his family's perspective, his son's perspective, on his father writing this song." We wouldn't have accessed it. We would have rolled their eyes, we would have changed the channel, we would have clicked off. We wouldn't have shared it on Facebook but we're comfortable.

0:55:45 RM: We're comfortable privileging certain voices, and that's a problem. Let me close. We're very close to the end. I know we're at 7:30, I apologize. I talk too much. In remembering and using the circle as the metaphor for our lives, our families, our communities, our nations, we understand that in the circle, we all have a place in the circle, we all have responsibility back to the circle. That's what our lives are about, is about taking your space in the circle and contributing back to community and having that circle take care of you. And when you have holes in the circle and people go missing and die and are murdered and are scooped and are taken, you have these very broken fractured circles.

0:56:43 RM: And to put the circles back together for me is what reconciliation is. It's not about Trudeau, it's not about programs or services, it's about us rebuilding, remembering and rebuilding those circles, putting them back together. And there's a lot of different ways to do it, and there's no one right way and there's no wrong way. These are pictures from Fort Albany in Peetabeck where I was invited with three other people to be a part of creating a program, a youth leadership program for the community after a string of suicides, and there had been five suicides in four months. And it was a very, very, very intense time in the community. And we were asked to come there to develop some sort of leadership program that could be in response to what was happening, but also, perhaps grow into some sort of counsel that focus on health and wellness for young people.

0:57:53 RM: But young people aren't necessarily unhealthy or unwell, they're not at risk. We label young people they're at risk, youth at risk. I was a youth at risk. Youth at risk. Well, a risk of what? Fucking colonialism? Like, let's name it. I'm not at risk of myself, but we're at risk of the system of the country, of the project. That's we're at risk of. And so, we start to flag these things inside of Peetabeck. Like, what is happening with these young people, and we... This is the first morning, and we start putting these sticky notes up, and we're just listing bullying, violence, fighting. All of the symptoms of colonialism, colonization; ongoing effects. And pretty soon after the first day, this entire wall, the whole wall is covered with all of the problems. And it's a really intense day.

0:58:54 RM: And this is Edward Metatawabin who came in to close the circle, and he's a residential school survivor himself, and he asked that all the youth to please come back the next day, he said, "Please come back tomorrow. We need every single one of you." And he did it in a way that was really illuminating for me, making eye contact with every single young person saying, "We need you back here tomorrow, you are important to this circle." And we started working... Everything we did, we started working in this circle and by the end of day two, the walls were filled with solutions and ideas in responses to all of the problems. And so we work our way into thinking about, well, how can we fix what's happening? What is it that we need?

0:59:46 RM: And at the end of day two, we have a big team meeting and the chief and council come in in the meeting and they announced that they've managed to raise $380,000. De Beers, the diamond mine, and a few other corporations have kicked in close to $400,000 to fund whatever this thing is that we create with the community, with the youth. But that we're not to tell, he said, "Don't tell the young people that there's a budget. Don't do it. Just do the work and in the final report, price this thing out, let us know what we have to do." So, we're working from that premise, that there is a budget that we can probably do something for these young people in this way.

1:00:30 RM: But through the process, something really interesting happens and we're not telling them about the budget but we are having a conversation about, Well, what do you want to happen in your community? And how I choose to run programming and how I create the leadership model is, it's fundamentally centering the land and I use the seasons, and you program around the seasons, and that's the way I like to try to run it. But me being a dummy I'm like, "So, we're gonna use the four seasons, okay?" I've worked in the four seasons, they're looking at me all funny 'cause they have six seasons up there and I didn't know.

[laughter]

1:01:09 RM: The freeze up and the melt are fundamental to life from the north, it's like the core of the existence is the freeze up and the melt. So, I learned something. So now we're talking about the six seasons. Okay, so we gotta program around the six seasons, how are we gonna do that? And if you can read some of these things, these aren't trips to Toronto, or to the West Edmonton Mall, or a Raptors game, or anything like that. This says goose camp, they just wanna go to goose camp 'cause all their uncles go to goose camp, and they want teepee teachings and they wanna snare rabbits, they want food teachings. This all came from them. This all came from them. And so we started to look at how do we put this together with a budget and everything? And we work through our 10 days in the community and we put together this map for the community and we priced it out and it's less. We priced out the materials, like the good materials at around $45,000 and we submit it, and we go, "Well, here's your final report. Thanks." And we go home.

