Behind the Bastards - Canada's Darkest Secret: Residential Schools

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Robert is joined by Anna Hossnieh to discuss Residential Schools.FOOTNOTES: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/rcmp-herded-native-kids-to-residential-schools-1.992618 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/06/canada-dark-of-history-residential-schools  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/a-history-of-residential-schools-in-canada-1.702280  https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/  https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/historical-background/aggressive-assimilation  https://www.facinghistory.org/sites/default/files/publications/Stolen_Lives_1.pdf https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canada-indigenous-children-residential-schools-deaths-justin-trudeau-a8595441.html  https://www.anglicanjournal.com/sins-of-the-fathers-6853/  http://www2.uregina.ca/education/saskindianresidentialschools/gordons-indian-residential-school/   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. About a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's no me just shouting the word hitlery totally, but it's not great.

I'm sorry. Look, it's hard to introduce a podcast every week and they're not all going to be winners. Everyone's not going to be a triumph of the human spirit. So just deal with it. I was bad. I'm sorry. Hi Sophie. Hi Robert.

And hello to our guest today, Anna Hosnia. Anna, how are you doing? Hello. How should people introduce podcasts? How was that done? I mean, I don't do any better. I'm just like, hi, this is the name of the show. Okay.

And then I get into it. Yeah. I never know how. And I still don't because as I think I've repeated to people, one of the key aspects of my job is never learning how to do it properly. Anna, how do you feel about Canada? Canada and I have an interesting relationship. I spent the majority of like end of last year in the beginning of this year, making sure I could get into Canada, which was stressful. I remember this.

Because I had some criminal behavior on my record that Canada probably wouldn't appreciate, but I got in no big. They didn't even care. So I don't know. It's like a nice terrain with nice people. It's a nice terrain, nice people. Canada gets, you know, it's nice being next to the United States because the U.S. is always fucking up in like such extreme and invisible ways that as long as like, as long as you're just kind of quiet, you can get away with murder, which Canada has for as long as there's been a Canada. Oh, yeah.

You know, I like, it's a messy country, right? Like it's a messier country than you'd expect considering the reputation Canada has for like all the nice Canadians. Everything works like the government's so functional. Like we should all be more like Canada. And I guess if you're the United States, we should be more like Canada because they are a better country than us, but they're still, they're still messy as hell. And today we're going to finally come out swinging against Canada. Anna, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to knock them down, knock them down a couple of pegs. Rule with you.

I had no idea. I legit have no idea what you're referencing. Yeah. Like they're messy. Oh, yeah. They are, they are very, have you ever heard of residential schools? No. Yeah.

That's what we're talking about today. And this is a particularly ugly chapter of Canadian history that is now fairly well known in Canada. But I don't think most people outside of the Great White North have ever heard of them. So it's, yeah, it's, it's a pretty terrible thing. And we're going to talk about it and, you know, eventually whip our listeners up into a frenzy and burn down the entire nation of Canada. Probably not that second part. Yeah. Because they're still better than the United States, but like, you know, pretty messy still.

Do you ever get the vibe that like every government is bad? Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Every day. All of the time. I thought it was just me, but like, man, everywhere is bad. Yeah.

They're all, it's all bad. It's all bad. Some of them are like competent bad and some of them are incompetent bad. Like the US is consistently incompetent bad and Canada is consistently competent bad. And that is what I would say is the chief difference between the badness of them. Anyway, let's start at the beginning. So the beginning of Canada, that is. Our neighbors to the north got their start as a semi independent political entity in

1876, when the British North America Act united the three remaining British American colonies into the first four provinces of the Dominion of Canada, which is a pretty cool name. After, you know, that act in 1876, Canada got its own government and a federal structure for like the first times. This is the first time 1876 is when Canada, Canada starts being like a big thing as opposed to like just a bunch of different British colonies. You know, you get your, there's this colony that started out as just a bunch of fur trappers and, you know, there's the place where the people actually live and yada, yada, yada.

They all get united in 1876 and they're a, they're a polity finally. So this went over pretty well with all of the white people who inhabited the area that we call Canada, because white people everywhere have always loved Canada, but it was less populated among the indigenous people of the region who were not super psyched about Britain being like, now you're all Canada. Because they had been other things previously and perhaps preferred that to be in Canada. So the governments of the colonies of Canada had started setting up reservations for indigenous people back in the 1830s.

And these were kind of patterned off of the ones in the United States. Canada had kind of a history of looking over to how the US dealt with indigenous people and being like, what if we did that but quieter? So less of the, of the genocidal wars, you know, you do get, you do get some of that. The Canadian Mounties are certainly a part of the history of white people with funny hats and guns murdering Native Americans. But it is, it is generally a bit quieter in Canada. But they, you know, they, they operate on some of the same premises.

And in the 1830s, they start setting up reservations. And as in the United States, the goal of these reservations was to give natives unproductive land so that they would stay out of white people's way while we looted the rest of the land mass. So you would start out as the indigenous people, you know, this all being your land that your ancestors have been on since forever. And then Canada says, we're going to guarantee you that you have land forever, but it's this specific chunk of what used to be a much larger piece of land. And it's the worst chunk of it.

And if you, if you leave, you get in trouble. So the Dominion of Canada ported over several old laws that governed how they got to treat members of native tribes. And these had the kind of startlingly racist names you'd expect, including the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, which was meant to gradually civilize indigenous people. Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. Like, we're not going to be too fast for you. We're Canada, you know, when we, when we commit an ethnic cleansing, it's nice and slow.

Real, real, real even-tempered genocide. So the Gradual Civilization Act gave natives who had educated themselves in white schools the option of being enfranchised as British citizens. Doing so meant that they got all of the rights of a British, you know, a citizen of the crown, but they had to give up all legal claim to the land of their tribe. They couldn't live on the reservations and they weren't seen as natives anymore, as Indians in the legal parlance of the time. So you got to vote in all of that stuff if you agreed to stop being an indigenous person.

What? Yeah, yeah, that was, that was the rule. What the fuck? Yeah, the goal was basically to get all of the natives, the members of native tribes in Canada to, like, give up their rights to their native land and their native hunting and stuff that they'd been guaranteed by previous treaties. Like, treaties guaranteed you the right, if you're the member of, you know, certain tribes, you get to hunt in certain areas. And, you know, if you're a member, you get to, you get to hold certain land. And some of that land had nice mining on it, some of that land was good for growing, and settlers wanted it.

And they figured the best way to make sure that they could have it was convince all of these natives to give up their claim to the land in exchange for the unclear benefits of being a British citizen. So that's basically the idea, is you all become British citizens and we just kind of exterminate your cultures peacefully. So, I mean, is this all because they want control? Like, they... Yeah. Who cares if you have a native? Like, why do you have to, like, forego everything about your life to become a British citizen?

