Camp Gagnon - Native American Answers Every Question You’re Afraid To Ask

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get $5 off your Starter Pack (that’s over 40% off) with promo code CAMP at shopmando.com! #mandopod #sponsored #ad Yo! Dr. Anton Treuer, Professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, visits the tent for an expansive conversation about Native American history, culture, and spirituality. From explaining the complex origins of the Ojibwe people and their encounters with French colonizers to sharing intimate details about naming ceremonies, spiritual fasting, and traditional medicinal practices, Dr. Treuer provides insight into Native American life. He tackles challenging topics like reservation life, cultural stereotypes, and the real story behind historical tragedies, while celebrating the richness and resilience of Ojibwe traditions. WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Mando, MagicSpoon, Huel, Morgan & Morgan ,Bluechew and PrizePicks Prizepicks: https://prizepicks.onelink.me/ivHR/CAMP MagicSpoon: https://magicspoon.com/camp Huel: https://huel.com/camp 🏕️ FREE NEWSLETTER HERE: https://camp.beehiiv.com/ TIMESTAMP: 0:00 Intro 1:25 Meet Dr. Anton Truer 3:52 Ojibwe Culture 7:14 Anton’s Mother Inspiring Him 11:40 Cultural Dominance In Workplace 14:50 History of The Word “Indian” 21:19 “Inuit” vs “Eskimo” 24:00 Origins of Ojibwe 35:51 Importance of Understanding History 38:12 French Colonization of Ojibwe 47:30 Ojibwe Conflicts 55:34 Treaties vs War 58:07 Spiritual Aspect of Ojibwe 1:05:14 The Ojibwe Conversion to Catholicism 1:07:51 Ojibwe Cultural Practices 1:20:40 Importance of Guidance 1:26:51 Naming Ceremonies + Spiritual Fasting 1:41:16 Ojibwe Funerals 1:44:41 Medicinal Practices of Ojibwe 1:49:54 Would You Want To Be a Native 1:53:12 Were Natives Were Savages 1:55:24 Blankets Killing Natives 1:57:39 Washington Redskins 2:02:58 Reservation LIfe 2:11:21 Casinos 2:14:39 Substance Abuse on Reservations 1:16:53 Check Out Dr. Truer’s Work 2:18:46 Ojibwe Good-bye 2:19:04 Today In History

There were well over 100 million people in the Americas at the time of Columbus. The population of Europe at the same time was 88 million people. We have this conditioning of like scattered bands of roaming nomads in the wilderness. So as a result, we are left to our imagining much more than deep understanding. This is Anton Troier. He is a professor of Ojibwe at Bemagy State University and the author of many books about Native American cultural practices and history. and today we're asking every question you've ever wanted to know about Native Americans, but you were too afraid to ask.

Some like this. The Washington Redskins. Is that offensive? We also go through the history of the Ojibwe and many other Native American tribes and their experience with the colonizers of the French and the British empires. And what was lifelike prior to colonization? What were the Native Americans doing and how were they living? You will also learn ceremonial customs, the spiritual practice of the Ojibwe.

How do they name their children? What happens when people are born? How do boys become men? And ultimately, what is the spiritual component to the soul, to the human, when people die? This conversation is absolutely amazing. Anton is professional. And I learned a lot just from sitting down and chat with him. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp.

Anton Troier. Thank you so much for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Thank you for joining me in my tent here. Yeah, you have to have the only tent in Brooklyn. Yeah, thanks. Not in Brooklyn. We're deep in the woods. We're far away. We're somewhere in Montana, I think.

Yes, no, I think we're the only tent in Brooklyn. This is my goal. I think that the greatest human communication exists out in nature where human beings kind of started and have existed for the majority of the Anthropocene for the majority of our time as Homo sapiens. And then unfortunately we got all, you know, got all arrogant with her big buildings and stuff. And so I think these goods, obviously, you know, the convenience of maternity is nice. But I think we lose something about what it means to be human. So we got to go back to the woods. You got to go outside to go inside is what I always say. Yeah. Which is why I'm excited to chat with you. You're a very fascinating person. You have a really interesting family history that I think is an interesting thing to unpack.

Also a father of nine kids, which is awesome. I want to point that out up top. I love that. You are a holder and an expert in a specific native language, the Ojibwe. Right. Maybe not the Ojibwe. Ojibway? Ojibway.

Okay. Amazing. Also, an author, educator, teacher, professor, all of the above. And you wrote a book that got my attention. Actually, I need to give a quick shout out. You got onto my radar from a gentleman named Jacob Morton from Duluth, Minnesota. Him and his family are, can you help me pronounce this? Let's check it out.

Oh, yeah, Kuchuching First Nation. Koochiching First Nation. So he is a part of that tribal group in Ontario, and he requested that we speak. He said, if you're trying to learn anything about native language, culture, customs, you're the guy. So shout out to him, and thank you so much for agreeing to the opportunity. Hey, thanks for having me in, and thank you for thinking of me all the way from Kuchiching First Nation. I do go through Kuchiching pretty often. I live in northern Minnesota in Bemidji, and our property actually is partially on and partially off the Leach Lake Reservation, so I get to live in my home community.

And one of my sons is an enrolled member at Niggigusa Minikonning First Nation, which is right next door to Kuchiching. So we get up there pretty often. So can you tell me about the Ojibwe, the group that you grew up in that you were a member of? What can you tell me about them as a cultural group? Again, I don't want to group all natives or First Nation people as a monolith. And I know that there's a vast diversity amongst a tribal group. So can you tell me about yours? Sure, I'm happy to do that.

You know, maybe first of all, for the folks listening in today, there's a lot of diversity within native communities. In the United States, there are 574 different federally recognized tribes. And just like, you know, it wouldn't work to say, what do white people think about abortion, good or bad? And give one simple, easy answer. We know there's a diversity of views and opinions and, you know, experiences and so forth. It's like that for us, too. So, I mean, I got a house full of natives. I don't even know what they're thinking most of the time.

It can really only represent me. But the Ojibwe are one of the larger groups. They're about 600,000 Ojibwe people. and our population straddles the U.S.-Canadian border. So on the Canadian side, there are 141 Ojibwe First Nations, and in the United States, there are Ojibwe communities across Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and even into Montana. And within the Ojibwe population, is probably most accurate to say we are a collection

of interrelated dialect and cultural groupings. So we have lots of things in common, certainly feel lots of affinity towards one another, but just imagine where I live, one of the staple foods is wild rice. And it grows in muddy, shallow bottomed lakes and rivers. You go out there with a canoe and a couple of sticks, two people, and you bend the stocks over the canoe

and knock the seeds into your canoe, parch it, and then it's food. And it might sound like super primitive, but I've been out at Lower Rice Lake on the White Earth Reservation when they open up the rice harvesting season. 200 guys will go out there to knock rice, and they'll knock 50,000 pounds of rice by noon. And so now it's, you know,

it's an ancient custom, but it's a multimillion dollar business. It's in all the grocery stores in New York and everywhere else. And so wild rice doesn't, doesn't even grow in the Western Ojibwe communities because you're out into the Canadian and American plains. And, you know, and you go to the far eastern edges of Ojibwe country on the Quebec border. It doesn't grow there either. But that's like Ojibwe soul food in Minnesota, Wisconsin, you know, much of Ontario and Manitoba.

just to give a hint for like cultural variation within that group. That said, I mean, we communicate with each other all the time. There's a lot of exciting stuff going on with language revitalization, you know, political mobilization, all kinds of things. And we certainly communicate with one another and with lots of other tribes too and work together to try to get things done. But we're not, as you mentioned, a monolith. Right. And your mother was Ojibwe. Yes.

Oh, wow. And did she grow up on Res? She did. Yeah, she had an amazing childhood. You know, she was born in the Cass Lake Indian Hospital, which is on the Leech Lake Reservation. She was actually an enrolled member at White Earth, which is the next Res over. Back in the 1800s, the U.S. government was trying to relocate Ojibwe people to White Earth. So you could, they were forcing people to get enrolled at White Earth rather than their community of origin.

So she was enrolled over there as a citizen, but never lived there. She was always resident on the Leach Lake Reservation. Anyway, she was born there, lived her first 18 years on the reservation, which is a big place. It's about 40 miles by 40 miles. They're 10,000 tribal members. And her whole childhood, she met one professional native person ever. Wow. So out of 10,000 people?

They couldn't find one to be a teacher, a social worker, a banker, a police officer. And it wasn't because none of those 10,000 people wanted the job. And it wasn't because none of those 10,000 people were capable of such a job. It's because even in a native community, the systems were that effective at excluding native people from positions of power. and economic mobility. How do those exclusions work? Well, the way they've worked in so many other places. Sometimes it was just people being jerks.

But oftentimes, it's just with the nature and structure of the systems themselves. So to be an educator in America. You need to go to college. You need an educator license. And there are lots of hoops. to jump through. And there are barriers at every step of the way to finishing high school, to going to college, to navigating teacher licensure programs, and then finding gainful employment, especially in your community of origin. You know, so there's so many different things to unpack.

And it was pretty interesting. The one professional native person my mom met, and she had a pretty visceral experience with poverty. They'd pull all the kids from school for two weeks at a time to harvest wild rice for hunting, for fishing, and for the production of maple syrup and sugar. That's eight weeks out of school right there, you know? But the one professional person she met was the school nurse. So she did finish high school and she thought maybe I could do that. So she ended up going to nursing school. And one of her first jobs was working for our tribe's health program. And she thought, even here, native people are getting pushed around. Enough of that. And she went back to school and got a law degree. She was actually the first female native attorney in the state of

Minnesota. Wow. So then when I was a kid, she'd bring me with her to court. And she'd say, you just sit there. Don't say anything. So, you know, I'd sit there and not say anything. And I couldn't really remember her court case as well, but I remember stuff. I remember she was the only woman in court. I remember that she and her law partner, Paul Day, they were the only natives in court. And I would just come walking out and they're thinking, you know what? We can do stuff. It's the D and the DEI, diversity representation, role models, it matters. And my mom was so smart, she could have been anything.

