Nuanced. - 147. Jean Teillet: Weaving the Narrative of Métis Culture, Rights, and Resilience

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

Join us as we explore Métis culture with Jean Teillet, an influential advocate and descendant of Louis Riel, who intertwines her legal expertise and artistic passion in championing Indigenous rights. In this conversation, Jean delves into the Métis' rich history, their fight for recognition, and how recent legal victories are shaping their path toward self-governance, offering insights into her book, "The Northwest is Your Mother," and the vibrant future of Métis advocacy.Jean Teillet, now retired and named Emeritus Counsel at Pape Salter Teillet LLP, is renowned for her pivotal role in Indigenous rights litigation, including R. v. Powley, and her contributions to Métis and First Nation communities, along with receiving numerous accolades such as the Governor General’s Meritorious Service Cross and authoring "The North-West is Our Mother."Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, Aaron P. Thank you so much for tuning into another Bigger Than Me podcast episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and comment to show your support. Today, we will be exploring Métis culture, their language, their art, their music, and how they fit into Canadian history with the author of The Northwest Is Our Mother. My guest today is Jean Taié. Welcome, Jean. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm wondering if you would be able to do a very brief introduction and background about yourself to get people familiarized with you.

So my name is Jean Taye, and I am a recently retired lawyer, and that's like 11 days retired. I have been for the past 25 some odd years, an indigenous rights lawyer mitigating at the Supreme Court of Canada and all of the other. levels of court as well as a treaty negotiator. I work for mostly for First Nations and for Métis Nation. And I've also, I'm also an author. I've written the Northwest is Our Mother, which is the history of the Métis Nation, as well as a book called Métis Law in Canada and multiple other articles. And I also do a lot of public speaking and writing. So that's me in a not chill, my legal life anyway. Brilliant. Well, I'm going to ask you to take us all the way back to the beginning where you were a writer, a dancer, a choreographer, a director, a producer. Would you mind taking us back to those 20 years of your life and some of the highlights that

you experienced? Well, I was primarily, and I'm back to being an artist again. I've always being an artist and I like making things. It's really what it comes down to. As you can see by the thread behind me, a lot of my work is in fiber arts. But I started out when I was a teenager writing for a radio station in Winnipeg and that was broadcast over through Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and North Dakota, Minnesota, and I think into Montana. And so I wrote a one-minute editorial every day. And it was my first input into writing. And it was basically like it's write anything I wanted.

And so I did. And they never edited me or told me what to write or said I couldn't say whatever I wrote. So I did that for, you know, I think it was about four or five years, maybe less, I can't remember. And then, but I also was very interested in dance. So I did that, really danced for quite a few years. I danced as a modern dancer. I danced with Toronto Dance Theater primarily on a few other companies as a sort of, you know, occasional dancer. I choreographed for theater

theater workshop productions and quite a few other places mostly in Toronto and I also had a have had a long career as a visual artist with works hanging in some private collections in the United States and

a few public and private places in Canada and then I went to law school at 38 and that was a big change and mind you I'd wanted to I wrote the law school exams when I was like 20 at the same time as I was auditioning for dance companies and I decided that dance is like being an athletic thing you really have to do it when you're young and in my mind I said well you can be a lawyer when you're 40 which at that time was about as old as I could imagine being. And so sure enough, around, it's at 38 that I went to law school.

So just kind of moved over to the other side of my brain. And then I've spent that since then in law. And now I'm back in my creative mode again. There's one piece I'd like to ask. about specifically and it's the two-row wampum belt sitting in the University of Toronto. Would you mind sharing with the listeners the meaning behind that belt? Yeah, it's it's a Haudenosaunee. That's sort of the Six Nations tradition. And so what happened was I, my first day of law school at the University of Toronto, I walked in and there was a very large big brass plaque on one of the walls. And I mean

large like you know 12 feet high by the you know 10 feet wide and it had uh statements about the law from the Torah and one of the statements said there shall be one law for you and the stranger among you i might be misquoting that slightly but you get the gist and i remember standing in front of that on my very first day of law school and think you well that's not right That's not what I, you know, I'm, I should have said in my introduction, I'm also a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation, and I am, as my, one of my elders, Maria Campbell says, introduce yourself by who are your people and where are you from. I'm a member of the Riel family. My grandmother was Sarah Riel. My great-granduncle, her uncle was Louis Riel. So my great-grandfather was Louis' little brother. And I was born in up right on, literally on the banks of the Red River in.