Well, because people found it very unsettling that despite all of the what seemed to be them, the self-evident benefits of civilization, Native Americans pretty consistently in both North, you know, the United States and in Canada, in all the chunks of North America that were being taken over by white people, were consistently unwilling to give up their cultures and their, like, the historical way that their families had lived in favor of living in cities like white people because it sucked. And among other things, that was kind of a direct threat to people's, white people's attitudes about the nature of the world. But also, like, they wanted their shit, right?

They kept finding, like, gold mines and silver mines and coal on Native land, and they wanted it, and the best way to get it was to reduce the number of people who legally counted as natives so that eventually there would be none of them left. And it was like, again, they weren't out there massacring, although that happened sometimes. They weren't necessarily out there massacring people. The goal was to just gradually reduce the number of people who legally counted as native to zero so that all of that land would be open for settlement. This is the polite Canadian way of committing a genocide.

Wow. Yeah, and so anyone who took the state up on the offer of enfranchisement would receive a grant of land that was not part of the reservation and a one-time cash payment, but they would lose all of the rights that they had as members of their tribe. But people didn't like this offer. Only one guy actually took it, and so the government of Canada had to keep pushing. They passed a gradual enfranchisement act in 1869, which had the same basic goal and mandated that enfranchised natives had to adopt English names.

The act also attempted to lay out how tribes on reservations were supposed to organize their societies and care for their land. It determined how many people could be underneath the chief and all this stuff. It was just like taking these societies that were seen as inherently disordered and uncivilized and trying to turn them into something that British legal codes could understand. God, I hate that. I hate everything about this. Yeah, it's all pretty gross, and both of these laws, the ones we've discussed so far, were eventually superseded by the Indian Act of 1876,

which is still in a modified form, law in Canada today. And as a result of all this legislation, it was kind of established through the late 1800s that Indigenous peoples existed under federal jurisdiction. So the federal government of Canada was sort of responsible for dealing with Indigenous people. Yeah, it's all kind of a messy history, and I don't want to get too much into the weeds of Canadian law here, but I did find an interesting booklet called Facing History, which is published by an international organization of educators that focus on teaching the ugly parts of history to people.

And I'm going to quote from that sort of summarizing how Canadian law evolved to treat natives. And they use the word Indian a lot. That's just kind of what the legal term was at the time in Canada, because racism. So we will be using that here when we're referring to the actual laws. The Indian Act of 1876 created the legal category of status Indian, a category that had long-lasting implications for the First Nations of Canada. Once it entered into law, the Act imposed a single common legal definition, lumping together different nations and languages into the broad category of First Nations.

What does it mean to be a status Indian? The original document of 1876 defines someone as being legally Indian if that person fit these descriptions. First, any male person of Indian blood reputed to belong to a particular band. Secondly, any child of such person. Thirdly, any woman who is or was lawfully married to such person. Now, a key element was the law's definition of who was Indian and what Indianness was. The term Indian was used several centuries before. The law simply formalized its use.

It is worth noting, however, that none of the many clans, bands, alliances, and nations ever called themselves Indian. And it's really messy talking about, like, a lot of people think that you just used the term First Nations for, like, the indigenous peoples of Canada. But that's actually only, that was a specific legal term for a specific subset of tribes. And there were a bunch of other tribes that aren't First Nations, but are indigenous peoples in Canada. It's very, I'm not an expert on it by any means, but it's like there's a really weird legal history that's basically, it's focused around the fact that the Canadian government really didn't want to recognize certain tribes as actually being natives because those tribes regularly rose in rebellion against the Canadian government, like the Matisse.

And so they defined them out of existence. So they made a definition of Indian that didn't include the tribes they had problems with, that those people wouldn't have rights either. Again, it's like the polite liberal white person way of committing a genocide. You erase them on paper. So you don't have, like, yeah, it's pretty interesting. Pretty Canadian. So this process, yeah. So this is how they attempt to do it at first, like just kind of slowly write these people out of existence

and give them an option to, like, become citizens so that they, because clearly nobody who could become a British citizen would want to still be a member of, you know, whatever tribe. But this really didn't work out very well. And indigenous people continued to want to be indigenous people. And this was a problem for the new government of Canada. Prime Minister John A. McDonald found this very frustrating in particular. He was a big believer in civilizing the native. And he felt that the government had to do whatever it could to sever the connections of individuals to their tribes

so that they could be Canadians. The best way to do this, he felt, was boarding schools. Quote, when the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages. He is surrounded by savages. And though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and motive thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. Prime Minister McDonald decided to commission a study into how Canada might most rapidly civilize her indigenous people. He commissioned a journalist named Nicholas Davin to travel to the United States

since the good old USA was clearly the best at getting rid of North America's native peoples. Davin traveled to Washington, DC, and he met with veterans of U.S. grants administration, which had enshrined a policy of what's grant called aggressive civilization, which is a polite way of talking about forcing people to live like white folks, forcing indigenous people to live like white folks, taking them off their land, taking their children from them, throwing their children into these what they called industrial boarding schools. Did you say aggressive civilization? Aggressive civilization, yeah, that was Grant's term for it.

I don't like it. A lot of these terms like savage and civilization and like what you just said, is there such... To refer to anyone as a savage because they come from a native background to just be like, you're a savage because you are a Native American. It's like, fuck you, you don't know my culture, you don't know their culture, you don't know shit. Because the word savage I think would be a great term to use like bodacious, like some kid does like a sweet skateboard trick and you're like, bro, that was savage. That's so much better, but it's been poisoned because of racism.

Just another crime of colonialism is that we can't use the word savage to talk about sweet skateboarding tricks. I hate it. Devastating. Yeah, it's heartbreaking. Also heartbreaking is the story of Ulysses Simpson Grant's kind of relationship to the genocide of Native peoples. Grant is one of those guys who you really want to like because, you know, the Confederacy and stuff. And, you know, the destruction of the KKK. He has some good moments as a president, both as a president and as a general.

And he'd spent most of his career with like a pretty vocally positive attitude towards Native Americans and against U.S. imperialism. As a veteran, he'd condemned the U.S. Mexican war as quote, one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. In 1869, after taking office, he'd promised peace in the American West and admitted, our dealings with the Indians properly lay us open to charges of cruelty and swindling. So Grant was a guy who like when he came to when he came into the presidency, you might have felt like, oh, he might actually be pretty good president in terms of like U.S. Native relations. Like he clearly understands like, yeah, we've been fucking these people over for a while. But shortly after he came into power, gold was discovered in the Black Hills, which was land guaranteed to the Lakota by a very clear treaty. So there's gold in them hills and the hills is owned by the Lakota.