She could only imagine herself being the one thing she saw another native person do. and, you know, it opened my mind to the possibilities of what I could do when I saw her and her law partner. And by the way, we just had the retirement celebration for Paul Day. They asked me to speak and I had to say, you were the first native man I ever saw doing something professional. And there were about 300 people in the room. And they were all native judges, lawyers, educators, and social workers. I said, look how far we've come. and think how much further we still have to go

and what a difference one person can make. Yeah, it is interesting how much representation in that sense makes a difference. You know, like, there's just little stories where people just kind of do the things that the people that they're around that they identify with also do. Like even, you know, an immigration story

is coming to America. Like, you know, people will do industries that their friends are doing, that their families are doing. One that I always find interesting is like Vietnamese immigrants come to America and typically work in like aesthetics, you know, nail and, you know, manicure, pedicure. And I believe it was one woman in like the 50s that came that started the first one and created an entire industry that basically took up an entire sort of like migratory group. the same with Indian

from Southeast Asia and like hotel businesses that there was one guy that came and you can track it to this individual person. It wasn't that long ago and that one person setting an example of here's how things are done, here's what we can do in this place and showing the rest

of the people that were the same ethnicity, same nation, same language, here's what we can do and here's how we can sort of function in this new location. And in that point. Yeah, it's interesting because I don't know if Americans, at least for myself, don't recognize how much that matters when you are of the minority, when you are of the outgroup, seeing people sort of, you know, moving up the career ladder in that way. Yeah, I think it's at every,

you know, fault line in our society. So when you have any particular profession circle, be it social, political, economic that's dominated by one particular group of people. You have both cultural and sometimes overt barriers of entry to people who are outside of that group. And then you also have, you know, the pull of affinity, you know, for those who are within that group. And so, you know, it makes a difference. You know, we see this like women have been denied gainful employment or the same wages in so many different circles. So oftentimes when there are professions that have been, you know, where women are more dominant, then it is more appealing and easier for women to find entry into those positions. And of course, they're trailblazers

breaking into all kinds of other fields too. But you have to blaze the trail, you know? And so there's both the pull of affinity space and there's the push away, you know, that you find in a lot of places. So a lot of professions were dominated by white folk, you know, and there were overt barriers of entry to people of color. And it's still an ongoing effort to break those down. And in so many other regards, too. And I do feel we've made tremendous progress. but certainly we got plenty more to do. Right.

What can you speak to the history of the Ojibwe? I know when tracking native history in my mind, again, oh, I want to bring this up also, the book that you wrote, that I love the title, and correct me on the title, I don't know the exact wording. Basically, all the questions about Indians that you've always wanted to ask,

but you were too afraid. Oh, yeah, everything you wanted to know about Indians, but we're afraid to ask. Yes. So before we actually go to the history, we've said the eye word, a few times. Oh, yeah. We've said Indian, which, again, as a white guy, I don't, I don't know the sort of cultural implication of that. So what is the strategic choice behind using that word, and what

is the nature of the word Indian mean to natives today? Yeah, so words matter and vocabulary choices matter. And unfortunately, this is an unsettled debate within native circles yet today. Sure. Which can make it really difficult, especially for folks, outside of Native circles. But we've seen this happen in many, many groups. Is it Hispanic, Latino, Latina, Latinx, Latin, eh, you know. And we've seen this with, you know, black, African American, certainly not colored people, but maybe people of color when you're looking for an inclusive label, you know.

And so you just have to get familiar with. what's going on in the landscape. I would love in the United States for us to do what they did in Canada, where they had a national conversation, representatives from each of the native communities, and they said, instead of using Indian or Aboriginal, which were the terms that had been in use in Canada, they said, we'll dispense with those. We'll call the communities instead of reserves. We'll call them First Nations. And we will call the people from there, First Nations people. They still had discussions there. So they actually have three labels in Canada. So it's First Nations. The Arctic indigenous folks still prefer Inuit. And then there's a third group

Meti, which has their own really fascinating history. They actually have their own language, Michif, which is a combination mainly of Ojibwe and Cree verbs and French nouns and his, you know, racially diverse population. Oh, interesting. So that's Canada. Now here in the United States, we haven't gotten there. And it's hard to have a conversation that everybody is well represented in or get all of them working together. And, you know, I think as a general rule

for folks who are listening in today, Native American and indigenous are considered politically correct. You're not going to hurt somebody's feelings. You won't offend them. You know, that's fine. But they are a little ambiguous. So if you have someone who's Maori from New Zealand and they're here in America going to college, they won't identify as white, black, they're indigenous.

But that's different from being North American indigenous. So now you're back to a lot of syllables just to provide clarity. But once you've established context, those are pretty commonly used by, you know, native and non-native folks. However, There's another layer to indigenous identity, which is, by the way, quite complex. Like, who's native and who decides is not a simple question. But being native is not just being part of a racial or ethnic group. It's also a political identity. So there are 574 federally recognized reservations in the United States. someone who is a member of one is a citizen of their native nation

as well as the United States so it's like dual citizenship so just like you know what does it take to be a German citizen well there's kind of complex there's a little process if you're born there

you can become a German citizen you know if you have you know parents who are from there or marry someone from there you can become you know, a German citizen, even if you weren't born there. There's a process. For tribes, having citizenship in your tribe, they've been hunting for the right way to have that included in the vocabulary. So as a result, the words American Indian have not been entirely abandoned, even though obviously Christopher Columbus was lost, thought he was in China, no, Japan, no,

India, yes, and these are Indians boom and it stuck, and it was obviously erroneous. But it's kind of hung around and it's been used by the American Indian movement, the National Congress of American Indians. And it's kind of a way to differentiate those who have political status as a native person versus just heritage or world indigenous. So it has a different kind of meaning because it speaks to that political status and that word is enshrined in American law and so forth. But obviously, it's very politically incorrect, even though it has not been abandoned, including by Native folks. But usually that's the context.

As far as I'm concerned, maybe we could just adopt like Native nations, just a little different from our Canadian brothers and sisters, use that for, you know, the political one That would simplify a lot of things. We just haven't gotten there. So for me, you know, I tend to have this conversation, establish a context, you know, for our conversation, I'll probably use them all, somewhat interchangeably aware of their shortcomings, mainly as a means of setting up some safe space for the conversation. But I do think it's good. And I usually recommend people to do this. If you're working for a school, a program doing business, then talk to your stakeholders.

ask them what they prefer. Then you can do that. And it puts you in touch with the native folks you're working for or serving and gets you a get out and getting beat up around the years card. We can all use one of those. You know, and then the conversation can proceed.

This might be outside of your purview, but I know that there's a very sort of contested debate around the term Eskimo. And I asked because you grew up, obviously, in the north. That term is obviously, I've heard different approaches to it, that it is antiquated. I've heard outright as a slur. I'm curious, again, you not necessarily

being from, you know, the groups that might be Inuit. What is your impression of that term and how it's used amongst the people that it would be referencing? Oh, yeah. So in the Ojibwe language, the word is Eshkimu, and it means raw eater and describes like a culinary practice, people eating raw seal meat and things like that. In the Cree language, It is Eskimu. They're linguistically related to the Ojibwe and has the same meaning. So a lot of the Inuit say, why should we use a word from a different tribe that describes our culinary practice as opposed to our word, Inuit, meaning the people. Oh, that's what Inuit means.

The people. Yeah. So that's, I think actually many, perhaps most of the tribal terms of self-reference are. or something like that. Like Mexicans will say like La Rasa, like the race or like the people, effectively the same thing. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. But in any

event, for the most part, you know, the origin was not a slur so much as a descriptor, but it has been received that way. You know, the origin of the swastika was not evil, but there was new meaning ascribed

to it. Yeah. I mean, I think effectively every slur. Like, I think every slur is description plus violence. And then it becomes a slur. It initially is a description plus the violence that's attached to it. Yeah. So for the most part, I'm like, power to the people. We can all say Inuit, since that's the preferred term. The only difference you'll have is that in Alaska, the Inuit population there, the Yupik, Eskimo have that as the formal name for their community. Their Inuit, who use Yupik Eskimo as a term of self-reference. So that is, you know, a political label that's kind of embraced in that community,

but they're aware of all of the history that we discussed. But there are so many other, you know, hundreds of Inuit communities. And they're like, across Canada, it is Inuit. it is not Eskimo get it right interesting yeah okay now I would love to talk to obviously like the current state of like you know political reservation affairs and all the uh you know intersectional issues and benefits that go along with that topic I think would be helpful to kind of outline the history like we mentioned before so where could you even say the Ojibway begins I know this is an ancient culture so I don't know if there is like a genesis point

but how would you sort of unpack Ojibwe history Oh yeah, well, let's like, let's talk about the history of white people and sum it all up in a few minutes. Yeah, so, you know, a couple of things that might be helpful for framing the conversation about like who are the Ojibwe and what is the history. One thing is this for all human beings. All cultures change over time. They change way faster than most people realize. When I went to high school, they still made us read Jeffrey Chaucer, who's like one of the first. human beings ever to write anything down in English.

I could barely read that stuff. Yeah. The oh ye, oh yeah, you know? He was only writing 600 years ago. Yeah. And that's a language widely spoken, widely published all over planet Earth,

right? That's only 600 years of language changed to get from Jeffrey Chaucer to where we're at now. So that happens with everybody. And I think there's some conditioning that especially people in America get, well, really around the world, about Native Americans. 87% educational standards that even mention native people are stories from before 1900.

And there's stories of trauma, tragedy, and loss. So Americans are conditioned to think of natives as something that happened in the past. And that anything that doesn't look like it just stepped off the set from dances with wolves is considered inauthentic. And so that has something to do. with the programming. And, you know, there are more movies about aliens than Native Americans. So as a result, we are left to our imagining much more than deep understanding. So we're running against that cultural conditioning, you know, just to describe who a people are.

Right. That said, it's interesting. I was reading The Sapiens book, and then I was reading Origins by Jennifer Raff. pretty great. And Jennifer Raft's like a genomic mapper. And she identified among other things that Native American DNA has been separated from other human DNA for about 35,000 years plus. It has a pretty long time. So like the first evidence of human beings anywhere in Europe is around 40,000 years ago. And all of what is now England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales was covered in ice, no humans

12,000 years ago but there had already been humans here for well over 20,000 years by the time the first humans even made it to England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales so while there's this other part of the conditioning

we're all immigrants here it's not accurate Native people are indigenous of the land and that being said you got so many different changes, you know, there was nobody who would have called themselves English,

you know, 12,000 years ago, there were nobody living there. Mm-hmm. You know, even a few thousand years ago, those words are pretty recent, as is the English language. So for the Ojibwe, although our DNA is ancient here in the Americas,

the emergence of a distinct Ojibwe identity probably can be dated to have a few thousand years ago. Mm-hmm. And originally we had homes on the Atlantic coast. The land there was well suited for indigenous life. There are lots of fish in the ocean, lots of fish in inland lakes, big game, small game, land well suited for indigenous agriculture, get a population boom. And then when there are cyclical droughts or other things, then there's competition over resources. People are moving around.