1:02:18 RM: A couple days later, we get a call from chief and council, they're livid, they're like, "But you didn't spend the money, you didn't do the work. We paid you to submit this shit, you didn't spend the money." I was like, "They don't want money. They don't want money, they want your time. Read the report. That's all these young people wanted, they want time. They want to be with the elders in the bush, they wanna go to goose camp. It doesn't fucking cost you anything, you're already going. Take a kid with you. They didn't want Play Stations and new TVs and iPads, they wanted time. And that's a resource that money doesn't buy." And I started my comments today saying that, that time and the space that we make for each other is fundamental to the work that we need to do. We have to make the time to do this work and we have to make the space to do this work.

1:03:16 RM: And all these young people wanted, almost unanimously, was time from the adults in their lives. And that for me really frames the whole conversation around family. Family is the revolution. Family is what reconciliation is about, it's not about them or us, it's about rebuilding Indigenous families. Being free to work on the Indigenous liberation project in this country. Anything short of full Indigenous liberation inside of Canada is not good enough. Our family should be free to work on that project. We shouldn't have to worry about our daughters, our aunties. But we do. We said it today. My wife, Fran, he woke up and he's like, "Yeah, I'm not sure of where we're going golfing. Oh, fuck, that's great." We wake up every morning and check Facebook to see who died. Did someone die last night? Is someone missing? Did they find so and so? That's our reality.

1:04:20 RM: And until we're free of that reality in this country, until everyone is safe, no one is safe. And how do we move forward? How do we reconcile with that? How do we embrace each other and round dance in the streets? There's huge, huge, huge. There's a lot at stake for Canada. The world's watching what's going on here, and that's why in the media front facing, we're all smiling and that's what's so hurtful about the AFN and Perry Bellegarde just cosigning all of this bullshit without talking to the people in the communities is that because the political implications of this project are massive. There's a lot riding on this for Canada and so front facing, we're smiling. Carolyn Bennett's got her fucking scarf on. Jesus. And then says everything's good.

1:05:14 RM: That's why we need to continue to disrupt. We need to continue to demand more from this project because the bare minimum and programs and services will not help. We've seen programs and services across communities be cut just like that with new governments. They go, "Nope, not that. Not that. Not that." It happened inside the national Friendship Centre Movement, core funding is cut from it. I mean, if we could make a long list of the reason why programs and services are not the answer. And so for me, quite clearly, family is the movement. And when we sent our families and we start to look at how we bring ourselves back to whole, there's a couple of fundamental pieces that have to accompany that. Land is at the center of my health and well-being; it gives me everything I need to be well: Medicine, food, water.

1:06:12 RM: And so we have to live in good relationship. Inaakonigewin is a law concept, it's an Anishinaabe law concept, but when you translate this word, it's not literally translated to law. What it's actually talking about is your relationship to all things that are, that will be, and that were. And so, it's actually talking about your reciprocal relationship to the world around you. So when you live in good spirit, when you're able to live in good spirit, in connection to aki, land, you're centering and you're focused on that reciprocal relationship back to all that keeps you well. We have to be free to do that. We have to be free to do that in this country.

1:06:58 RM: And so for me, this is why land is fundamental to the family project. We have to be able to bring our children out to teach them the language, to show them the medicines, to talk about where we come from in a free and unencumbered way, without private property signs, without being shot on farms, without being worried about being yelled at by our neighbors. We have to be free in our territory. And I say that thinking about not just of the current context but what we do in the future. Like, what we do in the future in Canada is so important in terms of land. And we're starting to see land being returned to Indigenous people, we're starting to see those that are well off enough with their inheritance to give their summer homes up.

1:07:51 RM: I always say that, "There's no reconciliation." And people go, "Yeah! Woohoo!" And then I go, "Give me the keys to your summerhouse just for the month of August." By then they're like, "No. What?" It has to be uncomfortable. It has to be uncomfortable and Indigenous voices need to be centered. And we need to remember, we need to make time, we need to make space, and we have to really consider who's in the room, and we have to be very careful about the way we proceed 'cause we're not gonna get a do-over. We're not gonna get a do-over. So thank you very much for coming tonight. Miigwech. Thank you for listening.

[applause]

1:08:42 S1: Great. Anybody who has to go? Yeah, well, one of you absolutely must be to if you have to do that. And I think we have a few minutes. We're a little over time, but we've got time for questions. Does anybody... Who wants to go first? I can go first but I get to have dinner with Ryan after this. Anybody? Okay, I will go first. Ryan, you started off in the beginning talking about the 2167 project, and I was hoping you would maybe present a little bit. What would you like Canada look like 150 years from now? Or, where do you think we're going?