And so the only thing to do was to orchestrate a war for resources and lie about the fact that the Lakota had started it, even though Grant actually like sent in troops. And yeah, it was like the Iraq war of the day, actually, if you read, there's a good scientific American article will quote. But if you read about like what Grant did to the Lakota in the Black Hills, it sounds a lot like the Iraq war. So the whole thing snowballed and I was going to say like us going for oil, right? Yeah, yeah, just like you've got like basically using a mix of lies and provocation in order to justify a war for resource extraction. Now, I have a question. Was there any oil in Canada also on like Native American land that we also tried to kill for? I don't, I haven't heard anything about, but people didn't give a shit about oil at this point, right?

Yeah, baby, we were all about golden coal back in them days. Yeah, so this is like the whole thing, you know, the shit in the Black Hills turns into a clusterfuck. It includes the massacre of George Custer in the Seventh Cavalry. But despite the fact that it was a huge disaster, the policy of aggressive civilization that Grant had initially announced in 1869 was seen by a great idea by Nicholas Gavin and eventually by the Canadian government. So they basically decide like look over at the United States waging a genocidal war in the Black Hills and they're like, it's too loud. But like the fundamental idea of forcing these people off of their land and into cities and into schools where we teach their kids, that's a good idea. So in 1879, Nicholas Gavin traveled back to Canada after his time in D.C. and he wrote a report called Report on the on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-breeds. Now, yeah, interestingly enough, half-breed isn't a general term.

That's a specific term that was the official, yeah, that's the official Canadian government term for the Métis people was half-breed. And the short version of the story is that the Métis had rebelled against the government a number of times and the white people in charge didn't want to recognize them as real Indians because that would entitle them to land and hunting rights and all that stuff. So while the Métis weren't considered to be an Indigenous people under the Indian Act, they were considered to be an Indigenous people when it came to the Canadian government's policy of abducting Indigenous children and forcing them into these what were called industrial boarding schools. So like they both were and weren't native people under the government side. But yeah, the Canadian government just called the Métis half-breeds. What the fuck? This almost feels like a JK Rowling book, just like so filled with weird terms that you're like, this is kind of like racism in a way. It's very racist. Oh, super racist. I mean, I'm just referring to JK Rowling books, but like this is just fucked. Half-breeds, fuck out of here. I can never wrap my mind around caring about a person's culture this much.

It's like, who cares? Who cares so much to be like, you are labeled this because this happens to be your background. Like, leave it the fuck. I hate it. I just hate it. It's not great. And there's a complicated history there that we're not going to get into in tremendous detail. But what's important is that like the overall policy, while you have the Canadian government considers like only recognizes some Indigenous groups as actual tribes, any person who is like an Aboriginal person in the area that becomes known as Canada is kind of covered by the rules that the Canadian government puts in place about residential schools. And basically what they start to mandate is that Indigenous children cannot stay in their homes. They have to be taken away and educated at schools that are located away from the reservation. Because like native schools are, they teach you to be a savage, like fuck.

Yeah, yeah. Daven Wright wrote in his report quote, the day school does not work because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school. So basically like people, like natives, even if you teach them to read and write, you know, in English and whatnot, they're going to like at their own culture. There's something and this is this is like a long standing like thing with white people in North America in particular is this like kind of admission that when people have the choice between quote unquote civilized life and living the way that like native tribes had for generations, they almost always preferred to live the way that the tribes had lived like nobody nobody wanted to live in cities or whatever. But yeah, so that really bummed out the Canadian government. Yeah, and they decided we got to do something about that. So that's, can I just say there's something very interesting about how white people are so and like especially like white governments are so good at creating identity crisis within like people of color, like to a point of like almost like you don't feel healthy mentally at all because you don't know where you stand and it's because white people are constantly trying to be like technically like if you want to be this you have to do that.

And it's like you fucking suck like a lot of like I feel like I struggle with that same thing because growing up I was constantly told I had to be a certain way to fit in with like other like white kids I was growing up with. And it fucked me up for a very long time where I felt like I had to go away from my own culture of like being Iranian. And then it took me a long time of like therapy to come back around and be like why I appreciate where I come from. And I felt like I was mind fucked to a point where I was my name is Anna, but I was called Anna so many times so long by people that I started introducing myself as Anna because I was like, well, that's what they keep calling like I was literally mind fucked. And yeah, it's this it's this the people in charge of these these polities of the United States government of the state governments of Canada are kind of inherently horrified that there might be other ways to do things. And maybe I don't know that I'm sure there's a number of reasons, including the fact that people who are in power feel like their power rests on everybody believing in the system they believe in. But there's a bunch going on here a lot of it's just about resource extraction right is that if you if you break up the tribes, then they can't hold on to their land and that's, I think really at the core of what Canada is doing here. So the understanding they have is that like if you take away the kids of indigenous people, you send them a great distance away to these these schools, they will grow up not feeling like a part of their tribe. And the thing that they the initial term they used for these places was industrial boarding schools, which is a horrible name.

And they these were what they sounded like massive boarding schools filled with children who'd been forcibly taken away from parents by the government. And these they were kind of based not on like the nice English boarding schools of the past, but on the kind of places that like in England. Your family was in debt or to poor your kids would be taken from you and put in these workhouses. It was it was based on the workhouses it was based on these places for the storage of poor children whose parents were seen as unfit to take care of them. And the hope of the Canadian government was that these kids would be educated in such a way that it would kill the Indian inside them. And as David wrote, quote, if anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young. The children must be kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions. So the Canadian government, big fans of this idea, and they started building a series of industrial boarding schools, and these were managed by the Anglican and Catholic churches. So both churches. Oh, this is going to go well.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is going to go well. What is there's something is there's something you know about, I don't know, say the Catholic Church and the raising of children that that might be relevant here. Is there a history there? Oh, boy. Everybody loves everybody loves the church is. Yeah, I love that sitcom. Everyone loves the church.

And you know, everybody loves Robert. Yeah. Yeah, product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his heart was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus.

It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Oh my goodness. Those products really washed the taste of a slow cultural genocide out of my mouth. How about you, Anna? Always love products. So, yeah, the Canadian government starts putting up these industrial schools, these industrial boarding schools and puts the churches in charge of them.

And this saves the government money. And it also helped various Christian denominations with their plan to gradually convert all the indigenous peoples of Canada. The idea was that it would be easier to get kids to adopt a new religion after they were forcibly taken away from their family and everything they'd ever known. Which is a tactic I plan to steal when I get my cult up and running. Like it does seem to be like credit to the Canadian government. The earlier you abduct the kids, the easier it is to get them on board with your cult and then, you know, the FDA lights you on fire. Anyway, the first wave of these boarding schools numbered about 69 institutions with only 1100 students. But the program quickly grew and by 1931 there were 80 some residential schools operating in Canada.