So the Ojibwe were on, or the group they sometimes call proto-Algonquian. So there are 29 tribes that trace their origins to that group were moving westward from the Atlantic coast through the Great Lakes. And really starting a little over 2,000 years ago. And the land was already occupied by other humans. So some interactions were peaceful and some were not. But as they moved around, then separated from other folks in the, Proto Algonquian group kind of became 29 different tribes of which the Ojibwe are one. By the time you get to the arrival of Europeans, you know, Columbus 1492, it's really the,

you know, you've got some Spanish explorers and stuff making it to Maine in, you know, the 1500s, but really the sustained French colonial presence begins in the early 60s. 1800s and then you have sustained interaction between the Ojibwe and Europeans. And the Ojibwe continued to expand throughout the early contact period at the expense of other tribes. And it wasn't always because the Ojibwe were fighting everybody. The Huron were depopulated by smallpox and other diseases. And the Iroquois who were allied with the English were fighting trying to take land from their neighbors. and the Ojibwe fought back and kind of won that conflict,

but absorbed some of the Huron territory to the east, and then pushed west as well. Wow. I mean, the fact that you even say, like, yeah, they're moving around there around 2,000 years ago, just glancing over 2,000 years is, like, that is so ancient. I mean, that's the, what, the time of Christ, roughly, right? Like, just to put in, you know, terms for, you know, religious folks.

I mean, it's, yeah, not a historical blip. You know, like, we look at America, like, oh, 300 years old, we're talking 2000. Yeah. Yeah, it's remarkable to even put yourself in that time frame.

Yeah, and our best estimates are that there were well over 100 million people in the Americas at the time of Columbus. Over 100 million? Yeah, some estimates are close to 150 million.

And our best estimates are that the population of Europe at the same time was 88 million people. Wow. But we have this conditioning of like scattered bands of roaming nomads in the wilderness.

Chasing animals. You know, but this land had more people than Europe at the time of contact. Many more people relied much more on agriculture than just hunting and foraging.

And so there are a lot of things that didn't jive, you know? Right. But I think some of that is America's difficulty dealing with its own history. Right? So the narrative of American exceptionalism, greatest nation on earth and so forth, doesn't get fed very well by its ugly chapters. So it's easier to pretend that the ugly chapters didn't happen.

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Secret for all the people listening to this program. The promo code camp, see, When you go to magic spoon.com slash camp, you're going to save $5 off your next order. So have some fun, feel like a kid again, sit down with your kids and enjoy a nice big old bowl of cereal without all the guilt. Let's get back to the show. Yeah, absolutely. I think the, yeah, I can understand the desire to turn away from the ugly chapters, but I think it's necessary to have the fullness of the scope of what the nation is and what it used to be and how it changed. and, you know, the good and the bad, I think, need to be sort of brought to the light.

Sure. Whether that's, you know, obviously, native genocide or, you know, African chattel slavery. Like, I think all of it needs to sort of be, and those are only a couple. And I think it's important to recognize all of them and sort of reckon with it and confront it. I think going into it, it will be better for everyone. Yeah. As an individual human being, I think I've done some of my best growing. and I have broken through and been able to love myself best

when I've looked at my greatest shortcomings. Yeah. And my darkest days. Yeah. I've always heard this quote, what you seek is on the other side of what you fear the most. Right. And if there's an aversion to learning about the darkness,

I would encourage myself at least to, you know, go towards it. Right. Yeah. And, you know, shame can't stand. The sunlight. Yeah. So if you shine some light on it, you know, we regain our dignity. Right.

And so to me, you know, addressing historical injustice and working on truth and reconciliation and things like that, you know, it's not just about the poor and disenfranchised and those who have been oppressed throughout history or the fact that we have racially predictable disparities to just about everything in America. those things do need redress. But it's about America. Like great nations, like great human beings, keep their word. So, yes, it sucks for those who got lied to by the U.S. government

breaking every single treaty it made with Native people. But America hurts itself by not honoring its own treaties, you know. And so they can regain their integrity by saying, here's what we did. And it really well be different now. And have it not just be aspirational. Mm-hmm. You know?

What was the contact point for the Ojibwe and European settlers? What was that time frame, roughly? It's around 1600 when the French are trying to set up shop in the eastern Great Lakes, where there's sustained contact. And what do we know about those early days of contact? Is there other writings that sort of disclose what that relationship was? Was it immediate conquest or was there some type of treaty that was, you know, enacted at that time? Oh, yeah.

So we have lots of data. The Jesuits love to write stuff down. So Jesuit relations is 76 volumes of Jesuit priests writing down everything that happened when they met the Ojibwe people in the 1600s. Wow. You know, so you got lots of records from that side and perspective. Sure. You know, I think sometimes Americans have this view that the French were like good colonists or something, you know, they were nicer to the natives. But the French were trying to conquer the world and believed in chattel slavery.

French is an official language for 30 countries, and it's not because they love French culture so much. Sure. Right. So. Yeah, the nature of imperialism is to get the whole bad. Colonization was not a friendly practice. Right, regardless of the culture, sure. Right.

But there were some distinct differences, you know, and there were differences in power dynamics between European countries as well. Like France and England fought each other horribly for many, many hundreds of years. When France was setting up colonies, England was setting up colonies and they were busy fighting wars with each other

and trying to engage their native allies as proxies in those wars. There were more natives than Europeans fighting in some of those early conflicts. Right. I mean, this goes on today, you know, in different forms. Yeah. I mean, 25% of planet Earth was part of the British Empire. There weren't enough Englishmen to be a police officer on every corner.

Right. They conquered the Irish by having a bunch of Irish dudes work in the British Army to go fight their countrymen. You know, that's how it's always worked. And so that was kind of the design in the early... stages of the colonial enterprise for both the French and the British. And things change very, very quickly. So, you know, the French also had a somewhat different practice than the British. So in the Western Great Lakes, they sent only men. And they said, you will marry native women and you will make babies and you will cement our trade and military alliances through marriage and

family. And so that was a long-standing practice. And it had distinct effects. Probably about a third of Ojibwe people have French surnames from that practice. And lots of people had mixed racial heritage. Of course, the French had an interesting custom where they would, you know, send the boys from those unions back to France for a formal education, then bring them back to New France to like run the fur trade, where they spoke beautiful French, English, and Ojibwe. They're Catholic. It might be at least as brown as me, but they kind of had European disposition,

culture, religion, and so forth. The British didn't do that so much. Your last name is French. My last name is German. There's a whole other story behind that. Okay, we'll get into that. Oh, this is your father's son. Yeah.

I understand. Yes, yes, yes. Yep. And so, but in any event, you know, after the conclusion of the French and Indian War, which the French lost, they abandoned New France, but that just meant they pulled the army out and they left all their people behind. So they're French-speaking Quebec-Qua in Canada, French-speaking people in Louisiana, and the British are trying to supplant French trade networks.

So who do they hire to run the British trade? But the same people who speak French, English, and Ojibwe, and you only have 25 years transpire and you have the American Revolution. And then John Jacob Astor is one of the richest people on planet Earth and America's trying to supplant the British trade networks and who they hire. And it's the same people. So, you know, you do have both a continuity, you know, to all of these different colonial families and enterprises. And then you also have really distinct differences, you know. So the Ojibwe, we're in a pretty powerful position during the height of the French Empire. because the French relied upon the Ojibwe for trade,

you know, military and all kinds of other things. It starts to erode during the British era, and then the Americans, you have such a swell of new immigration and military pushes, it really disempowers people. And that was a tough time to be native. Like, if you fought, you probably lost, and it'd come take your land, kill a bunch of people, confine you in a small area, and feed you crap food.

You know, but if you accommodated like the Cherokee, they're still marching you off on a trail of tears. They never fought the U.S. government and it didn't work any better. So there was no way to win, you know. And I do think that the Ojibway fared a little better than many tribes during that era, simply because it's a large population that straddled the U.S. Canadian border. The British government was supporting the Confederacy during the U.S. civil war. the American government was less interested in fighting the British and the Confederates all at the same time. You know, it didn't mean that they weren't jerks or, you know, trying to manipulate people.

But, you know, in Minnesota, Ojibwe people have land on all of the 10 largest lakes in the state of Minnesota. You know, so in certain regards, we fared better than some tribes. That doesn't mean that there wasn't a rough experience with the president. there too. Right. The intermarriage component with the Ojibwe and the French is very interesting. Was there sort of a reception from Ojibway elders or chiefs that allowed this practice? Or was this through like, you know, bridal kidnapping and capture? Oh, you know, the Ojibway pre-contact, people had a lot of freedom in who they wanted to marry and make a life with. Inter-tribal marriage was common at that time. Yep. But it was also at a period in time when people spent most of their time getting enough food.

And I think throughout most of human history, marriage was largely an economic arrangement rather than a love arrangement. You know? Were they agrarian at that time, like pre-contact? Djibwee covered a pretty big territory. The southern Ojibwe communities did a lot of agriculture. But throughout the Great Lakes, you had a lot of... of mixed hunting foraging. It's actually a pretty diverse ecosystem and economy. So you got, you know, cereal grains with wild rice. You've got fish, big game, small game, agriculture,

you know, foraging berries, different things like that. So it actually, when you're not just dependent on one thing like the buffalo, you're more adaptable to change in disruption in your system. Or you're hedging a little bit. And of course, where do you find all the furs, but places like the Great Lakes? So it gave people in Ojibwe country an advantage during that period of time. But, you know, it wasn't sustainable for all time. And they saw potentially the economic benefit of intermarriage. Like if they already didn't have a stigma.

Well, yeah, you saw a variety of things. So the French were pressuring people. but the Ojibwe and French kind of needed each other. And I think they're patriarchy issues in all cultures, including indigenous cultures. So I think you started to see Ojibwe people pressuring the women in their families to just go ahead and do it, something that hadn't happened before. And it was in response to this French effort to like, you know, establish. empire through the bedroom, you know? And so I think you saw changes in both.

But, you know, and for the French, too, they couldn't just run over on the, on the Ojibah, they needed Native allies to deal with the British, you know. And so you saw accommodations both ways, but, you know, the British, once the French were out of the picture, didn't need the natives quite as. much although natives fought on both sides in the American Revolution and the war of 1812. Mm-hmm. But once you clear the war of 1812, you know, that leverage that native people might have gathered from Europeans fighting each other really dissipated a lot.

Interesting. And as far as Ojibwe warfare, did they have hot conflicts, so to speak, with the French and other settlers? Um, well, you know, all tribes had some history of, warfare you have really tremendous differences in how this played out in different areas but the Ojibway did not have you know the kind of conflict that Americans think of crazy horse and Custer or the Apache um with the French there's a little bit with the British and you know Pontiac's war in 1763

Ojibway, Ottawa, Potawatomi and other groups formed an alliance and took over nine out of the 11 British forts in the Great Lakes. You know, so there was an active military defense of their interests. And then you saw it again in the war of 1812, Tacomsa. You know, but for the most part, it was very different. When the Americans come, there were tribes that fought. ferociously the Shawnee, the Miami, you know, and many others, the Ojibway tended to threaten without fighting and negotiate for best terms. Interesting. And did that, obviously, I don't think you could say it, you know, it greatly benefited perhaps, but was there any

short-term benefit to some type of more diplomatic approach? It's really hard. to run hypothetical scenarios because we just don't have a way to compare. Nobody made out great, right? Whether you accommodated, fought, or somewhere in between, it usually didn't work out. And some tribes actually said, we won't fight and we won't even talk to them. We're going to go hide out in the mountains. You know, there are actually some groups that were literally hiding in the mountains in the 19 teens who had never fought.