1:09:25 RM: I don't know, I wrote something kind of as a joke for Vice thinking about Canada in the same way we think about the European Union. It started as a joke and the premise was like, "Well, after high school or university, kids in Canada fill up their backpack with condoms and T-shirts and go catch a train across Europe and discover themselves and straighten out their lives or fuck up their lives, depending on which way it goes. And what they do is, there's the food, and the cultures, and the languages, and the money, and the architecture, and the selfies now, and all of the great things that happen when you get to go out and travel the world. And we have no problem thinking about the EU as a thing with diverse cultures, and languages, and foods, and laws, and histories. We have no problem with that. We love it but we don't think about Canada the same way that these kids could do the same thing, catch a train from Vancouver and head out to Halifax on the train and experience the same thing.

1:10:36 RM: They could experience the same sort of diversity inside of Indigenous communities. We have our own laws, foods, cultures, languages, ceremonies, types of architecture. If we were free to live that way, they could discover the same type of diversity right here in this country. But we have a problem thinking about Indigenous nations in this country being separate from this colonial state. And by the way, my answer informs you I am far from a political scientist so I'm talking out of my ass a little bit, but that's what I think about is like what nationhood actually looks like and how it will and can transform territory in such a profound way for the better, in a really beautiful way. And so, I'm not a fan of borders, I don't think having borders is necessarily the answer, and I'm not quite sure how we get there, but yeah, full Indigenous liberation in our homeland, and nothing short of it, so yeah.

1:11:46 S1: Yes.

1:11:48 Speaker 3: First of all thank you for your talk. It's really great to see how you're laying your emphasis on the building on the social reproduction, like different kinds of subjects and the digging of family and social traditions. Secular colonialism is also built on a certain form of capitalism and it's not really possible to really build community when so many other different forces are pushing in. And you were saying you got funding from De Beer mining to an education project.

1:12:23 RM: It wasn't my community. I might have went like, "Oh, well, save the check."

1:12:28 S3: Well, but I mean...

1:12:28 RM: Yeah, I understand yeah.

1:12:29 S3: It's okay, so it's maybe the only check coming too so, and they're not. But I was wondering what your views are on thinking about the role of capitalism and alternative infrastructures and structures that would support this work on building the community or rebuilding the community from that.

1:12:48 RM: Yeah. Well, we know, I mean we know Indigenous peoples long had our own economies and some treaties amongst ourselves to trade and to move through each other's territories to do that and so we know it exists and we know it's possible. How we exist inside of capitalist state and returning to trade economy or some sort of mixed economy like that is an interesting experiment, but it's also happening. Nimkii Aazhibikong is an example where Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch are actually creating that. You don't pay money to go into the camp, you go there and you work, and you fish and you provide for yourselves and for others. And so, there are a couple of models where we can see currently where this works. In order for capitalism to work, it needs workers. And we know the structure is violent to women and we know that it's not sustainable. And so we do have to think outside of it and this is where land becomes so important to Indigenous futures is because we can't... When we.

1:14:09 RM: When we allow industry into our communities, you can't go back. In Treaty Three, where I come from, pulp and paper was the backbone of Treaty Three for the last 100 years. Well, the iPad comes and people stop reading newspapers and pulp and paper industry tanks. And Dryden, Fort Frances, Kenora, Atikokan, Ear Falls, Gal Bay, Thunder Bay. These are gonna be ghost towns if something doesn't change for those communities and we're not brave enough yet to imagine something else different. But it happened over night, almost 2,000 people in Fort Frances in my home town lost their jobs. And the Japanese corporation that bought the mill two years prior, over night, packed up their computers and bounced. Just like, gone. And a few months later declared bankruptcy.

1:15:06 RM: And so the response for the town was to open up a mine. So now New Gold, which is if you know anything about mining, Worldwide New Gold is a terrible corporation. They allowed New Gold into the territory, 'cause people need to work. And people lost their jobs inside of the mill and a Facebook group emerged called the Fort Frances Man Cave and it was former mill workers selling their trucks and snowmobiles that had leans and loans against them, just to try to make ends... Like they're breaking the law, just to try to make ends meet. That's how desperate the situation was there. So when you allow these corporations and industry into your territory, it's really hard to go back. And so this country has a lot of self examination that has to happen, and that's a reconciliation project in and of itself.