It's the name that like industrial boarding school is kind of too harsh. They transitioned to calling them residential schools because the kids live there. And I'm going to quote now from a write-up in Indigenous Foundations, which is a website that's kind of a project of the University of British Columbia to tell the stories of the kids who wound up in these institutions. Quote, authorities would frequently take children to schools far from their home communities, part of a strategy to alienate them from their families and familiar surroundings. In 1920 under the Indian Act, which is like the most recent update of the Indian Act, it became mandatory for every Indian child to attend a residential school and illegal for them to attend any other educational institution. The purpose of the residential schools was to eliminate all aspects of Aboriginal culture. Students had their hair cut short, they were dressed in uniforms and their days were strictly regimented by timetables. Boys and girls were kept separate and even siblings rarely interacted, further weakening family ties. Chief Bobby Joseph of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society recalls that he had no idea how to interact with girls and never even got to know his own sister beyond the mere wave in the dining room. In addition, students were strictly forbidden to speak their languages, even though many children knew no other, or to practice Aboriginal customs or traditions.

Violations of these rules were severely punished. Oh boy. Yeah, so it's basically you're trying not to kill them, but you are trying to kill their culture. Right, which kind of internally kills them. Yeah, yeah, definitely destroys people on the inside as human beings. Yeah, it's fun stuff, Canada. So punishment for speaking one's native tongue is among those common traumatizing experiences you'll hear from the survivors of residential schools. Because spoilers, this shit continued up into the present day. There's a ton of people who will talk like a ton of different stories out there of people's experiences here, because the very last residential school didn't close its doors until 1996. So this started in 1883 and continued into the late 90s, like Bill Clinton was in office when they finally closed down the last residential school.

So there's like, there's like fucking people in their 20s who went to these places. Yeah, one of the survivors of the residential schools is an author named Gilbert Oscobus, who attended the Garnier residential school. Now his native tongue was Ojibwe, and the Garnier School punished all uses of Ojibwe with physical violence. And I'm going to quote now from a write up based on Gilbert's experiences titled The Welcome. It begins with an encounter between Little Wolf based on Oscobus and Catholic priest, the Black Robe. Little Wolf saw it but couldn't believe it was actually happening. The Black Robe's huge hairy hand flew up, appeared to hang in midair as it drifted through a lazy semi-circle and exploded violently in the boy's face. The blow slammed him into the hard stone ends of an iron gate. Dazed and shaken, he lay in the dust, dimly aware of split lips and warm, salty blood making angry red patterns on a brand new Buckskin shirt. Indian language is verboten. You will not speak it again. Far off in the swirling mists of pain and confusion, a door slams, a lock turns, empty walls bear mute witness to the sounds of muffled sobs torn from a small frightened boy huddled in a darkened corner.

And like locking kids in cellars and whatnot sometimes for days on end was a common punishment for them speaking their language. But physical punishment in particular was a really consistent response to kids using their native language. George Gwerin, a former chief of the Musqueam Nation, later recalled, quote, Sister Mary Baptiste had a supply of sticks as long and thick as pool cues. When she heard me speak my language, she'd lift up her hands and bring the stick down on me. I've still got bumps and scars on my hands. I still have to wear special gloves because the cold weather really hurts my hands. I tried very hard not to cry when I was being beaten and I can still just turn off my feelings and I'm lucky. Many of them in my age, they either didn't make it, committed suicide or died violent deaths or alcohol got them. And it wasn't just my generation, my grandmother, who's in her late 90s. To this day, it's too painful to her to talk about what happened to her at the school. And both of these cases, these stories actually kind of weigh in on the more minor end of punishments, meet it out to indigenous kids for speaking their native languages. It was not uncommon for students guilty of language speaking to be beaten and shackled to their beds. And another common punishment was to have needles shoved into their tongues to remind them not to use forbidden words. That's some that truly feels like a story from like the dark ages, not like the 80s. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, like was going on when a lot of us were in school. Yeah. I'm going to quote again from that booklet published by Facing History. Quote, Many in the school's administrations believe that the students independent spirit had to be broken in order for them to accept a new way of life.

Students who did not adhere to school schedules and regulations received strappings, whippings, and were often humiliated in front of peers. Students who tried to escape from the schools had their hair cut very short. Indeed, such offenses would earn students long hours, even days in a dark secluded closet, often without real food. The cutting of the hair on the first day at school or for punishment had a profound meaning. Long hair has a deep and spiritual meaning in indigenous cultures. To many, it serves as an extension of a person's mind, reflective of its strength and beauty. The hair length and style also distinguish between different indigenous nations. And symbolically, the cutting of a person's hair by an enemy is an act of humiliation and forced submission. The staff at the Mohawk Institute even built a prison cell for those who tried to escape. Indeed, disobedience and escape were two of the most common forms of resistance to the harsh foreign discipline. And sometimes kids would die trying to escape from these places or escaping and winding up because they were out in the middle of nowhere, winding up in the middle of like a desperate Canadian winter trying to get back home. It wasn't uncommon at all. So there is absolutely zero regulation of these schools and if there is, they just don't care how the students are treated. That's really it. They don't care. The actual education at these places is piss poor at best. Residential school students did not receive anything close to the same education as white Canadians in public schools.

Like the goal here was not to give these kids a good education. The goal was to break their connection to their culture. And in fact, they didn't learn the normal classes that other Canadian students were supposed to learn. Indigenous children were taught only practical skills. Girls learned how to become domestic maids. They learned how to do laundry and cook and clean. Boys were taught how to do carpentry or farm or other manual labor tasks. So again, they're training them to be low level working class people because that's all they think they're good for. They don't want them to be natives. They don't want them to live like Indigenous people had lived for centuries, but they also don't see them as really being Canadian. They just want to take their land and make them into farm workers or whatever. And yeah, residential schools were of course chronically underfunded and often only kept the lights on with the help of child labor. Most of them operated under what was known as the half day workday system where they would have half days of classes and the students would work unpaid the other half of the time.

Not just cleaning and maintaining the school, but also growing food or whatnot doing things that essentially helped pay the bills and keep the lights on. And yeah, it was again, unpaid labor. And we all know what another term for unpaid labor is. Many students spent so little time in class that by age 18 they'd only reached the fifth grade. They were as a rule discouraged from pursuing higher education. So that's good. That's good stuff, Canada. I didn't know any of this about Canada and I am deeply disturbed by all of it. I don't understand. I'm going to go drop kick a maple leaf right after this. You say drop kick a maple leaf? Yeah, I'm going to beat the shit out of some leaves out of this.