Wow. Who had never signed a treaty. but by the time, you know, white settlement comes to them. They're like, well, we didn't fight and we didn't sell. You can't make us move. And they're like, your cousin's already signed the treaty. You have to go to the reservation or we well incarcerate you. Wow.

You know, so like none of the methods saved anybody. Right. There wasn't a choice to say, I'm not selling anything. Mm-hmm. Right. It was either sell it to us, we're going to take it. I guess those are. Yeah.

And so, and there's more to say about the naturing dynamics of, you know, how native people understood treaties at the time they were signed and things like that. I want to ask you about that because I had heard, again, this might be folklore or urban legend, but I think in New York specifically or perhaps somewhere near the northeast where we are now, that there was a sale that had happened amongst the Dutch and the native groups of the time for virtually nothing. And the story goes, and I'm sure you've heard this, is that the natives at the time said, you're going to buy the land? It doesn't make sense. Like the notion of ownership amongst these early tribal groups was so different to how European settlers had seen ownership and private property that they had sort of said, like, yeah, we'll sell it to you. Like, you're not going to take it anywhere. It doesn't make sense that you can own a mountain. It's just, it is a common good that we all sort of see and, you know, sort of utilize.

So sure, you can own it. It'd be like me selling you the Brooklyn Bridge. It's like, all right, go ahead and you own it. But then they didn't realize what that had technically signed them up for, that that would then sort of incur incarceration or death or removal outright. So I'm curious, is there any credence to that story? Kind of. You know, certainly the concepts of land ownership were different.

You didn't have, imagine the language in a treaty. with words like write, title, convey. You know? These are all subjective terms that humans made up. Right. Well, that Europeans made up. Right. And that natives didn't even have in the vocabulary.

Right. And at the time of treaty, all of the native signatures were not fluent or literate in English. Right. So it's hard to say they deeply understood everything that was going on. You know? But by the time, like if you're from a larger group like Ojibwe, where they would come back for another treaty every several years, trying to piecemeal whittle you away,

by the time you get in around two or three, then they know what's up. Right. And so does that create more hostility? Like, I'm curious, I guess, why the Ojibwe or some other type of tribal group is not just immediately confrontation. Or, you know, these unknown people are coming into their space, trying to buy and sell things.

But, you know, maybe after a couple of rounds of negotiations, things sort of go sour. Why not immediately fledged some type of full-fronted war? Because they knew that it wasn't going to produce the desired result. And what was that based off of? Did they had they seen other groups that had gone to combat with European settlers and not go well? Yes. They had seen other groups fight and lose it all. often native leaders were brought to Washington, D.C. to parley.

And they're looking around going, oh, my God, there's no way to kill them all. Wow. And so by the time they're looking at it, they're saying, I want to live. Right. So now we have to come up. Some negotiation. So do what you can. But like with the Ojibway, for example, by the time you look at the really substantive treaties, they understood.

pre-Europeans, that there were some lands that they excluded other people from. They had territorial wars with their neighbors. They also understood that there were some lands where they shared use with their immediate neighbor. And so when you look at and analyze the treaties, the native leaders are saying things like this. I don't know what your words mean. What matters is, I still get to live right here. I don't have to move anywhere. That includes I get to harvest wild rice here.

I get to harvest the fish and I get to hunt and I get to do all the things I've always done. And essentially what native people were saying in those early Ojibwe treaties was, we will change the status of certain lands from our exclusive use to shared use with you, which is different from we are alienating ourselves from this land and selling it to you. I like the idea of a home by today. Like, this is your home, we're leaving the home. It's, you know, we're cohabitating. It's saying this driveway will have an easement so both of us can use it.

Right. And that's not what the Europeans... Well, that is what Europeans understood in those rounds of the treaties. In fact, there's even language saying, you know, you'll be able to cut the parts of the trees that go above the ground. But the roots and the ground itself, we reserve for ourselves. Native people are saying that in the treaty logs. You know? And so then there were other lands that would be reserved for the exclusive use of native people, reservations.

And that was the Ojibwey understanding at the time of treaty. But they just kept coming and kept whittling, you know. And it was grave injustice done. Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious if you feel that it's, is more unjust to have done some sort of, you know, malicious treaty rather than some type of outright war. Like, part of me almost feels that having these sort of sleazy kind of deals that then they go

back on, that then they renegotiate over and over and over. It's almost worse than some type of battle and, you know, having conquest in that way. I don't know. Like, it feels, one of them feels more honest, despite being more brutal. You know, like it's a weird way to put it. Rather have to cut off the head than a death by a thousand paper cuts? Maybe, yeah, I don't know. Like, that's just how I'm feeling.

But I'm curious if there's been discussion about that within, you know, the literature. It's hard to compare oppressions. Mm-hmm. You know, there was a grave injustice done. Mm-hmm. Thousands of them, you know. Um, and those were impossible circumstances. Mm-hmm.

But in spite of all of that horrible crap against all odds, in spite of 500, pretty rough years. We still have some land. We still have our languages. We still have living, vibrant, beautiful cultures. That's an amazing testament to the fortitude of my ancestors, what they went through and the decisions they made and how they were able to set us up with this. Absolutely.

You know? And we have a word in Ojibwe, Anakobiguan. We use the same word for my great grand child and my great grandparent. So it spans seven generations from great-grandparent to grandparent to parent to me to, you know, my kids, grandkids, great-grandkids. And it literally means my line. And so we're supposed to think in terms of seven generations. Like seven generations ago, our people are going through a hard time dealing with treaties and all kinds of bull crap, you know. And they thought, what are they going to need seven generations from now?

And they thought, we're going to need some land and we'll need some. clean water and we'll need our language and our culture and we'll need each other. And so they did everything they could to set us up to have those things. And against all odds, indeed we do. So I think seven generations from now, what are they going to need? I think they're going to need the same things. They won't remember my name, no matter how many books I write. But if our language, culture, land, clean water, live, our communities, then all my strivings

are worth it. Yeah. That's awesome. Is there a spiritual component that goes along with the land in the sense that did the Ojibway specifically have a sort of, I guess, deification or spiritual rituals or practice around the place that they were living? And when these trees were being done, it was also an affront to the spiritual component. Like, what can you say to the religion of the early contact Ojibwe? Yeah. I would say simply this. You know, there was an understanding that we are part of the web of life, not its masters. You know? And the objectification and commodification of everything on planet Earth as a tool and resource,

which by the way was even applied to the humans and everything else, you know, was not just an alien concept, but an offensive one. And also just very short-sighted, you know? if we all thought in terms of seven generations, well, it'd be a pretty easy decision about should we do the strip mine or not or whatever the things are. But we're not thinking in terms of seven generations,

we're thinking in terms of the next quarterly shareholder profit statement, you know? And so that is part of the problem. Like, what is colonization? It's taking one language, one culture, one religion, and using it to supplant the other. while humans have been mean to each other throughout history, clunking each other over the head with a club

to steal their bologna sandwich, so to speak. Colonization was different because it said, you have to worship God the way I do. You have to speak the language I speak. And if you do not model your life after mine, you have no right to exist. And colonization,

since it was about erasure, employed a lot of violence. But if you look at it, like all of us have been deeply touched by colonization, when you try to solve all your problems with violence and makes a bunch of other problems. So why should we think that all of the problems created by the colonial way of solving problems

could be solved by the colonial way of solving problems? Right. And they cannot. And you can even see it in American politics. If you're steeped in the culture of erasure, one of the great fears is fear of your own erasure. And so so much of our country is full of people fighting for just us instead of justice. And it will never work.

There's no escape from diversity. 30% of the German citizenry is born somewhere other than Germany. We have to figure out how to get along and build things together and think beyond the next quarterly shareholder profit statement. Right. Yeah. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you need more time. It is the most valuable commodity that exists, and Huell is going to help you do that, all right?

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you know, the French expected their children to be Catholics. Sure. You know, and the French and Ojibwe made a bunch of babies together. So you have a lot of people who were raised in Catholicism, for example. You also have waves of missionaries who are often fighting with each other over the rights to colonize the natives. And those things had effect. At the same time, Ojibwe country is quite large. You know, even today, 80% of the United States,

of the Canadian population lives within 50 miles of the U.S. border. Right. So you have some communities where everybody speaks the tribal language. You have communities like Punea on the Red Lake Reservation, Round Lake on the St. Croix Reservation in Wisconsin, where no one's ever been baptized. 100% traditional, a religious belief in funeral practice.

I myself, never been baptized, always raised in our traditional tribal custom. and I'm not alone in that. And in more recent years, we've also seen, you know, a lot of younger people who are really interested in relearning, reclaiming, you know, holding up their indigenous identity and all the things that it might mean. I think there are a lot of people, of all groups, who are kind of disillusioned with the major institutional offerings, be they the political ones, or the religious ones. And understand that connecting to one another in a more meaningful way and connecting to this earth as a sacred entity,

you know, makes a lot more sense. Until 10,000 years ago, the dawn of the agricultural age, all of us lived in villages and had earth-based world views and spent most of our time outdoors. Right. It is pretty new to say, You got to spend all your time sitting in a chair and staring at a computer screen. I mean, we're used to scanning the horizon looking for food or a threat. You know, we'd only fix our attention when there's a threat coming.

So just looking at a computer screen all day is triggering our threat stimulus and it has people all stressed out. And so they're saying, go outside. Yeah. They're calling it like rewildings. I call it listening to our elders. Yeah. You know? It's an interesting practice.

I mean, there's so many little things that I think we've lost, even just from that connection with being outside, like even just putting your feet into the soil has health effects, which are fascinating. It's been termed grounding, but again, it's just kind of one of those things like, you know, given the right climate and things like that, our ancestors, I imagine, you know, yours certainly, mine ostensibly,

would have had their feet in the ground. Oh, sure. In some capacity. Or even just eating local produce in ameliorating seasonal allergies. eating honey from a local hive would give health benefits that imported honey from a controlled hive wouldn't give you. Sure.

So many little things that we'd lose. I mean, even Dr. Heaveman talks about waking up and getting sunlight, getting actual sun rays when you wake up. Are you familiar with Dr. Heverman, his work? I haven't read him. He's great. He's a neuroscientist out of Stanford that does a lot of work. Just about personal health optimization.

And so many of his recommendations, and advice kind of lead me at least to follow this sort of naturalistic worldview. And I try to not fall into the, you know, naturalistic fallacy, but, you know, just waking up and getting sunlight and photons into your eyes and then going to sleep when the sun is relatively, you know, down or dark helps reset our circadian rhythms and we sleep better and we have better hormonal balance. I mean, there's just a litany of things that I think have been lost. Yeah.