1:16:06 RM: And in one of the episodes of the podcast, I actually share a couple of stories about families that tried to hold out from the tar sands for a long time, but ended up making the decision to get employment in the tar sands just for different reasons. So kind of investigate that through the podcast a little bit, in a couple of the episodes of the podcast and I think it's a big question this country has to answer. Also shared, I was in the North West territories with my friend Denise and his family during 2015, at the end of the summer. It was the worst forest fire season on record, up there in... They put out all the fires above ground, but they continue to burn underground. And it burned through the telecommunication system and they couldn't find where along the road where this had happened, so there was no internet. No gas. Cause pay at the pump is convenient, but it's connected to the internet. No, ATMs, no internet. The banks don't work because they don't keep cash at banks. I don't know if you know this. If you have 20 grand in the bank, you can't walk in and go, "Give me my $21,000 bills." They go, "Sir, we don't have that. We have to make an appointment." They have to order the cash."

1:17:28 RM: So, all of our money is just ones and zeros. And NWT when this happened, there was six of us on tour, and we had $44 cash. We're like, "Well, get a gun, we gotta go hunt. This is... I don't know what we're gonna do," And we're on tour, so we couldn't get gas. There's no money, but what was really beautiful was Fort Smith when we were there, is they just went back to a trade economy and it lasted five days and I go to witness it and be a part of it. And everyone took care of each other, and it was really beautiful. And at the risk of sounding like Farley Mowat, it was like, "Oh, those Northerners." You know what they call Farley Mowat up there, "Hardly know it." So it was really beautiful to witness. And it does, let me know that we know how to take care of each other, but it's gonna take us giving up a lot of our comforts.

1:18:33 RM: In 2003, when my first daughter was born. This was during SARS. I don't know if you remember SARS, but the SARS outbreak was happening. We're in Saint Michael's Hospital in Toronto, during SARS. And if you remember that summer, the whole eastern part of Ontario shut down because a hydro thing failed in Niagara Falls. And so Toronto was in the dark for four days. Well, let's just say Toronto will not go back to a trade economy. It will be The Walking Dead incarnate, because even just in the three days without power in Toronto, the first day is kind of fun, you barbecue with your neighbors and you bring out the beer that you have. And I was like, "Well okay, this is fun. Sleep over." And then day two was like, "Well, it's still kind of fun." By day three, you're out of food and you're kind of hooped. Like, "I don't what we're gonna do here." And the grocery stores only have two days of food in them. So, once the grocery stores get cleared out, it's really dark, but we have to... We have to do it, we have to think about it.

1:19:49 RM: And there's a question in Dave Courchene[?] keynote where he asked the question. "If you can't feed the people, are you a nation?" Holy fuck, stop it. So these are good, really important questions. Yeah?

1:20:09 Speaker 4: [1:20:09] ____ for the talk. I can't just by myself because I'm one person. I don't have the funds to give back land, but you were saying at the end, they don't want your money, they want your time. Is my time still acceptable to give?

1:20:27 RM: You're here, yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, showing up is a big part of it. Likes on Facebook are also sort of a part of it. Tweets and retweets are sort of a part of it, but showing up is really important and bringing someone with you next time is really important. I think that's the best we can do right now. I don't expect anything out of anybody, and I don't think... Most Indigenous people don't, we're used to... We're fine, we're gonna be okay. But yeah, showing up is really important and I think giving each other time and space is really fundamental to the conversation. And what you do afterwards becomes sort of your path and your journey. And I get emails all the time that are kind of funny, but it's like, "Hey, you know, I read Leanne Simpson and then I watched this YouTube video and then I called my uncle a fucking racist at Easter dinner."

[laughter]

1:21:38 RM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it is happening and what's really... We're kind of joking, but everyone here is gonna have their own path on this kind of journey and there really is no right or wrong way and it's... That's the challenge, and it is difficult, and I don't mean to be dismissive, it is very hard work. And there's a sort of a saying that I've heard in many different spaces, people saying, "Strong hearts to the front." And so for those of us that have strong hearts, that hold strong hearts, come to the front of the line and lead, show us, do something, anything. But when you get tired and when you get hurt, take a break and be good to yourself, be kind to yourself. This work burns you out and it will burn you out, it should, it's hard, it's heavy if you're doing it right.