I imagine you trying to, but it keeps like, you know how it floats down and you're just trying to like kick it, but it like keeps moving, you know. It's troublesome. That's why Canada has never faced justice is how difficult it is to drop kick a maple leaf very hard. One day our scientists will figure it out, but until then, you know, we just have to let the anger live in our hearts. So to make matters more heartbreaking, a significant number of Indigenous parents willingly took their children to residential schools. It was required, but some of the parents saw it as like an opportunity. It was not uncommon for parents to try to hide their children, but some saw this as an opportunity for their kids to actually like have a better chance of success in white society. It was also a matter of like the different churches, the Anglican and the Catholic churches would compete for students because they kind of wanted to beat the other church in saving the most souls. So it was not uncommon for like churches to come on to different reservations to kind of induce parents to pick their specific school to send their kids to one resident student who later attended a residential school in Saskatchewan,

but we had these two competing religions, the Anglican and Catholic churches, both competing for our souls, it seemed. You know, I remember growing up on the reserve here when they were looking for students. They were competing against each other. We were the prizes, you know, that they would gain if they won. I remember they, the Catholic priests coming out with, you know, used hockey equipment and telling us, you know, come on, come to our school. Come play hockey for us. Come and play in our band. We've got all kinds of bands here. We've got trombones and trumpets and drums and all that kind of stuff. They use all this stuff to encourage us or entice us to come to the Catholic school. And then on the other hand, the Anglicans, they would come out with what they called bale clothes. They bring out a bunch of clothes in a bale, like a big bale. It was all used clothing and they'd give it to the women on the reserve here and the women made blankets and stuff out of these old clothes. But that's the way they competed for us as people. So that's cool. It's fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Good on the churches.

So most residential schools kept students away for 10 months out of the year, somewhere year round. All correspondence from children back home had to be written in English, which most children's parents could not read. Families were deliberately split up inside with brothers and sisters kept as far apart as possible. And as you might imagine, the teachers who would willingly work in such an environment did not tend to be the cream of the crop. Right. Yeah. And I'm going to cite again from that Indigenous Foundation's website by the University of British Columbia, quote, Another significant problem at residential schools was the quality of the teachers these institutions attracted and were willing to hire. The Anglican run St. John's Indian residential school was the rule rather than the exception when it reported in 1947 that the teachers at both junior and senior levels had some teaching experience, but no qualifications for their jobs. The 1952 federal government survey found that 10 people employed as teachers claimed no formal education beyond grade eight. Unqualified teachers were hired because no one else was willing to brave the Canadian wilderness to work for pitifully low wages at cash strapped schools.

Residential school teachers did not in general approach normal standards. In 1948, a departmental study conducted of the qualification of the teachers in the residential schools disclosed that over 40% of the teaching staff had no professional training. Indeed, some had not even graduated from high school where do they just pull any like you just show up to the interview. You're like, honestly, like I don't like Native Americans and they're like, you have a job. Yeah. Are you willing to hit kids who use their native language? Yes. All right. You're a history teacher. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty great. So if the quality of the education was bad, then at least residential schools were also a pestilential deathchats that murdered thousands of children. I wrote that in a more positive way than it is. Yeah.

So there are numbers of kids dying. Huge numbers of kids dying. We'll never know how many, but thousands for sure. Yeah. In 1907, a government medical inspector named Ph Bryce reported that 24% of the time in Canada when a previously healthy Aboriginal child died, they died in a residential school. And this number undercuts the amount of deaths because one of the few things that would actually get you sent home from a residential school was being deathly ill. Students who were sent away from the school back home died with their parents and stayed out of government statistics. And the data suggests that between 47% and 75% of all Indigenous students discharged from residential schools died immediately after coming home. Wow. Yeah. And these kids just getting tuberculosis, spreading it back to the tribe. We'll never know how many died. Now, a lot of kids did die at the schools. The minimum you'll hear bandied about is somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,200, you know, over this period up until the late 1990s. But there are credible estimates that place the death toll at well over 6,000 children. The reason there's such a discrepancy is that virtually all residential schools made use of an age old tool for committing genocide without pissing off the neighbors.

Mass graves. When smallpox or tuberculosis would sweep through a school, surviving students were often enlisted to hide the corpses of their classmates from prying eyes. Sylvester Green, who was forced to bury the corpse of an Inuit boy in 1953, later recalled, We were told never to tell anyone by Jim Ludford, the principal, who got me and three other boys to bury him. But a lot more kids got buried all the time in that big grave next to the school. Did your school not have a mass grave, Alna? Fortunately, people weren't dying at my school because I guess white people ran it and they cared about the other white kids. I guess no one died at my school because there were white people at it. Yeah, I mean, you know, I do believe that every school could eventually have mass graves. And I think COVID-19 is going to get us there, actually. I think finally we will achieve, we will defeat racism by bringing mass graves to all kinds of schools.

And that's really, that's an improvement to cheer for, right? Yeah, I mean, let's cheer for it. God damn. So, at the United Church School in Edmonton, dead indigenous children were buried under a hedge. At Bluequills Catholic School near Saddle Lake, skeletons and skulls were regularly spotted near the basement furnace. At the Mohawk Institute, run by the Anglican Church in Brantford, children were buried under the orchard at the side of the school building. We'll never have any idea how many kids were disposed this way. They're still digging up mass graves around residential schools today. Like there are regular stories about them finding more and like, yeah, it's horrible. The Canadian government, one of the reasons why it's so hard for us to know how many kids actually died in residential schools is that the Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of Aboriginal students in 1920 because so many kids were dying and it made them look bad. The deadliest years were probably the interwar period, the 1920s and 1930s, but indigenous students kept right on dying at residential schools up to the modern era.

Sue Carabou was taken from her parents at age seven and forced into a residential school in the 1970s. She believes that dozens of other kids died while she was interned there. Quote, Remains were found all over the fields, but student numbers do not reflect the reality. Many of my friends committed suicide after their release, which is something that all of these kids, these people will point out is that like the death toll. One of the reasons we'll never know the death toll is that a lot of the people who died, you know, killed themselves years later. And so it's just like, oh no, it's just part of the weirdly high suicide rate that natives have in Canada. Anyway, Sue's experiences give you an idea of how brutal residential schools remained right up into the modern era from a right up in the Guardian. Quote, Sue Carabou contracts pneumonia once a year like clockwork. The recurring illness stems from her childhood years at one of Canada's horrific residential schools. I was thrown into a cold shower every night, sometimes after being raped, the frail 50-year-old Indigenous mother of six said, matter of factly.