So I am your classic Red River, Métis. And I stood in front of that plaque that day. And I said, well, that's sure not what I thought or was taught. You know, I had always believed that there were indigenous people had their own laws. And I also knew that there's, you know, there's military law. and there's Catholic law and there's Jewish law. There's all kinds of law out there. There's not one law for you and the stranger among you.

And then the other thing that bugged me about that statement was, well, if there's one law for you, the stranger among you, then surely you settlers are the strangers. And she should be our law. That should be the one law, right? So I really didn't like it and I really bugged me. So I, after that, you know, in the first week or so, the other indigenous law students there, there were nine of us, or nine of us or 11 of us, I think,

that year. We were the peak. That's the most indigenous students UFT has ever had, was that year. And then I think they were like nine or something the year after, and there were three or something the year before us. So we were at that, you know, in those years I was there, then we were the biggest amount of indigenous students at the University of Toronto ever. And so we did things. So the Wampong Belt, I started talking about it at the we called ourselves the Native Law Students Association. I started talking to them about this thing that thugged me. And we started talking about it all of us. And we said, well, why don't we try and get another symbol of indigenous law in the law school and put it up?

And so we, but we didn't want to appropriate another indigenous people's. symbol without, you know, talking to them in permission. So we invited the holder of the two Rwampum belt to the U of T from Six Nations, and he came and he talked to us about it, what it means, and then we asked him if we made a replica of it, would that be wrong? And he said, no, no, no, no, no, not at all. as long as you say it's a replica and then

we said well and if we put a plaque under it that says description of it can we send it to you so we get the wording right and then you can send it back and he said absolutely so I went off and beat it it so what it is

is it's a white row and a purple row thin purple row and another white row and another thin purple row and another white row. And so it's called two row because it's the two purple rows. And really the symbolism behind it is that indigenous people have their laws and customs and live in the one

purple row. And the settlers have their laws and customs and they live in another, in the other purple row. And the white rows in between are about respect and trust and honesty and communication and all of those things. And the belief was that the two rows could live in parallel with each other as long as there was respect and honesty and dignity afforded to each side. And that's the idea of it. So two laws that work in parallel with each other. So I beat it.

Marty Bayer, who was from Manitoulan Island, an Ojiboy guy, brought back beautiful birch bark rods and hawk feathers and deer skin strips. And so we took my wampum belt and we sort of made a sort of a leafed into a frame and hung the hawk feathers from it. And then we drafted up a plaque and we sent it to the, I'm sorry, I've totally forgotten his name and he said note that sounds great i think he made a maybe made a couple of changes to to it and then we gifted it to the university of toronto and uh to the dean then who was bob sharp who was later on the court of appeal for ontario and um um then they hung it in a really prominent place just as you were coming out of the library and down the steps into what was

called Lavel Hall, which was, you know, they just rebuilt U of T. But anyway, it was, it was given a very prominent position there. And one of the interesting things is that they put the new law school now up, and that brass plaque is gone, but the two Rwampum belt's still there. Yeah, so that was the story. And I think it was great that U.S.T. accepted it and placed it. and did all that, so it was all, it was a good, I believe very much that symbols are really important to have, because people, people look at them and they absorb them.

That's a beautiful story. In the beginning of the Northwest is your mother, you talk about how there's a risk of the Métis being treated like the forgotten people, that they walked so lightly on the land in so many ways that there's a risk that they don't get the acknowledgement, the understanding, the recognition that they deserve. Would you mind describing from your perspective who the mayti people are for people who may just be starting to learn about Mayti people now? Yeah, the word itself, Métis is very confusing. So I think to anybody who's listening, if you're confused about who the Métis are, you're in good company and you're right to be

confused because it is confusing. So, and that's because it, um, it, What happened really is in the 1960 era, people start to become very aware of language. A lot of this comes out of a man named Franz Fannan, who was an African writer, who started writing about naming and how we use words like mulatto and half-breed and, you know, Negro and all of those kinds of things. and the fact how discriminatory the language is in the naming. And so people became very aware that are English people, let's put it that way, who had always called Métis primarily half-breeds, became aware that half-breed was a very derogatory term.