So I'm curious, are there any things that you've researched in the literature? about your ancestry, you know, even spiritual customs. Like what was the sort of dogmatic tenets of your faith as you grew up? And I use faith, again, I know it's a European term, but I think that's the best way I can describe it. Yeah, maybe it'll be easiest for folks to understand by sharing a story or two, just about some of the things we do in our family. Please.

Like one of the customs when we have nine children, so whenever a new baby was on the way, we have like, in a whole, Ojibway cultural birthing go bag. So we harvest a medicine, we bring it with us right into the hospital, get hot water out of the tea dispenser, steep the medicine, strain it, and we use that for the baby's first bath. Oh, wow. And then we take the placenta and afterbirth home, and we bury it on the north side of a maple tree with an offering. And the maple is considered symbolically like tree of life. So we put their placentas there and it's, you know, kind of a wish for a long, healthy, happy life for the baby. Now we also spend a lot of our time harvesting. Sometimes it's hard for

people to figure me out because, you know, I'm sitting here in Brooklyn and I'm wearing decent clothes and I'm a world traveler and my English is right, you know, but I also speak Ojibwe and I choose to live in my native community and I spend about a third of my time officiating at ceremonies from naming ceremonies to traditional funerals and everything in between. All that works uncompensated and in the traditions of our people. Spent about a third of my time doing my actual job, which is I'm a professor of the Ojibwe language. I teach Ojibwe language culture history, write books. Spend about a third of my time doing public speaking, diversity, equity, inclusion, things like that. They're like three strands of a braid. They all feed one another. But in the spring, when we harvest

maple syrup or maple sap every year and cook it down into syrup. sugar. And this is something I've done every year of my life. My mom did every year of her life, her family, like back through the generations. But when we go out into the maple forest, I've got all of the kids. We've nine kids. We have four grandkids now. And they're making offerings by the tree of life where their placentas are buried. And we have like sometimes five generations in our family there. So I feel connected across the generations to our culture and our practice to this particular part of the woods. And my kids love doing this. And when I'm gone, I'm certain they'll be doing that. You know, and that's just a very basic practice.

That's not like the religious ceremony, but it's still very spiritual. There's much more to all the other kinds of things that we do. And it's a very rich culture. So there's no way to give you a everything, you know, in one sitting, but to give an idea of a couple other things that we might do, we also spend a lot of our time hunting. And so the ancient custom, when someone harvested their first deer, when we're living in wigwam villages, would be to invite the whole village, cook the whole deer, and it gets eaten in one fell swoop. Now, today we live kind of like everyone else. So, you know, by the way, the res is not a horrible place. sit in my hot tub, you know?

However, we will invite over extended family. So aunts, uncles, grandparents, members of the community fill the house up with people. We cook up some of the deer. And there's a prayer. And then instead of just eating, we kind of ritually feed the successful hunter. We'll take a spoon of the food. We'll say their native names. So one of my kids is names Beja Gobinace means lone thunderbird.

Bejogabinase. And he has to refuse the first bite and say, no. I'm thinking about children who don't have enough to eat. Ah, okay, put it back, get another spoonful. Beja-gobinace. And he refuses again and says, no, I'm thinking about my elders who can't get out in the woods to hunt for themselves. Hmm, okay, put it back, get another spoonful. Beja-gobinace.

And he refuses the third time, and he says, no, I'm thinking of my family and my community and the people who came here today. to support me. Huh, okay, put it back. Beja Gobinace, and then he can eat. And then we'll say, well, Beja Gobinace, you just changed your life? Because up until today, you were what we called a dependent. You depended on all the people in this room to provide all of your food. And there they are, aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents. Today, though, you're providing for all of us. And this is what it means to be an adult. From today on, you'll have a special power. It's just the power to gather resources. You'll have it when you go hunting, when you go fishing, even when you get a job. So when you use your power, you think about kids who don't have enough, and elders who can't

get it for themselves, and your community and your family, and then they take the rest of their kill packaged up venison, and they give it away, so they're impoverished, but rich. And since I have nine kids and get to do a lot of experimenting on them, I have to say, that this ceremony's been very formative. So, like, my son would maybe get a rabbit. And right away, he'd pick up the phone and he'd call my mom, noco, no go, wabuz and dayawa. And she said, ooh, no joshay, I'm going to cook for you tonight. Bring that rabbit over here. And I'm thinking, here goes the, you know, intergenerational transmission of caring, sharing, and caretaking. And I didn't even have to say, go bring that over to your grandma, you know?

And what I found is that those cultural practices, they reflect our values as a people, collective, communal, collaborative, and so forth. But they shape our values as a people. And so much of the Western world is shaping us to think about me and mine, our individualism. Up by your own bootstraps, hard work, determination, entrepreneurial spirit, drive, ambition. put some plaques on the wall, make something of yourself. You meet someone new and it's like, what do you do? As if productivity equals self-worth. You know, we're so competitive.

We're so materialistic. And I think those things have us at odds with our most core yearnings as human beings for connection and love and belonging. We survived saber-tooth tigers and cave bears not because we out-competed the person in the next cave and acquired more venison than them. We survived those things because the people in the next cave loved us, and they would intervene if we were in danger.

So we need connection, belonging, love. And modern culture is so out of alignment with those things. So what I've seen with these things like our first kill, you know, harvest, is that it's a way of incultuating people to our way of looking at the world and doing things. And it has great impacts. Well, also, by the way, just open it up for any other person who's ever been successful hunting just to share things with the new hunter. And they're amazing.

Like one of his namesakes was saying, you'll notice there's different kinds of deer in the woods. They're fawns. There's doze. They're young bucks with a spike or a forkhorn, big mature antlered bucks, and they all act differently. In deer are very gentle creatures. It's very rare that one would attack a person or something. But on the rare times when that happens, it sometimes surprises people to know that it's usually not a big, mature antlered buck that would mess with a person. It's an immature buck.

And they're also the deer that's most likely to get shot. And in a way what he was providing was a little metaphor for manhood, and he laid it out, and he said, as men, we make so many of our biggest mistakes when we're young. It's when we're more likely to think driving 90 miles an hour was a good idea and pay the price or make someone else pay the price. When we're more likely to experiment with drugs and alcohol or go on a date and not respect our partner. So if you want to be a big, mature, antlered buck, you've got to act like one. they move a little slower they think before they act you know and these things are very formative

so this kid like even later in life at age 16 one time I had a friend complaining oh my back I can't get out in the woods I don't even know the last time I had venison in my freezer he didn't say anything but he just went out in the woods harvested a deer cleaned it up packaged it up went to my friend's house filled up his freezer

so my friend calls me and he's like I I didn't even know anyone remember these teachings what an incredible young man can I can I Give him some gifts. Sure. Same kid's senior year in high school, he and his buddy were going to double date to the prom. So I got him hooked up with a tux rental. And his friend's mom said, my next check, I'll get you the tux, I promise.

And then her car went down. And she had to say, I'm so sorry, I can't. So he's all heartbroken, ready to cancel this prom date. My son says, oh, forget that. Come with me. Went to the Tux place. He canceled his tux, took the money. They went to the Goodwill, bought a couple suits.

Everybody went to the prom. I show up at the prom, you know, take pictures of my kid in a tux, and I'm like, um, where's the tux? Then I get the story. And I said, well, son, if you would have said something, I would have rented your friend of tux. And he looked at me baffled. And he said, but dad, it's my job to look out for people who don't have enough. And so at every phase, like these kind of things, it's not just cute. culture. It's formative about a way of looking at the world. And of course, we have ceremonies

for all the things when there's a death in the family or sending somebody to the next world or, you know, all the different things. But I think sometimes, you know, in the Western world, people think of, you know, oh, you go to church for, you know, confirmation, you know, wedding, funeral, baptism, you know, that's it. A couple times make grandma happy, you know. And it means much more to other people, I think, within a particular faith tradition. But what I've found with what's in our own cultural practice is that it's pretty deep. There's a lot there. And it's tools for life and how to navigate everything from the joys to the tough things. Absolutely. I mean, I think that is one, beautiful and two, I think important, the idea that, you know, these rituals and these ceremonial

practices not only sustain the tradition, but perpetuate it. Right. And they're, you know, again, not only reflective and ceremonial and symbolic, but, you know, again, are deeply grooving these roots into who you are as a human being. And I think a major shortcoming of modern American culture, broadly speaking, you know, westernized culture, has no coming of age ceremony for men. And I think that is truly the detriment of men, and I'm speaking from my perspective, truly the detriment of men in America, that I think, you know, obviously I think Jewish people have their own sort of, you know, the bar mitzvah ceremony, and there's different religious traditions. But I don't know. I find that to be an issue, I think, culturally, that I don't know if men get,

and I think women, too to an extent, but I can't speak to that experience, but men having this moment where they say, I am a man now and I'm going to behave as an adult or as a man would. And what that actually means. And we have these things that you're 18, you're an adult, but that's legal status or you're 21 you can drink. But again, that's sort of indulging

in these sort of conveniences, but actually understanding what masculinity is and then having the permission to become that, I think is completely lost culturally. And even growing up Catholic, there's like some semblance of it within religiosity that, oh, now you are, a member of the parish at this confirmation, but it doesn't bear the same weight as I think most

indigenous manhood ceremonies would be, certainly not in the way that this ceremony sounds to be. Yeah. You know, things are highly variable, but I do agree that it's important to provide some guidance, you know, some guide posts, something to think about with major inflexion. points in a person's life, all kids must break from their parents. It's necessary. You can't helicopter smother your kid or you deprive them of their sense of their own capacity. And you can't just check out and leave them to it. They'll feel abandoned and neglected. You know, and so it's a very difficult part as a parent. You get to look forward to this with a new one in your own world. But I do feel that some of this stuff provides a structure or a

framework for thinking about things that can be very empowering. So we, by the way, we do these first kill feasts for boys and girls. Everybody can do that. And we also have ceremonies when a girl gets her first menstrual period marks a transition to womanhood spiritually. There's a year of ceremonies and as each traditional food comes into season, wild rice, wild game, fish, maple, berries, there's a feeding kind of like at the first kill feast and it's full of empowerment teachings. And so, you know, they will, usually it's the women in the family,

the, you know, mother, aunties, grandmas, female namesakes, and they'll have a public feast and they'll say things like, you have a right and a responsibility to be respected by men and here's what that means. No one can hit you.

No one can make and call you names or make you do something. sexually that you do not want to do. I just think what a different world we'd have if we did that kind of ceremony or message for girls as they became women with their brothers watching. I watched when my sister had that ceremony and we've had a lot of our daughters have gone through this ceremony. It can be very empowering.