Carabou was snatched from her parents' house in 1972 by the state-funded church-run Indian residential school system that brutally attempted to assimilate native children for over a century. She was only seven years old. We had to stand like soldiers while singing the national anthem, otherwise we would be beaten up, she recalled. Carabou said Catholic missionaries physically and sexually abused her until 1979 at the Guy Hill Institution in the east of the province of Manitoba. She said she was called a dog and was forced to eat rotten vegetables and forbidden to speak her native language of Cree. I vowed myself that if I ever get out alive out of that horrible place, I would speak up and fight for our rights, she said. And it's worth noting that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, you know, the guys everybody with the hats and the red coats, they were the ones who would drag these kids out of their houses. Oh my fucking god. Yeah. Proud RCMP history there. So Sue's experiences being molested at her residential school were not at all extreme. To date, more than 2,000 people have sued the Canadian government as a result of sexual abuse they endured while they were interned at residential schools.

This experience was remarkably consistent across the different religious denominations. Catholic priests raped tons of kids because that's what Catholic priests do. Anglican pastors also raped tons of kids because the residential schools were an almost deliberately perfect environment for child molesters. One of the most successful molesters was a man with, and I'm going to need you to strap in for this name, Anna, because it's, it's, he's a child molester. So we can't, we can't laugh about it too much. But his name is William Peniston Starr. What the fuck? Peniston. Yeah, I know, I know, I know. Peniston Starr. Peniston Starr. No, no, no, two different words.

Oh, okay. I had to like triple check to make sure Peniston wasn't like, how, how is that a name? Peniston. William Peniston Starr. Yeah, anyway, in 1956, this guy starts working as a physical training teacher at the Glycan School in Alberta. And then he gets promoted and transferred to be the principal of an Anglican school in Quebec. And in 1968, he's appointed the director of the Gordon residence. And his evaluations as an employee, as an employee were like consistently positive, which is why he rose so rapidly through the ranks. You know, there weren't a lot of good employees at the residential school, so he was kind of seen as a superstar.

But there were some early signs that there might, that everything was not all above board with Mr. Peniston Starr. In the late 1950s, he had to suddenly leave his job at Glycan after an unidentified conflict came between him and a group of senior boys. Indian Affairs official WPE. Unidentified conflict. Yeah, they never go into detail. The Indian Affairs Department published a report on the matter and said that there were issues within the gymnasium tumbling team that Starr trained, but didn't say what those issues were. Unidentified conflict. I'm just like, that phrasing is truly trash.

Well, do you know what it sounds like to me? Like maybe they, he tried to pull some shit and they confronted him. Yeah, that's exactly what it sounds like happened is he was trying, he wound up molesting or attempting to molest some of the kids on his wrestling team. And they complained and the Anglican church transferred him and promoted him. Oh my God. Holy fuck. Yeah, it's cool. But you know what? Doesn't abuse children on a wrestling team. Are you doing a horrible transition to an ad break? I don't know. I don't know what else to do in times like this, Sophie. I have no other comforts but botching an ad transition. That's my whole, that's my whole world.

You do what you can. You don't find our faces comforting. I have lost all ability to take comfort in the human form. The only thing that comforts me now is transitioning to ads awkwardly. Products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, so we're back and we're talking about William Peniston Star. I can't get over that name. You know what that makes me think of? I remember in history class growing up, they'd always be like, so many American names are just made up. That is a fake ass name. But to me, to think that someone years on years, hundreds of years ago was like, okay, now what could we name this family? Maybe Peniston. And it's like, what? You just named it after an anatomy? Maybe their family was a bunch of dicks. Because you know how they always say like, well, your family owns land.

So you guys are the lanterns or whatever the fuck. But this, maybe it's like the whole family was a bunch of fucking dicks. So they were like, and these guys will be the Penistins. I like that version. Yeah, so do I. So, yeah. So this guy gets in trouble for molesting his wrestling students and they promote him. He continues to teach wrestling. He leads a lot of trips overseas for like the dancing troupe and stuff.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Falwell Jr. just took an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty University. Oh, that's unfortunate. Poor Jerry. You know what I bet Jerry Falwell has never done? Molested wrestling students at his school. Do we know that? I'm kidding. He's almost certainly done that. Yeah, I was going to say. I don't know.

I'll be shocked if Jerry Falwell Jr. has not molested somebody. He definitely was Liberty University president after posting a provocative photo on social media. What's best about that is how he initially tried to argue that he wasn't drunk in the photo. When he was so visibly drunk that he couldn't even cover his stomach. It's amazing. I do think the Righteous Gemstones, the TV show, truly I think was such an outing of what it is to be that type of television pastor. Don't even pretend anymore. Everyone knows you guys are not these righteous, God-fearing people. Come on. Give me a fucking break.

You know who is a righteous, God-fearing person? Anglican educator, Peniston Star. Peniston. People, rapist. So this guy's career continues like a rocket for years and years and years. While he's teaching kids and leading overseas trips for the school dance troupe and stuff, he is just molesting the shit out of a bunch of children. And I'm going to quote now from the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report on residential schools.

Throughout his time at the school, Star had been using his position to sexually exploit students. He instituted a system of bribery and intimidation to establish a regime under which he could sexually assault students. Those who refused to participate were punished through the denial of privileges. He was arrested on March 5, 1992, on 12 charges relating to sexual and child abuse, all arising from the years that he worked at the Gordon residence. According to an internal government document at the time, the department had not received any complaints related to sexual or other abuse during the time that Star was employed at the residence.

On February 2, 1993, Star pleaded guilty to 10 counts of sexually assaulting 10 boys between the ages of 7 and 14 while he was the administrator of the Gordon residence. He was sentenced to four and a half years in jail. And it's since come out that it's likely that he has victims in the hundreds. Yeah. Four years, you said? Yeah, four and a half years, yeah. Wow.

Yeah, it's pretty good. Sexual assault by students against other students was also unfortunately very common, and this was the natural result of several terrible things. For one thing, huge numbers of residential school teachers sexually assaulted their students. Again, thousands and thousands of kids were victimized by their teachers. And this normalized a lot of aggressively sexual behavior to the kids, and some of them went on to copy it. For another thing, all these kids had been pulled out of their families and communities.

So they'd been like ripped out of the moral universe. They'd inhabited as children and stuck in a completely new one. Their parents were replaced by nuns and priests and teachers who I'm sure sometimes cared about them, but just as often beat them or molested them or had them help dispose the corpses of their peers. So just a bad place to be a kid. Students were often victims, but they were not necessarily passive ones. The book survivors speak notes to the extent that they could, many students tried to protect themselves and others from abuse.