And it is derogatory because it really means that you are half of something. You're not a whole anything, you're just half of this or half of that. these are the word breed is also very troubling I mean we breed animals we don't breed people right so if you're calling a person a half breed you're calling them half an animal and it doesn't take a lot to guess which half is the animal right and the other part of it is that a half breed connotes almost like a mule like you have nothing that you can you're neutered you have nothing that you can pass on you know and it also can creates you as an individual and not as a member of a collective. So it's just, that one word alone, just completely severs that person from any collective at all, and especially an indigenous collective. So the Métis, of course, in French, and the bulk of the Métis nation have always called themselves Métis or Métis or Mischiffs,

that that has been the language that they, used. But of course, the English never did that. The English people always called them half reads. So the, who are the Métis? As far as I'm concerned, the Métis are the people who are the members of the Métis Nation. And the Métis Nation is primarily the people who came into existence in the late 1700s in the prairies primarily. Now, that territory kind of spills over a bit into Ontario, a bit into the United States, a little bit into BC, maybe a little bit into the Northwest Territories, but the bulk of it. The real bulk of it is centered on the prairie provinces. And so they're the people that we would today think of as Louis Riel's people. Although

Louis Riel was not the first leader by any means, he's, you know, three or four generations in to the creation of the Métis Nation. But that's who I'm talking about. I do not use the word as a simple reference to anybody who has mixed ancestry. I don't use it to refer to First Nations people who lost their status or whose grandmother married a white guy or any of the people in Eastern Canada who have lately picked up the word Métis and are starting to call themselves Métis. So I don't think that that's appropriate. But what I think about the use of the word is absolutely irrelevant. The horse has left the barn on that one. It's just out there and everybody's using the word and that's why everyone's

confused about it is because anybody who has so much as an ever so great Indian grandmama from 1702 now that maybe they didn't even know about for 300 or 400 years is suddenly calling themselves Métis, well, that's, I think that's just a fantasy, but that's what's happening. So, you know, my, my solution to this would be to suggest to the Métis Nation that we should call ourselves the Métis, the Chiff Nation, and let everybody else fight over Métis. But I'm not a perfect politician. I'm not in power. And so I doubt that that's going to happen.

But it is a problem, the word. So that's who I'm talking about is the people that we would now think of as Louis Riel's people. There's a strong movement right now to understand history, I think, in a good way, but to me there's also this very dangerous path that we're on that we're sort of just looking at history as a terrible atrocity and that we say white people came over and caused all these problems for indigenous people and that was it. And I often point to the Métis people as an example that there could have been and there was collaboration among First Nations people. and people coming across from other lands and that that was something both communities benefited from it didn't have to go the way that it went with the english it didn't have to be that way that we did have healthy relationships we did have trade and it was something that was good so when we look back on history we have to somewhat embrace the ambiguity and the complexities of these relationships as they

were certainly it was never all good or all bad but right now i do feel like so many people are looking back at history and just saying everything that was going on was bad and everybody in the past was bad and indigenous people have just had a terrible time of it and certainly there are pieces of that that are absolutely true but it's far more complicated do you have the same understanding do you have concerns when we look back at history and kind of just have one one narrative around it I I certainly think the history is always more complicated than a simple narrative. And my, when I was writing the book, that was so clear to me. I so often would come across a single event where there would be seven different stories, all coming from different

perspectives, all about the same event. And some of them totally irreconcilable. Some of them could live together if you kind of looked at them. But no, history is incredibly complicated. And I, I never think there's, the good guys are not always good and the bad guys are not always bad. I mean, the bad guys can be bad sometimes and good sometimes, and histories like that. I don't think there's a simple story anyway. I think the problem with our history in Canada until pretty recently is that no one was even trying to tell the indigenous side of the story. And so that was what I was trying to do with the book. I wasn't trying to say, well, everything you've said is wrong.

I'm just saying, yeah, but there's this other story here. And so when I was writing it, I was always asking myself, okay, this happened. So what were they, by them, I mean the Métis, what were they thinking? Why did they do what they did? Not the simplistic stories that we got from, you know, the settlers who wrote the history, the histories, right? But, okay, just turn it around and say, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense if you were the Méti people standing there.