It doesn't mean it's easy, but it provides a way, a frame for things. thinking about what does it mean? And if you think about what do we do in the mainstream world, like what is prom? It's a mini pretend wedding from the days when people abstained from sex until marriage. So you dress up like you would for a wedding. You promenade with a partner. You have a special dance and a special meal and all these expectations. And I think all kids want to do what adults get to do that kids don't get to do. And without guidance, it's like get laid. And get drunk get a driver's license some people navigate that fine and some people struggle but i've found that that can be really empowering for and empowering for the young person coming of age but empowering

for their parents and their grandparents to have an opportunity you know to engage meaningfully and recalibrate the relationship as, you know, as an adult one. Absolutely, yeah. I just think there's a removal of the thing itself with sort of the spiritual or symbolic components that go along with it culturally, right? Like, you know, obviously sex as a thing, you know, is great, so long as it's sort of, in my opinion, tied with the sort of spiritual or, I don't know, life bringing sort of, I guess, fabric that goes along with it. And that isolated on its own,

I think it can be frivolous or trivial or even detrimental to people in certain capacities. I think drugs are a similar thing, right? Like I think, you know, weed or marijuana, I think mushroom, psilocybin, ayahuasca obviously has deep indigenous, you know, you know, tradition. And I think removing it from the symbolism or the nature of what it means on a grander scale, I think is a disceryman. I think is a disservice to the thing and just breaking it down to its individualized function or utility, I think is, I don't know, I think it can be misguiding. And the same thing with prom, like, you're just doing the behavior, but there's no symbolic element, which I think is necessary in a lot of cases.

I'm curious about the naming ceremonies. Oh, sure. Would you share with me, you know, I guess on a personal basis or even on a larger scale, like, how did you name your children? Or what is the sort of Ojibway naming custom? Yeah, so the ancient custom is the parents don't pick names. They pick namesakes. The namesakes function somewhat like a godparent in Western religious traditions, so spiritual guide and role model.

And then the names sakes give names, plural, to the child. And the names come from a dream or a vision when fasting. And so someone might, for example, if they have a dream about people sitting around a fire and they're praying and the smoke goes up and there's an opening in the clouds and they might give the name Bagu Negizik, hole in the sky, or something like that. So it wouldn't be he who sits around fire while smoke goes up through hole in sky or something like that. It's something a little more cryptic. It's a snapshot of there's a bigger story behind it. And it establishes a namesake relationship. So in Ojibwe, the cultural belief is not so much that we have souls.

It's more like we are souls. We have bodies for a little while. We're not humans looking for a spiritual experience. We're spirits. We're having this temporary human experience. And so the body in Ojibwe is called Niyyao, my body, and it really describes like a vessel. a cup. So it's temporary housing for our soul. And when we're born, soul goes in. Other things

can go into, including your native names. So when you fill your cup up with a bunch of good stuff, it pushes the bad stuff out. So it's healing as well as identity creating. And that's kind of the basic component. If I give a name to someone else from one of my dreams or a vision that I had when I was fasting. I'm kind of taking a little something out of my cup and I'm putting it into someone else's. So this is Niyo and the word for namesake is Nio-e-e. Niyo-e. And it kind of describes or invokes that concept. And what is the benefit of fasting? Oh, many benefits of fasting. I think, you know, the physiological ones are well documented because the scientists are, you know, have been speaking to that. But But there's a spiritual dimension to fasting too.

We are very physical creatures. We're used to looking at someone and thinking that's who they are. Instead of seeing the soul that's housed inside of the temporary body, you know, if you think of everyone as a spiritual entity, it's easier to be respectful of them, even if they're really making you mad and being ridiculous. And I try, imperfect though I am, thinking about other people with regards to gossip, talking about people behind their back, you know, running somebody down. Try not to do those sort of things because it's like I'm talking about a sacred spirit.

That's who they really are. And they just have their inner wounded children getting in the way of them being a better version of themselves, you know? But, you know, as I think about these things, there's a sacredness, you know, to everyone and to everything. And when we can see that, I think I'm the better version of myself and able to build things with other people in a better way. Could you share the funeral ceremony of the Ojibwe? Oh, sure. Oh, yeah, I guess I didn't quite finish on family. But I'll talk a little bit about fasting and a little bit about funerals.

Please. With fasting, when you give up food and drink and also the company of other people. And so we'll put people out in the woods and it's alone time. It's a very sacred thing. We're so filled with human chatter and motion and commotion. Constant stimulus. And when you shut it off, then you're not. just alone with your thoughts, but the woods are alive. You start to notice the insects crawling

right in front of you. You can see the sacredness of things and beings. As your body shuts down, spiritually you can wake up. Our visual sight doesn't get in the way of our spiritual site as much, and we can open. And it slows everything down, which can be really great. Like, oftentimes our creativity is really impeded by the constant motion and grind and drive and everyone's playing whack-a-mole on emails and like it you know it consumes you the world will eat you up if you let it and so it provides a chance to get perspective and to see things in a in a spiritual way and i you know i've been fasting a number of times my children have been going fasting and it's it's pretty powerful we also have this belief that like daytime for us is

like nighttime for the souls of the departed and vice versa. And so I remember one time one of my kids, he was about 13, put him out fasting and he's a really tough kid. I'd go out once a day to check on him. Any dream? Nope. See you tomorrow. You know.

And next day, anything? Nope. See you tomorrow. you know and kept doing that third day anything tough food like i'm all right it's like okay he said but i do i do notice right at the end of the day right before the sun sets every day the wind stops and there's a hush in the forest and it the bird stops singing and it feels like someone died and then a few minutes later, then you can start hearing the nighttime animals and the woods are alive again. And I didn't tell him anything, but he could like intuit this, you know, it was pretty cool.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And so you just develop a spiritual intuition. Like, you have to feed it. And sometimes we benefit from the company of others and the connectivity with others. And we also benefit from time for reflection. and cultivation of spiritual connection with everything else. When your son does this, where does he go? Oh, well, we are also very lucky with where we live. We live in northern Minnesota. We have a large property,

and we actually do most of our hunting and harvesting and everything else right there. We're on the northernmost part of the Mississippi River. And, yes, we have areas where he can go fasting, undisturbed. will he be in just sort of like a camping setup or is there a place there like what does that actually look? Yeah, there's no permanent structure for him. He's, it's him in the trees and whatever the weather brings. And does he develop something for himself, some type of covering using leaves or some type of like?

There's some variation to how what people do. Some people are like, you get one blanket, good luck, pray for good weather, you know. So I've been a little bit more accommodating but not that much. so you know blanket tarp usually put people out fasting in the spring and the fall so there aren't too many wild weather events or you know plagues of mosquitoes things like that but you can fast any time of the year and what would be a typical fasting window what would be i guess like ideal or optimal if there's such a thing honestly when people are young sometimes they don't have to go as many days in order to get the pity of the spirits

as we get older sometimes takes us a little longer just to detox and deprogram and be ready and open and receptive but it's pretty like we've sometimes we'll put people out for a really short fast of a couple of days four days is pretty common

and sometimes people have been out there longer I've fasted seven days water only no water no water yeah wow just pushing the limits of what the human body can handle, but yeah. Wow. I mean, yeah, I'm on a 24-hour fast right now. Oh.

I love fasting. Yeah. For kind of the same purpose, I guess. It's not a mistake to me or coincidence that it exists in all of religions throughout the world in different capacities, of course. But I think it is intrinsic to sort of the human experience that there is a spiritual component. It's interesting that it exists in Ojibwe as well. Again, it's not surprising to me, but I do think that there's something intrinsic to

the human condition that by taking out that stimulus and sort of the excess energy of, you know, not digesting food. Yeah. What that can do intellectually, what that can do creatively, spiritually. Oh, sure. I don't think that can be discounted. So I do it at least once a week, sometimes more. Oh, wow.

I really enjoy it. I feel better when I'm fasting. Conversations like this I find to be more fluid or even doing stand-up or whatever endeavor I'm doing. I like it. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I've got to tell you about an amazing service known as Blue Chew. That's right. Blue Chew is a service that basically delivers this chewable

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all had to navigate scarcity, you know? Yeah, we're built more for scarcity and not constant consumption. Right. And so, you know, navigating kind of feast and famine situations, like, when there's a time of major scarcity, when you can't get enough food. then your body's built for that so that it'll put you into overdrive. It supercharges your immune system. You actually get cognitively sharper and you have a surge of energy and empowerment that comes with that, which is how, like, you'd be charged up enough to go out and run an antelope down or whatever you needed to do so that you would survive.

So, you know, intermittent fasting or even going keto for a while, like it can physiologically do things to you that are really positive. But, you know, there's also this spiritual dimension that I think is really significant. You asked about funerals, too, and, you know, with regard to that, the real substance of what we do at the ceremony itself will save for the ceremony. Otherwise, it would be like I'm sending you off or something. But I officiated a lot of these funerals, and it too is a beautiful ceremony. even the loss is tough. So the belief is, you know, as I mentioned, we are souls. We're made out of earth in our creation story.

When we pass away, our soul leaves our body behind and that body goes back to earth. But the soul is eternal, our unique light, breath, and sound. And so some of the things that I think people might find very different is that the entire funeral ceremony is for the departing soul. So it's not for the family so much. It's not for someone to preach to the family about why they should be at church more often or things like that.

It's for the departing soul. So we eat with the departing soul. So there's a open casket. Food is placed right next to them. The family comes right up next to the body of the person who passed away, they eat with them. So there's a prayer and a ceremony for that. They're a pretty long legend that explains about creation

and how we became mortal and the making of the road of souls and things like that. And then that's all at the wake. And then at the funeral, we eat with them again. And then there's an instruction for the departing soul on how to get to the spirit work. world and there is a preparation of them for that so they have certain things they take with. It's amazing how many cultures of the world speak about death as a transition, whether it was

you got a couple of coins to pay the boatman and the ancient Greek traditions, you know, a crossing over. For us too, there's a crossing of a river. And it's usually described as crossing of water or a plain of light or something like that. in all cultures. And so, so yeah, it was pretty interesting.

And, you know, when they cracked the code on the ancient Mayan ruins, they found that all of the Mayan rulers were buried with a pot. And the inscription said, my name is,

and then the name of the person, and this is my chocolate pot. And they had a pot of chocolate. And that was like spiritual currency for them paying their way into the next world. For us, we've used tobacco. and then food is the offerings we send people with.

And then there is a section when we take a break from speaking to the departing soul. We talk to the family and give them instructions for navigating grief and loss and things they have to do to follow up over the following year. And then, yeah, we use a lot of music too to send them off. So they're kind of charging the person up for their journey. And then there's some procedure songs to send them. What kind of instruments would be used in the music? Most Ojibwe music, we have several types of drums and rattles.