At the Gordon School in Saskatchewan, the older children tried to protect the younger ones from abuse at the hands of the dormitory staff. Hazel Mary Anderson recalled, sometimes you'd get too tired to stay up at night to watch over them so nobody bothers them, because those workers would, especially night workers, would bother the younger kids. The younger kids' dorms were next to the older girls' dorms. It's like the older girls would stay up and not sleep at night to protect the little kids from being molested by night workers. Yeah.

By the 1950s, it had become clear to even the most idiotic of soulless bureaucrats that the residential schools were not working as intended. Indigenous children were meant to assimilate to lives as lowly paid laborers. Aboriginal cultures were meant to be wiped out, but it became clear that things were not working as intended, and so the government pulled back. In 1951, the Indian Act was amended and the half-day work school system was ended. Next, the government decided children could live with their parents whenever possible. In 1969, the Department of Indian Affairs took control of the system and pushed the churches out.

All of this sounds good on paper, but abuses continued. Schools were still underfunded and teachers were still underqualified. Many of them had not even graduated high school. In fits and starts, the Canadian government tried to close the residential school system, but this often just meant changing the words they used for doing the same thing. In the 1960s, thousands of Aboriginal children were apprehended by social services and taken away from their families. The 60s scoop, as it came to be known, kept the last few residential schools full

up through the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, when the vast majority were finally shuttered. The last residential school closed in 1996, by which point Indigenous groups around Canada were already organizing to sue their government and considered to have been an act of genocide. By mid-April 2000, Canada was being sued by an estimated 7,000 survivors of the roughly 150,000 children who'd been interned in residential schools since 1883. The Anglican Church was named as a co-defendant in 359 cases of abuse involving 1,600 plaintiffs. It was enough that there were fears that the national sign-out of Canada might go bankrupt

over all the lawsuits, which eventually totaled more than $2 billion. Lawsuits continued to stack up and calls for a government investigation and apology were repeatedly denied by the Conservative Administration of Stephen Harper. Finally, in 2008, Canada launched its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which spent seven long years compiling an exhaustive report on the residential schools. The head of the commission, Justice Murray Sinclair, is the second Aboriginal judge in Canadian history. His conclusion was stark and he did not mince words, declaring, Canada clearly participated in a period of cultural genocide.

Yes. So the Canadian government has at least been like, yeah, we did us a genocide. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. It's the least you can do. Stephen Harper himself apologized on behalf of the government in 2008,

although he and his government refused to agree that Canada had committed genocide. The Anglican and Catholic churches apologized too, although the Pope's representatives noted that his apology was a personal one and not an official apology by the Catholic Church. You wouldn't want to do that. Of course. More than $1.6 billion has been awarded and handed out to the survivors of residential schools so far. Yeah.

This is also very fresh and there's new stories dropping regularly about, for example, the scope of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police's involvement in this, new mass graves that have been found in different locations. In 2013, the news broke that in the 40s and 50s, nutritional experiments had been carried out on malnourished, Aboriginal children at these schools with the federal government's knowledge. Yeah. It's really fucked up.

Basically, they found out that all these kids were malnourished and instead of giving them all vitamin supplements, they only gave some of them vitamin supplements so they could watch how differently the two groups reacted. So they just used them as tests. They're like on top of putting you through the most truly traumatizing experience of probably your whole life that could potentially ruin you as a being. Yeah. Let's see. Let's just try and use you as science experiments as well.

Well, they wanted to know the effectiveness of vitamin supplements for white people and they had all these kids that were not white that they could test it on. So about 1,300 kids were used as test subjects. Subjects were kept on starvation level diets. They were given or denied vitamins, minerals, and certain foods. And dental services were withheld from some students because researchers thought better teeth and gums would skew results. So that's all fun. Fuck.

That's the fun story of the Canadian residential school system. That is... Wow, fuck you, Canada. I know. What the fuck, Canada? I mean, I'm glad they gave some money back, but that doesn't... That does not change a fucking thing. I would not say they've made it right, no.

No. They haven't. Wow. You know what I don't like? Go ahead. Is that... I don't like that. Oh, you don't like that?

You're gonna be like, is that... No. And then go on, but is that... No, I also don't like that. And I think there's this... I don't understand it, but I feel like it's just like the human being was... And this happens in all countries. Just like, if you find someone less than, kill them off.

And it's so devastating to be like, why has it taken... Even now it's still happening, but at least some people are coming around to be like, oh yeah, maybe we shouldn't just kill people. And it's like, barely are we coming around to 2020 and we are barely kind of turning a corner of like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't just kill people because we think they're less than. And there is... I don't understand like, what world was I raised?

Like, I have very strict Iranian parents. Like, how was I able to get to the point where I'm like, you know what? That's really evil fucked up and not a thing we should do. But then yet so many people are so far behind. It doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't. I don't... Yep, it's bad.

Yay. Makes you want to like, shake the country of Canada. Yeah, let's just kick the shit out of some Maple Leads and not look too closely at our own history because everything Canada did was kind of based on the actions of the US government earlier. I was going to say like... And there's... By the way, if you go to Australia, very similar things were done.

Yeah, the schools and stuff. Like, Canada's program was really particularly extensive and lasted a shockingly long period of time. Like, they kept it going a hell of a lot longer than the US government kept their kind of residential schools are going. But yeah, pretty much the same story. It does feel like the more remote you are, the easier it is to kind of like get away with clear genocides.

People don't know how much Canada gets away with, right? Like, when we were in... When I was in Guatemala, I talk about that time a lot. My Canadian friends, like I was hanging out with a bunch of Canadians. And as an American, despite all the shit that Americans had done to Guatemala, we actually got like less negative responses than the Canadians did because a number of Canadian mining companies had been guilty of like horrific behavior and like were at that point doing horrible, horrible things in Guatemala, which is a thing about Canada.

You could actually... If you want to really look into Canadian history, a lot of very specifically fucked up things around mining that happens constantly, both within the country itself and with companies that are headquartered in Canada, but are mining concerns. And we talk a lot about all the wonderful social programs Canada has. A lot of that is funded by resource extraction on a global scale that generally ignores the rights of a lot of people in the areas where the extraction is occurring. It's good stuff.

Wow. It's almost as if we shouldn't exist. Maybe just countries, maybe just countries, because like I always do feel shitty. Like there's so many things to criticize Canada for, but also I'm like, but I'm an American. Like it does. Like the reality is that they're all bad. They all do terrible things to people. If you want to look at any country that's considered to be one of the good countries and you scratch

it a little bit, you'll find that they're operating horrific rare earth mineral mines that rely on the mass, you know, enslavement of children or something. It's just one of the fun realities of the cool world we live in. Yeah. Can someone, if there is any country, I don't know, like Norway, like I don't even know what's good. Maybe, I mean, your best bet's Uruguay, but like still probably a bunch of fucked up shit you can find.