So what were they thinking? What were they doing? Why would they do this thing? So that's what I was trying to do, not say you're wrong, although sometimes their stories are wrong, you know, but not always. And so, you know, I think it's just more a point of. adding another thread or two to the story. And so, you know, I can tell, I wrote that whole story of basically the Métis Nation in there,

but I could not add in there the First Nations thread, right? And that's a whole huge thread that no one else has written yet, right? That would be really fascinating to write. And just for example, the 1885 resistance, we know that the First Nations, the Cree, were engaged in that resistance as well. But they were not working with the Métis. They were on their own trajectory. They went to war for their own reasons, and they followed their own path. And yet it often gets bundled all together. Well, I wrote the Métis side of the story or tried to write the Métis side of the story with long,

had the English side of the story, but where's the Cree story in there? You know, that would really be nice. Now, some people have started to write at Blair Stone Child and Bill Weiser have been trying to, you know, add to that story. But there are other perspectives on it, you know, and it just makes it richer, you know, makes us understand that none of this is simple. So I agree with you that it's not a simple story. And I think it's good, ultimately, that actually indigenous histories are being published now. But I think we're missing massive stories. I was given the opportunity to publish the story of the Métis Nation. But where is the history of the Kree Nation? Where is the history of the Stallow Nation? Although we've got a beautiful Stallow Atlas, which is great.

but where's the history of the meekma? Where's the history of six nations? You know, somebody, and I mean, it's like not academic books, but a popular history. I was given the chance to write a popular history, right? Which means it's sort of easy to read, not too many dates and footnotes and things like that, just an easy read. Where are all those stories? Those are missing. We haven't got those yet, and we need them.

I couldn't agree more, and I really enjoyed how you wrote the book because it was so easy to absorb, and it took you on this journey, and it gave me a deeper appreciation. I've worked as a native court worker. I understood that there were Métis people, but I didn't understand the culture, the history, the values, the language, the music. I got to learn all of that and get insights onto the distinctness of being Métis and have a deeper appreciation of that as a consequence of reading your book. So I'm wondering if we can also talk about the process of making that music.

When you started talking about the Voyageurs and how many songs they would play and how, like, a good day would, I think, have 25 different songs. 50 songs was a good day. That's what they said. Can you tell us about the music and that side of it? Yeah, I totally fell in love with the Voyager's when I was writing that part of it. And that's another story that, believe it or not, is not out there in Canadian history. No one's written a popular history of the Voyagers. They pop up in, you know, various stories a little bit here and a little bit there,

but no one's actually written a wonderful story about them. And they're phenomenal these guys. They were, they were fascinating, and they are the fathers of the Métis Nation. So where they are is most of them come, you know, I can't remember the numbers, but let's just broadly say, like 85% of them come from a very particular, area of Quebec around Pradovilla and so and that's interesting all by itself

that they're just coming from this one very small area of Quebec and they're unique you know these guys there so their music was phenomenal so I'm married to a musician my husband's a composer conductor

arranger rock and roll plays everything and when I came I used to while I was writing book. So I'm up here in my little, I call it my little attic room. And this is where I wrote the book a lot of it. And I would come downstairs all the time and I'd come down to the street. I'd go, did you know that? Full of all these things that I was learning. And one of them that I found was that the Voyagers, if you had a good singing voice, you got paid more than the other Voyager's

did. And I was just, I was kind of blown away by that. And I was listening to Voyager music while I was writing that section and just, you know, imagining, because I've done a lot of canoe trips in my life and just imagining what it was like when they were paddling along those rivers and lakes. And there were so many stories. Overwhelmingly, everyone who encountered the voyagers talked about their singing. And people, a very famous Irish poet Thomas Moore came through the Great Lakes. And he said something, I'm paraphrasing, but something like he had been in the finest concert halls in Europe and heard the great, you know, symphonies and operas and music, but nothing had touched his soul as much as one night when he was, when they were paddling,