Yeah, so typically that's what you'll see. You had mentioned tobacco. Could you speak to the medicinal components of Ojibwe culture, specifically in regards to plant medicine like tobacco or mushrooms, ayahuasca? I know it exists more in Central America, but is there any, I guess, proxy for that in Ojibwe culture? It's a little different. First of all, like, this is a, the part of the world that I live in has a very rich, diverse ecosystem. There are lots of plants, and there's lots of plant knowledge.

So we use many different types of plants for just about everything you could imagine. So we use them for cleansing, for healing, for anything from basic colds to the most grievous, illnesses and their medicines for all of that. And still a lot of people actively cultivate that knowledge and use that. It's also something that is a spiritual practice. So, for example, one of my daughters used to get really chronic ear infections. And I took her to see a spiritual leader because usually we don't work on our immediate family members. And he said, she has something.

something deformed around what they call her mastoid gland. It's kind of inside the inner ear. And fluid keeps building up and giving her ear infections. And we had taken her to the doctor so many times. And they're like, here's some more antibiotics. Here's some more antibiotics. More antibiotics. Let's try this antibiotic.

A Western doctor. Yeah. But once we went to see this guy, he said, here's what it is. I'm going to give her a medicine. And this will be like a one-time medicine. And so like he was kind of like spiritually directed. But it was kind of like a directed poison to kill the illness. But if you took that and said, oh, this medicine is for earaches, it'd be like you're drinking a poison.

So it has to work with the spiritual, as well as the physiological and scientific component, the way we use them. This was successful for your daughter? It worked, yeah. That was it. Done. Yeah. And there are many other things to say about, you know, what's in the, you know, repertoire of medicines that are out there.

But the Ojibwe do not have something that is like a peyote or an ayahuasca that's a hallucinogen for inducing a vision or something like that. So that is not part of our custom. And people are aware that those things exist for other tribes. and peyote's indigenous to, you know, Texas and northern Mexico. It's just out of our region. Iawasca, you know, from the rainforest. So, yeah, those things are not kind of in our repertoire.

One of my elders kind of cracking me up, I said, what do you think about people who want to do peyote? And she goes, well, they can do whatever they want. I don't know about any other cultures, but it's not right for us to rush our visions. And that was her perspective. Interesting. Yeah.

What about tobacco? Tobacco, yeah. So the Virginia leaf tobacco does grow in much of the temperate part of the United States. Where I live in northern Minnesota, we're kind of right on the growing range for where that would grow. But the concept is that when we harvest something, take the life of a plant or an animal, birdfish, we shouldn't just be takers. So they're supposed to be reciprocity. So tobacco is kind of like the instrument we use if we're going to take some. something. So you offer in order to take so there's, you know, symbolically in exchange. We do that even

when we're doing a prayer. So it's kind of like, you know, a sacrament or something like that. It's currency for whatever our requests are. However, in our area, because Virginia leaf tobacco doesn't always grow that well, we actually have another plant. It's not even scientifically the tobacco plant. We call it red willow. And it'll even grow out in this area too. You might see it in the ditches in various places. It has bright red bark. And so in the springtime, when you harvest it, you could run a fingernail down the outside, twist it, and the outer bark will pop right off. It's paper thin, and then scrape down the inner bark, dry it out. And we've actually been, you know, telling people at ceremonies we officiate, let's decolonize our tobacco. Let's use that stuff.

Don't use a store-bought tobacco. It's full of 187 chemical substances that kill you dead when used as directed. When you make offerings to harvest your offering, it's more spiritually potent, doesn't have the chemicals, you know, it's hard to pray for healing in a toxic environment. So let's decolonize the tobacco practice and center that in our ceremonies. And it's been a good effort. Wow. Is there any groups that you're familiar with their tribes that would use marijuana in any type of ritual way? I'm not familiar with any. I can't rule it out. I mean, there's so much. Yeah, I'm sure, in some capacity. Okay, this is amazing.

I really appreciate you sharing with me. In the short period of time we have left, do you mind if I ask you some rapid fire myths that people believe about Native Americans and native tribes in America that maybe you could just dispel. Oh, sure. In some capacity. Okay, I guess just a couple off the top of my head. I've heard people say, you know, I obviously have an affinity for what would be considered

the natural and sort of things. that I think are more in tune with nature, and I think that is ultimately where humans are come from and belong in some capacity. So with that, I tend to do things much in that line. And people say, yeah, you know, the natives, they were great, you know, they did their thing, but they didn't have a great quality of life.

They died when they were 20 years old, there was famine and disease, even pre-colonialism and, you know, look at them now, they're all doing modern stuff. So obviously Western modern culture is a premier culture and yeah, you wouldn't not want to have been a native back in the day. I disagree.

You know, I'm really loving being a native person. Back in the day, it's not a fair comparison to look at any ancient culture and our modern culture. The life expectancy for humans in all cultures has changed dramatically with the advent of modern medicine, our ability to fix a broken bone, all kinds of things. and I don't know I've got one relative John Smith it's ironic he got the name John Smith

he's born in the late 1700s and died in 1922 wasn't even the record holder for human longevity Noden Wind was another elder from our community he's born in 1876 and passed away in 1981

he was the Grand Marshal for the 4th of July parade in our town and he'd lived through half of America's first 200 years in the 1976 parade. Wow. You know? And many other examples.

So there's no evidence that the longevity of native people was less than the longevity of white people or other groups, you know, at the same points in time. Today that's a little different. And that has more to do with, you know, living in food deserts, pushing people into abject poverty, you know, and the attendant effects on what kinds of food people can access and all the impacts of that. So I have a modern life as well as a traditional one. I explained about some of our cultural customs and traditions, which are perfectly well suited to our modern world, as well as our ancient worldview. And I don't think that, you know, native people should be

compelled to repudiate the advent of modern medicine any more than someone in England should be compelled to only worship at Stonehenge or repudiate modern medicine there. It's really a false comparison. And there's plenty of beauty in all the cultures of the world, and we shouldn't denigrate any of them. Okay. This one is a false dilemma, I believe. But I've heard people present both sides of this sort of as a, I don't know, some type of refutation to Native cultures. One is the noble savage stereotype to say, all native tribes in America, they were peaceful, and they just traded beaver skins with each other, and they ate corn sometimes, and they were just loving and didn't do anything wrong to anybody.

And then the other side is, oh, these people were, you know, warriors and savages and, you know, killing people all the time and, you know, Western European colonialism is no different than what they were doing to each other. So I don't know if you want to take one of those first. Yeah. I mean, obviously they're both incorrect. I don't think we should denigrate or romanticize any culture. Native communities and different cultures did have histories of both conflict and peace. I do think that the really big difference with colonial culture is what we spoke to earlier in our conversation, which is that that kind of violence was on scale to say, I'm going to come to this land and I say I own all this land and I own all these people. That was a different kind of violence than competition over resources and things like that.

And certainly there are tribes in certain areas that had more or less conflict. And you could point to that when you look at feudal Japan, the Mongol Empire, European, medieval Europe. You see plenty of conflict and you see things starting to get scaled up. But I do think there was something very different about the colonial enterprise that caused greater harm and injury across planet Earth to all people. I mean, Europeans perfected colonization doing it to each other before taking it to the rest of the world. We all have victim experiences with being forbidden to be who you are. And I think that was very different than just resource competition or humans being mean. Now, I've heard other people say many natives died from disease because they didn't have close proximity with cattle in the way that Europeans had for a long time.

They had built up, you know, a resistance to cholera and they had a black plague that killed many people, but the ones that survived were not only immune, but also contagious to disease. And so when colonists came to America and they were giving natives blankets and things like that, they didn't mean to kill them. They just died on accident. What are your thoughts to this claim? Incorrect. So first of all, it is true that Native people had a lot more susceptibility to the germ-prudely. brought from across the ocean, really the domestication of cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs. You had the transfer from animal populations to the human population, many kinds of diseases,

even childhood diseases like measles were sometimes killing many, many, many people. Smallpox had about a 30% mortality rate for native populations. And so it was the timing that caused the destabilization. because at the same time that you're meeting a new group of people, you're having nine out of your 10 closest family members die, and then somebody's trying to take your land. Like it was very destabilizing. And I think if you had, you know, initial contact,

and then there's no contact for a couple hundred years, you might have even had some different results, much less, you know, more equitable resistance to what's in the germ pool. However, Lord Jeffrey Amherst of the British army wrote in his journals, take these blankets infected with smallpox, send them to the disaffected tribes in order to inoculate them. And so it was intentional biological warfare. That doesn't mean that every introduction of disease was by intent, but some of the introductions to disease were intentional.

Wow. I had no idea that there was a direct intentionality. Oh, that's diabolical. Yeah. Wow. Okay. A couple more. And then I'll set you free. The Washington Redskins. Is that offensive? It is to me. And why?

I really think we should just do away with human mascots altogether. They're on a spectrum. Redskins. more offensive than Indians, which is more offensive than warriors. But the two primary defenses of native mascots are, number one, we're trying to do this to honor people. It's like badass, Spartans, Trojans, and Indians. So it's cool.

And the other one is, I ran into a native person who said it didn't bother him at all. And so my view is, simply this. Of course there's a diversity of opinion. But we have to examine the issues. First of all, when somebody is dressing up with a faux feather war bonnet and putting paint on their faces as a fan for a sports team, are they respecting a culture or playing Halloween? It used to be that you had to earn your eagle feathers through acts of service. So putting them into cost. costume kind of not only takes them out of context, but defiles the custom around it and

makes a mockery of it. Also, bear in mind, it's not just the hometown fans playing Halloween. Opposing fans always defile their opponent's mascot in the name of team or school spirit. And so when high school teams at high school games are saying, hey, Indians get ready to leaving a trail of tears round to hi Hawaii, hi Hawaii. We have a problem because somewhere in the mission for the school,

it should say something about education and an inclusive learning environment. And if you're a native student at that school, do you feel included? Is anybody there learning? No. Maybe in the most morbid and sensitive.

Right. And so those are the issues. And with regard to, I found a native person who said it doesn't bother me, there are some who have said that. The Seminole tribe in Florida where, you know, you have spent a lot of time, you know, officially sanctioned the collegiate team's use of their tribal name. And the Musquaki sanctioned the use of Blackhawk for that team. However, over 100 tribes have passed resolutions repudiating the use of native mascots and imagery. So when you compare two yeses to over a hundred nos and the National Congress of American Indians saying don't do it, it becomes a little more clear. I don't know if you ever listen to country music. Gretchen Wilson.

I'm a redneck woman. I ain't no high class bra. Yeah. Does that mean I can call every white woman I meet redneck woman? Probably not. If someone objects, please don't call me redneck woman, can I say, you have no right to be offended because Gretchen Wilson is down with it? I see. No, right?

And so if it's offending someone, it doesn't have to offend everyone or everyone in equal measure. If it's offending someone, lions, tigers, and bears. That's an interesting point. Yeah, I hadn't seen it in that way. And then I guess not to mention, you know, if there's something more specific, you know, for example, not every tribal group will, you know, have some type of personal or spiritual connection to that thing. Yeah. Like, I guess Black Hawk, for example, that means something very specific to a specific group. Right.