All right. Well, can someone tweet at us if there's any single good governmental run country, please? Yeah, maybe Iceland these days. I think they're doing better. I'm concerned a little about Iceland. Like what goes up? What goes on up there? You know?

Yeah, they might not be a real country. It might just be a Canadian mining front. Like that would be a Canada thing to do. Faken Iceland on us. Faken Iceland. Tricky ass Canadians. Yeah. Okay.

God damn it. Yeah. I am dying to know what's a good place. Yep. If it exists because a part of me feels like it just doesn't exist. Yeah. Let us know if a single good place exists in the world. Otherwise, I will continue with my plans to hold up with a bunch of children in a compound

until the FDA burns us alive. Oh, that'll happen. Yeah. It's kind of a good time. Oh man. Looking forward to it. Really. I just watched that Waco TV show and I was like, no, don't bring up Waco.

I rewatch it every single night, Anna. Wow. Don't bring it up. Don't bring it up. Yeah. 11 or 12 hours a night of just pure Waco. Wow. I just can't get enough of that.

David Koresh. I know. And it's such a funny thing in like popular culture because these like home flippers from like HGTV like built their like silo weird like, I don't even know home goods company out in Waco. And I'm like, stop trying to rebrand Waco. Like we shouldn't just forget. No.

We shouldn't forget what happened here. Like this was such a fucking bullshit operation done by our own government. Yeah. Don't forget. It was horrible that they burnt that compound to the ground. And the only way to make it right is to burn the rest of Waco to the ground and finally free the world from Waco. Yeah.

Just get rid of Waco. We've never been to Waco. We don't need a Waco. I have. I've spent many months there and it's a bad place. Is it? Interesting. It's nice to Waco, but Waco knows that I'm right.

Fascinating. I would like to go see it, but. No, you don't. You don't need to see Waco. Okay. Fine. I won't go. I'll go to the silos.

You know, if you imagine the parking lot of a big truck stop. Uh-huh. That's what it is. That's the whole city of Waco. Just a big truck stop parking lot. It does feel like, like when I look at the photos of this, these, these people, um, Chip and Gowanna, Joanna Gaines, who created this like Magnolia market at the silos. There's something so dark about it.

Like it just in the middle of nowhere. And there's like these giant silos that are all like aged and shit. And I can't help but think like, oh boy. I can't believe somehow this has turned into Waco. But I can. Sorry. Everything turns into Waco. But I can.

Back to Waco. That's the magic of Waco. Always be Waco-ing. If you're not Waco-ing. A-B-W, baby. Yeah. If you're not Waco-ing, you're asleep and that's a problem. Yeah.

Be a Waco, not a Sleepo. Well. New shirt. Be a Waco, not a Sleepo. Yeah. I hate this. We can have like a really nice, a really nice depiction of, of David Koresh's just. No.

No. The ripped cum gutters. I mean, just, just. Cum gutters. So you call them cum gutters. Yeah. That's what you call abs. That's the medical term.

Okay. I've heard someone recently call them a penis ravine. Yeah. That's another medical term for abdominal muscles. Yeah. Both of those are proper in doctor speak. This is horrifying. Ask your doctor about penis ravines and cum gutters today.

And David Koresh. Always be asking your doctor about David Koresh. Or you could invest your time into something else, like listening to some of the podcasts and it does on this very network. And I would like to plug your plugable so that I don't have to hear about Waco anymore. Yes, that's true. I begged Sophie to book me so I could plug these goddamn shows. So I have to do it.

I, I, yeah, you know, speaking of penis ravines. I actually heard this on the penis ravines penis. Yeah. The penis didn't ravine us. I, I do a show right now. Well, I do ethnically ambiguous, as you guys know, with my co-host, Streen Eunice, who has been on the show many times. It's called ethnically ambiguous, which is all about being a person of color in America.

And we, that's, you know, we're really, that's what we do. We talk about being a person of color, a child of immigrants, or even an immigrant in this country. Actually, I would recommend our episode with Joey Cliffs, who is a Native American man who is, he, I honestly didn't know a lot about Native American culture because even though I live in this country, you're taught nothing in history classes or your schools because they just try and disregard the fact that we live on native land. All we learn is the thing about the corn that you bury with the fish.

Right. Yeah, exactly. That was the extent of it. And then they ignore the fact that we also like killed a bunch of native people to be on this land in, you know, the United States. You're like Mayflower. You're like, yeah, murder boat. But also, yeah, we do that show.

I recommend the Joey Cliffs episode because he is a Native American man. He actually, I learned a lot from him. So check that out if you guys want to learn as well. But also my other show, which is less about anything. It's called Deck Heads and I host it with Nick Turner. And it's all about the TV show Below Deck on Bravo. And a lot of you be like, why do you watch these shows? Honestly, because it's the only thing that lets me turn my mind off.

And I, nothing makes me more calm than pure nonsense. And that's why I love reality TV. It makes me feel alive in a way I haven't felt in years. And, you know, me and Nick Turner, comedian Nick Turner hosts the show. And I personally enjoy it because it's about super yachts that really, really rich, horrible people rent for tens and thousands of dollars. Just so much money for like three days. It's absolute nonsense.

And why would you ever spend your money like that? And super yachts shouldn't cost that much money. But we just basically, we're going over every single episode of the show to ever exist and we just fucking rip these people a new asshole about their behavior. And it's fascinating to see how white America works. It's fascinating to see how rich people just sexually harass whoever they want and get away with it and how they just treat everyone like fucking dirt. So if you want to hear us really break down these truly lovely times,

because we have been recording them all in quarantine. So it's a great juxtaposition of what we understand as reality while like the Black Lives Matter movement is going on like as we speak and continuing. We'll hopefully continue to go on until we have full justice. But then you just said, and then you cut to us being like, what the fuck are these people doing? And it's fascinating. I truly enjoy it because these people have no shame.

And I think more people need to see how the 1% live. So you can understand like being rich and owning all the fucking money in this country. It's bad. And why would you ever want to be a person like this? So if you guys like a really interestingly dark social justice angle of us watching reality TV, check it out because Jesus fucking Christ. These people have no shame. I don't get it.

I just don't get it and it's fascinating to observe. So yeah, check out Deckheads also on iHeartRadio sometimes. Okay. Yep. Alrighty. And that is... I was just gonna say, and you can follow me at Anna host me on Twitter if you would like to see me, you know, tweet about everything. So find Anna on Twitter.

Check out her shows. And you can find us here every Tuesday and Thursday. Talking about real sad shit that bums you out. That's the episode. You need to know it. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.