I think, on one of the Great Lakes. And one Voyager group met another. And they, they were sort of like almost like trains of like there could be 20 canoes in a in a group with you know 10 guys in each one and he said and they all started singing and it was misty on the water and he said

it was just the most heartbreaking thing he'd the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard in his life and you could have like 200 men's voices singing out on the water like that they all talked about it everybody who in

counted them, talked about how beautiful the music was. Well, this musical tradition then comes down to the May TV, because this is their fathers and their grandfathers, and they are taught all those Voyager songs, and some of the songs are wonderful. Some of them are what they call Complence, which would be sort of rueful mystic kind of ballads. A lot of them dreaming about living somewhere permanently, because you guys were always on the move but a lot of them were funny

songs and some of them were kind of jazzy and where they you know you can imagine sometimes they'd be going through a canyon or something and their voices would echo off the walls of the canyon and they would just repeat words that sounded back and forth across

that's jazz that's what that is so it's all kinds of things and they also did little plays and songs around the campfire at night when they were there. So they were very lively and they're very noisy. That was the other thing is the voyagers and the Métis, that's the other thing that came across to me over and over again is that everybody complained about how noisy the Métis were. When they were in the

camps, you know, the First Nations complained about how noisy they were and the settlers complained about how noisy they were. And it was like because they would, they sang and they talked and everything while they were traveling and then when they stopped you think they want a little bit of peace and quiet but nope the fiddles sort of come out they just dance and sing all night long and so and nobody else liked that but they clearly did so it's a very vibrant people full of you know joie de vivre and they are constantly on the move and constantly singing and to me that was just extraordinary so i think they get a lot of that from their voyager fathers it comes down to them from there this sense of of song and poetry and dance and music that they still go through today

I mean, their music is not contemplative, sweet. They don't sing sweet, sad ballads. It's just like, it's noisy, loud, goes at full speed, and they're not interested in quiet. So, you know, they're not, the Métis are not the quiet noble savages. There's just, that's not who they are. If you can ascribe a character to a people, they're not, they're just not quiet.

It's a beautiful. It's a beautiful reminder because we're so used to having our iPods or our iPhones and having Apple Music, Spotify, we're so used to that that we, A, don't really share music the same way we used to and all participate, but you also think of long travels. How do you keep yourself entertained? How do you keep the energy up when everybody is tired? I know when I'm on a run, I listen to music and it gets me amped up and I'll listen to a certain rap song and it'll just get me right hyped back up and that's energy to your mind. It fuels you.

And so you have to think people needed that back then and there would have been a process for that and it was just such a beautiful reminder that that was a unique aspect, but such an important aspect to be able to move forward. Would you also mind telling us about the Michif language? Yeah. So the language, that's the language of the Métteamation. a really unique language. So one of the unique things about it is that nobody outside the Métis Nation knew it even

existed until the 1960s. And that's not to say it only came into existence then. It's just that it was not a language that people spoke outside of the family. If the minute a stranger came into a group, people would start to either speak Cree. back in the 1700s, 1800s, people would either, if it was a First Nations person, they would probably move to Cree. If it was a European, they would move to French, because French and Cree were what you would call the lingua franca of the prairies. So everybody spoke French and Cree, or they would move into English or some kind of, you know, combination of those three. But basically, they never spoke their machif language to anyone other than another machiff.

And so it was hidden. And it's not until this Danish linguist came to, I think he came to Saskatchewan in the 1960s. And he was studying Cree. And he heard these people speaking this language. And his ears perked up. And he went, wow, what is that? That's, that's, no, it's not, what are they talking? And so he went over and talked to them and, uh, and started to, and got so intrigued

with this that he went into a deep study of it. And so his study is really fascinating, he's published a book on it and, um, essentially what he's saying is that it is, uh, there's only one other language in the world that's like mchiff and that's the language that the gypsies or the roma people speak and so what it is is that you're taking nouns from one language but the taxonomy and the grammar is from another language so for example if if i were speaking the chif and you spoke cree you would understand a lot but she'd be going wow wow what is this likewise if you were french you would hear a lot of French nouns, but you wouldn't understand the rest of it.

And that's apparently the Roma language, which is a lot of German in it, and there's other languages in it, but it's got its own taxonomy, and that's what the chif has. So it's a very unique language, and there are dialects of it. If you're up in northwestern Saskatchewan, it is basically more creed than French. if you're down where I'm from Red River Métis in San Boniface, Manitoba, it's got more French and less

Crete, but it's still, but they can still understand each other, the two different dialects. So there's the sort of what we call Northern Michif or Southern Michif. And so it's not a pat-waal. It's not just a slang, it's its own unique language.