And so if you ask someone from a completely different tribe, hey, what do you think of the use of this? Like, yeah, who cares? It's like, well, it might not be necessarily what your tribe connects to spiritually. Yeah. And, you know, yeah, they are on a spectrum. Some are worse than others, right? Yeah. But at the same time, I think we'd all acknowledge, no matter what your politics or feelings are, that there's a controversy around it.

Sure. Yeah, I mean, I can recognize the term redskinned is going to be more egregious than Black Hawk or some and all. So it's just, this is another question. We only have so much time in a day. Do you want to spend your day fighting over a mascot? Mm-hmm. with lions, tigers and bears, controversies behind you,

and you don't have to fight that fight anymore. You don't have to justify anymore. And ultimately, like our national sports culture should be something that people from all groups can engage with. It could actually pull us together instead of divide us. Right. So it's kind of also inimical to that mission.

I think growing up for me, I had a perspective of reservations as not being great places, that this as a system for reparation for Native people was not particularly successful. That it was too little, too late. The casino system and sort of,

I don't know, conciliation, perhaps, creates a lot of corruption, and there's a lack of incentive for many people to live on res, and as a result, drug and alcohol, runs rampant and is just a further decay of the native culture.

I think this is sort of my outside perspective, having never been on a res and speaking to very few native people. And one time I had a, I was at a rotary meeting or something. Someone says, if reservations are so bad, why don't you just leave? And I was thinking,

have you watched American politics in the news lately? If America's so bad, Why don't you just leave? That the issue might not be just the issues, but that you're only hearing about the negative issues. And there are a lot of things wrong in America, but that doesn't mean that there isn't anything wonderful happening in America too. Yes, there is sexism,

but that doesn't mean that every woman in America wants to leave America. there's racism, it doesn't mean every person of color wants to get out. We want it to be better and different. And I feel like that about Native communities. There's so many beautiful things. Should I really walk away from the forest where all of our placentas have been buried for generations because a white person thinks it's really a bad place to be?

Should I walk away from our customs and our traditions and our community. And I found plenty of success, all the different kinds of success. I'm really a happy person. I love living in my native community. I feel way safer in my native community than I do coming to visit in the Bronx.

So it's silliness, really. That doesn't mean that there are not problems any more than there are not American problems somewhere. There are. but of all the things wrong in native communities, it can be fixed by what's right in native communities. And I got called to a Malax. It's the next res over a couple years before the pandemic.

And they said, we would like to do something meaningful about the revitalization of our tribal language. And this is a tribe with a successful gaming tribe. So by the way, from the advent of the first casino there, they saved half their money. So now their endowment produces more money than casinos. They put an elder in every classroom in the tribal school. They pay spiritual leaders and give them offices next to the medical doctors in the clinic so people can integrate modern medicine and their traditional ways. They built a beautiful ceremonial dance hall in each other.

their communities. And on a Friday night or a Saturday night when a lot of young people across America are looking for a party, their ceremonial dance hall is full of hundreds of people from little babies to elders, eating healthy food, dancing together, moving to the music, and learning about their language and culture. And it is healthy. It's a healthy place. It is. There are individuals who are exemplars of health, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and there's a community that's doing something really healthy. And a lot of people just don't have a clue that that's even possible in a native space.

That doesn't mean that there aren't problems. In 1969, 57% of the native population was below the poverty line, 57%. Today, it's at around 20%. Now, 20% is not okay. That is way too high. We called it the Great Depression in America when we had an unemployment rate at, you know, 15%. So you know, the Great Depression started when white folks showed up and it's never ended. At the same time, and that's an indictment America and its oppressions, not native people, and their lack of a work ethic. At the same time, we just shaved, whatever, 37 points off of indigenous poverty. That has to be one of the fastest growth rates out of poverty for any group in the country. And that's not because of a

U.S. government intervention. That's something tribes dead for themselves. So instead of paternalism and pity, how did they do that? How can we, everyone else ally themselves to that? How can we learn from that and apply that to everyone and everything else? and that can move us from the paternalism and pity into partnership, which is where we should be. Because I don't know how many of you have approached a friendship or a marriage or a working relationship with paternalism and pity and how to work really well. Never.

Right. It's infantilizing. It feels wrong. Yeah. I mean, and I think so many people feel that way where there is a pity. Like, oh, so sad. Yeah.

People are inculturated to a Jesus complex about things. I had that meeting in Malax. They said, we would like to do something meaningful for our language. And we're going to make an investment. I said, how big? They said, $14 million. And so there's more to the context of what was happening in the community and other things. And they really didn't have a very high fluency rate.

And so I said, it's going to be hard to send all your elders to college and get them teaching degrees and start a new school. Let's do something different. So we started working on Rosetta Stone, developing books. And we had to pull in a lot of people to partnerships. We even convinced our state historical society to publish monolingual Ojibwe language books, even though no one on their staff could read them. You know, there's a lot of faith in all the folks working on it. They lost 20% of their fluent speakers during the pandemic.

That was no joke. But when we came out of it, we've finally, safe enough to celebrate Rosetta Stone and the new books and things like that. And we asked Joan Aquinae to speak. He's one of the ceremonial drum chiefs. He'd lost a brother and a sister during the pandemic. And he said, you know, we've been through a lot. We were been through a lot the past few years. And we've been through a lot the past few hundred years. But I have to say, seeing all of these people coming around, seeing what we've been able to build, knowing that our elders will be teaching people our language for hundreds of years to come, I have to say that this has

been the happiest time of my life. Paternalism and pity? You know, I think there's something pretty amazing, beautiful, and dynamic happening there. And by the way, the Malax band of Ojibwe then can turn around and say, we hire lots of non-Native people here. We expect everybody who works here to demonstrate this level of competency with our tribal language. Here's the tool to do it.

The assessments are built right in. You have one year from date of hire. Welcome to our native nation. And so language revitalization is about health, sovereignty, community, and they're going to recuperate their entire investment over the life of the product. Wow. Do you believe casinos were helpful or beneficial concession to the native populations? Like so many things, do you think modern corporations have been beneficial to white people? Yes and no.

Right. It's kind of like that. Yeah. You know, yeah, corporations. well, capitalism sucks, and it's been really horrible to so many people. And in spite of how horrible it's been,

our standard of living is higher than it's ever been. We don't have to spend 100% of our time just harvesting food. Like there have been positives and negatives and it's all wrapped up together. I feel like with casinos, I understand that there are attacks on the poor, essentially.

because people who are economically disadvantaged are most likely to patronize the establishments and can't always afford to. And it's not really my idea of the healthiest way to spend your time looking at a machine. And at the same time, the influx of capital to the places that have been doing it has enabled them to do all kinds of things.

We talked about what Malax did. And they have a diversified business plan. I said, why are we sending our money to a non-native bank? They bought the bank. Wow. They operate many different hotels throughout the Twin Cities metro, not just on their reservation. They're very sensible about their investments. And today, you know, there is political acumen, academic acumen.

They do not have embezzlement or corruption scandals. Power to the people. There have been lots of positive things that have come out of it. And it's complex, you know, but no one else is going to help Malax. If they didn't build a casino when the opportunity arose, they'd still be sitting at 57%. Yeah, if not more. Yeah. And they have found a way adapting to the unique circumstances that they were in to build a better life for their citizenry.

So power to them, you know. I do think, you know, it's good for tribes to look at the kind of model that Malaks developed in other places like that. Diversify the business plan. Think about the social supports, cultural supports, language supports, you know, and invest for the future. You know, and some places have done better than others or grown faster than others, but I don't think it is or should be up to anyone outside.

of a native community to say, we know better than you what's best for you. And what's best for you is not casinos or something else. Because everything anyone else has come up with him has been horrible. Residential boarding schools, you know, forced endemic poverty, all these different things. It's never been positive. Yeah. So I feel very hopeful about the future. And I would trust native people to steward our future in native communities better than anybody else.

Okay, last question. And this one is controversial, so I'm curious what you think. I've heard that there is a substance abuse issue on reservations. Is that true? And if so, why? It is also complex. There is a substance abuse issue across America and around the world. And the substances are equal opportunity killers and life destroyers.

I think it is true that those who are economically disadvantaged are more vulnerable to traumas, human trafficking, and the attendant or correlating substance abuse intersectionality. The data says poor people and people of color, including indigenous people, do have higher rates of substance abuse. And I think that it is the correlation between disadvantage and denial of opportunity rather than something inherent to racial characteristics that drive that. And it is also true that native people. people have disproportionately higher rates of abstinence. And I certainly see that in our cultural space. And it's not just because so many recovering addicts or something like that I don't use. And that's not because I have an addiction issue.

It's because I officiated ceremonies where some of the people coming through the door are looking for healing from that. And I wouldn't want to adopt a lifestyle that would be distracting to. anybody on their healing journey. And other people have other reasons, you know, for whatever they decide to do. Well, Anton, thank you so much. I really appreciate the time.

This has been amazing. I know there's a lot of feticization of native culture. And so I understand sharing specifically, like the particulars of the ceremonial and spiritual components. You know, I wouldn't want you to feel like it's in bad faith or bad hands. So I really appreciate being open and just educating the audience. myself included to the beauty, I think, of Ojibway customs, and I guess shining a broader light and sanitizing, I guess, the dark spots in American history as far as the genocide and treatment

of Native people in America. So simultaneously, yeah, educating and, I guess, encouraging, I feel inspired to learn more. So if I was interested or anyone that watching is interested in learning more about the Ojibway, Native cultures at large, or about you and your work. Where can they find you? Oh, yeah, there's so many wonderful voices out there. I really encourage people go to the source. Check out native authored, you know, books and voices. And there's so many of them out there.

Louise Archerich just won a Pulitzer Prize, Angeline Bully's a New York Times bestseller. With regard to my work, we'll make sure we add this to the show notes for anybody to click around and find a little bit more. I've published well over 20 books. And the most recent one is called Where Wolves Don't Die. It's a Y-A thriller and tender coming of age story that'll give you a window into Ojibwe culture,

just the sort of things we've been talking about. And I've got many others too, so there's everything you wanted to know about Indians, but we're afraid to ask. Also the cultural toolbox, if you want a deeper dive into Ojibway culture. And all the things are available on Amazon and everywhere good books are sold. and I've got a YouTube channel and lots of ways to connect and learn more. Look forward to hearing from you. Yeah, absolutely.

And if there's any Ojibwe folks that are listening right now, would you mind just sending us off maybe with a message to them in your native Ojibwe language? Miigwech, Apage, bygisendawai, be a peggish. Menween to me, no way, me, no, I, thank you so much, Anton. If you've made it to the end of this episode,

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