1:22:36 RM: So we're just calling the strong hearts to the front. We're asking people to take their privilege, to take their resources, their networks, their friends, their families to do that work for themselves. And you're seeing book clubs emerge, you're seeing the 94 calls to action are being responded to, slowly, but people are coming around it. So it's in all sectors, in all spaces, and we all have work to do if we're going to engage in this way. So, showing up is, I think, is a good, great step. Yeah, hi.

1:23:09 Speaker 5: Hi, thanks for the talk and the podcast, which I've started to listen too and the question is more about the podcast, which really felt intimate to me. This conversation, I had never heard them before in other spaces. And I was wondering, I was a bit surprised that you would say you came into the podcast with this political... Very almost theoretical way to see things.

1:23:35 RM: Yeah.

1:23:35 S5: So, how would you explain this very intimate vibe. And honest, you said honest, at one of the podcast you were wondering whether to share or not this type of conversation.

1:23:49 RM: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's the worst named podcast, Red Man Laughing, is like the worst name. I rarely laugh on that podcast. Was it you last night saying, "Rename it Red Man Crying."

[laughter]

1:24:12 RM: What are friends for. But yeah, and it was a departure from the other work that I was doing. And so it is very... And my grandpa dies in season five of this podcast and I'm talking about my family and reconciliation. And I watched my mom who wasn't raised by her parents have to reconcile with her father on his death bed, and I share the story and it's a miracle that because of the trauma in my family, is a miracle that my brother and my two sisters and I weren't scooped and taken from my parents, 'cause my parents were drug addicts and alcoholics.

1:25:01 RM: And so, I put this together in an episode of the podcast and I record it all. And I put it away and then I'm like, "Well fuck, I'm not publishing that." But then I think about it and I'm like, "Well, it's not that I don't wanna be at the center of the work, I wanna be involved in the work, I love the work but I don't wanna be at the center of it." But this whole season of the podcast is me at the center kind of wrestling with trying to answer these questions because I was so angry about the way things were happening. And so it is a personal sort of reflection, but I don't know that I could do that again in that way. So for me, it was just a chance to just turn the microphone on and let it happen. So yeah. So I don't know. I don't think I even answered your question. Yeah.

1:26:05 Speaker 6: Thank you for the talk today. I just wanted to add to what you're saying. It was raw and very real, to the point where there are other people that are equally angry and they get to walk in her shoes. And then they feel their own shoes and then they can take those steps. So, even though it's probably particularly yours, I can imagine a whole bunch of people just going, "Yeah man, that's fucking right." Or whatever it is that they're...

1:26:40 RM: A lot of those emails...

[laughter]

1:26:43 S6: But they're gonna move with you. They'll grow and learn and move on too. You probably didn't think of it that way.

1:26:54 RM: I mean, I appreciate you saying that, but I don't think of it that way. I have a weird job. Artists paint alone. They're alone. Writers go sit wherever they sit and write. And my job is I talk and I record things. So, it's just a weird job. But what I love the most about it is not the success of the show or whether it reaches certain download numbers, it's the emails, it's the people going like, "You are just saying what I can't, but I think that way, so thanks." And it's like yeah, no, not everyone talks for a living, so that's really cool. And then it builds this bond with people that I think is really special. And I started podcasting in 2008 when podcasting wasn't even really a technology yet, and I remember the first episode of the thing that I published got like 11 downloads and I was like, "Who are these 11 weirdos?"

[laughter]

1:27:58 RM: But that was the drug for me, it was like, "Episode two, 21. Who are these 21... Episode three, it was like 40 people." I couldn't believe 40 people would find this little thing on the internet. And now it's grown to 40,000 or 50,000 an episode and I don't know who these people are, but there's something there for them. And it's finding ourselves in those stories that I think is just that generous offer. It's like when we access, when we watch Rhymes For Young Ghouls, when we watch Colonization Road, when we hear, feel these stories, that's what we like about it. We see ourselves reflected back at ourselves. And so that for me is the bond and the value of having that bond through storytelling is so powerful. Yeah, storytelling is the movement. That really is. Awesome.

1:29:00 S1: I think that's a great place to stop. Thank you so much.

1:29:02 RM: Thank you all. Thank you.

[applause]

1:29:12 RM: But also...

[laughter]

1:29:15 RM: Subscribe to the podcast. I'm the worst business person in the world. Subscribe to it, put it on your phone and every time an episode drops, it gets into your phone. Thanks.




	Indigenous Futures Cluster Presents: Ryan McMahon	

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