And we think it's been around since the late 1700s or late 1700s early 1800s because some of the songs that are in the chif we have actually written down from like 1820 so we know it's been around for you know at least 200 years and it is a really it's very unique to the maytee and since you're talking about what you know if you're talking about what makes a people or a nation people language is one of the key key things they need to have their own language and otherwise they're not a they're not a distinct group they're sort of bleed into other groups so so yeah mitchif and it's very much spoken today

there's lots of matif it's not a i don't think it's an endangered language there's quite a few people who are still speaking it alive today it's not like unfortunately like you know i'm talking to Terryman, Davidson, Williams Davidson, who's Haida, and I think she said there's only three fluent Haida speakers. There's people, she can speak a bit of it and a lot of people, but there's only three really fluent left. Well, I don't think the shifts anywhere near that. I think it was quite a few people who are really fluent. Yeah. For the Helclimelam language, there's only one fluent speaker left in who's able to speak that. So it is considered an endangered language. I'd like to ask one last question.

When we're thinking about the challenges that the Métis have faced to be recognized, to be respected, to have their Section 35 interests respected, I'm wondering what would you say to municipal, provincial, federal governments, what would you say to First Nations communities on the impact the Métis has had and what they should know about the Métis, how they should understand them? well i think first of all that they should understand them as a separate people that they are a people they're not just half first nations or half this there's a separate and distinct group there and that's important that everybody understands that um so and i i think we're on the way to recognizing their rights um you know i did the first case at the supreme court of Canada that took Métis rights to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the Supreme Court was very clear, and we've had that there are, that the Métis are distinct people and that they have Section 35 rights. We've had a couple of other important cases since then, not the Supremes, that have reinforced that decision. So I think that in law, they're recognized.

Now, where the boundaries are is a, you know, that's a question for lots of First Nations and lots of Métis. I mean, I know for the Stolo, right? You know, where's the boundaries or, you know, people fight over these things. It's fine. It's standard. People fight over boundaries. There's a clear group of Stalo, you know, in the middle there. And the edges, where does that boundary between the?

and Catmuth and the Stolo Go, you know, those are, you know, those are, those are debates that will probably go on for another 150 years, you know, and the Métis Nation has the same thing. We sort of got this prairie core, but how far into Ontario, how far into BC, do you know, we fight over those, those boundaries, but the core group is solid. And so, um, I, so I think those are the things that people need to recognize. And then as, you know, so some of the things, there are self-government rights. the self-government agreements that are being signed and enacted into law pretty much as we speak. And I'm pretty sure those are going to go through.

The Manitoba-Metis Federation has a treaty that's coming. So I think that this is very different from where it was when I was growing up. You know, we're a thousand miles from where it was when I was born in the 50s. when the Métis were all stupid, dirty, diseased, drunken, less than human, you know, people. So things have come a long way. We have a ways to go, but I think things are better. Our stories are appearing. People are starting to understand.

And so I actually am retiring my law career pretty hopeful. I also see so many wonderful young people coming up who are picking up the battle and carrying it on. There's a beautiful young Nétis lawyer, Genevieve Benoit. She used to sit on my lap in color when we were at Nétis meetings back 25 years ago. she's a lawyer now she's working for the mating nation she's wonderful i so i i just think no i'm i'm very very proud of our new young generation coming along there doing well i look at the manitoba maytee federation they just bought a huge major building at the portage at the

corner of portage of main which is the major intersection in downtown winnipeg um You know, there are billboards up for the Red River Métis in the Ottawa airport, you know, of all places. So I think that they're doing well. And so I'm happy about that. I think, like I said, I think we've got a ways to go. People, the Canadian public needs to learn more about Métis and all indigenous people. I couldn't agree more. Yeah.

But I think, you know, you know, things are, what is it, Martin Luther King said, the arc of justice bends, you know, the arc of history is bending towards justice. And I think that's true for indigenous people. Right now, it's bending towards justice. We're not there yet, but it's bending that way. And I think, you know, I spent my law career trying to help bend that in that direction. And I think I helped. And so, but I, like I said, I'm very hopeful because the young people are smart and dedicated and working hard towards all indigenous rights. And to me, that's great.

I will sit back now and go back to my art career and watch with enjoyment as you, Aaron, and your generation just pick up the ball and run with it. Beautiful. Jean, thank you so much for doing this. The Northwest is Your Mother is available on Audible, audiobooks, it is available in physical copies. I highly recommend people check it out. Thank you so much for sharing your time today. Thanks for this there, and I really enjoyed it.