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."
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."
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron Pepe. 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 Taillet. 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.
Jean Teillet:So my name is Jean Taillet 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 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 a 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 nutshell, my legal life anyway.
Aaron Pete: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?
Jean Teillet:Well, I was a premier and I'm back to being an artist again. I've always been 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, so.
Jean Teillet: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 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. 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 Theatre, primarily on a few other companies, as a sort of, you know, occasional dancer. I choreographed for theatre workshop productions quite a few other places in, mostly in Toronto, and I also had a have had a long career as visual artist with works hanging in, you know, some private collections in the United States and a few public and private places in Canada.
Jean Teillet:And then I went to law school at 38, and that was a big change and, mind you, I 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 dances, like being, is an athletic thing. You really have to do it when you're young. 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.
Aaron Pete: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?
Jean Teillet:Yeah, 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 walls and I mean large, like you know, 12 feet high by you know, 10 feet wide and it had statements about the law from the Torah and one of the statements said there should 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, thinking, well, that's not right. What you know I'm, 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 you're from. I'm a member of the Riel family. My grandmother was Sarah Riel. My great-granduncle, her uncle was, was Louis Riel, so my great-grandfather was Louis's 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 matey.
Jean Teillet: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 have their own laws and and I also knew that there's. You know, there's military law and there's there's Catholic law and there's Jewish law, there's all kinds of law. 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. That should be the one law, right? So I really didn't like it and it really bugged me. So I after that, you know, in the first week or so, met the other indigenous law students there. There were nine of us, or nine of us, or eleven of us, I think. That year we were the, the, the peak, that's, the most indigenous students U of T 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.
Jean Teillet:So the, the Wampum Belt, I started talking about it with at the. We called ourselves the Native Law Students Association. I started talking to them about this thing. That bugged me, and we just we started talking about it, all of us, and we said, well, but 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.
Jean Teillet:So we invited the Holder of the two romampum belt To the? U of t from six nations and he came and he talked to us about it, what it means, and and. Then we asked him if we made a replica of it, would that be Wrong? And he said no, no, no, not at all, as long as you say it's a replica, and and and then we said, well, and if we put a plaque under it that says description of it, um, 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 beated it. So what it is is it's um, 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 um 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 and dignity afforded to each side. And that's the idea of it. So two laws that work in parallel with each other. So we I beated it Marty Bayer, who was from managed to to an island Ojibwe 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 uh, made a sort of a leaf, did into a frame and hung the hawk feathers from it, and then we Drafted up a plaque and we sent it to the um, the I'm sorry, I've totally forgotten his name um, and he said no, that sounds great.
Jean Teillet: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, uh, 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 um lavel hall, which was, you know, they just rebuilt u of t, but um, anyway it was, it was given a very prominent um position there. Um, and one of the interesting things is that they put the new, the new law school now Up and that brass plaque is gone, uh, but the two were one pump belts still there, yeah, so that was the story and I think it was great that u of t accepted it and and placed it and did all that. So it was all was um, it was a good. I believe very much that symbols are really important Um to have so because people, people look at them and they absorb them.
Aaron Pete:That's a beautiful story. In the beginning of the northwest is your mother. You talk about how there's a risk of the matee 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 matee people are? For people who may just be starting to learn about matee people now?
Jean Teillet:Yeah, the the word itself, matee, is very confusing. So I think to anybody who's listening, if you're confused about who the matee are, you're in good company and you're right to be confused because it is confusing. So, and that's because, um, what happened really is in the 1960 era, people start to become very aware of language. A lot of this comes out of um, a man named francis farman, who was an african writer, who started writing about naming um and how we use words like mulatto and half breed and um, you know, negro and all of those kinds of things, and the fact, uh, 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 matee primarily half breeds, became aware that half breed was a very derogatory term. So, and it is derogatory because it really means that you are half of something, you're not. You're not a whole anything, you're just half of this or half of that, these 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. And it also completely 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, 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 Métifs. That has been the language that they use, but of course the English never did that. The English people always call them half-breeds.
Jean Teillet:So 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 three or four generations in to the creation of the Métis nation. But that's who I'm talking about.
Jean Teillet: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.
Jean Teillet: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 a never-so-great Indian grandma from 1702, now maybe they didn't even know about for 300 or 400 years is suddenly calling themselves Métis. Well, I think that's just a fantasy, but that's what's happening. So my solution to this would be to suggest to the Métis nation that we should call ourselves the Métis nation and let everybody else fight over Métis. But I'm not a public politician, I'm not in power, so I doubt that that's going to happen. But it is a problem. The word so that's what I'm talking about is the people that we would now think of as Louisville's people.
Aaron Pete:There's a strong movement right now to understand history, I think in a good way.
Aaron Pete: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.
Aaron Pete: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 narrative around it?
Jean Teillet:I certainly think that 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 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 Maytube. What were they thinking? Why did they do what they did Not? You know, not the simplistic stories that we got from. You know the settlers who wrote the histories, right? But okay, just turn it around and say, well, that doesn't make a lot of sense if you were the Maytube 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 Maytube 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, because I mean 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 Maytube, 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 Maytube side of the story, or tried to write the Maytube side of the story. We've long had the English side of the story, but where's the Cree story in there? You know, that would really be nice.
Jean Teillet:Now some people have started to write it. Blair Stonechild and Bill Weiser have been trying to 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 Cree Nation? Where is the history of the Stalo Nation, although we've got a beautiful Stalo Atlas, which is great, but where's the history of the Mi'kmaq? 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.
Aaron Pete: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 Metis 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 Metis 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 a good day would I think have 25 different songs?
Jean Teillet:50 songs was a good day. That's what they said.
Aaron Pete:Can you tell us about the music and that side?
Jean Teillet:Yeah, I totally fell in love with the Voyageurs 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 in the Voyageurs. They pop up in 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 fascinating and they are the fathers of the Metis 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 Sprawlard of Yea, 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 the book. So I'm up here in 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 downstairs and I'd go, did you know that? But 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 voyagers did. And I was just that I was kind of blown away by that and I was listening to voyager music while I was writing that section and just 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 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 one boyager group met another and they were sort of like almost like trains of like there could be 20 canoes in a group with, you know, ten 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 most beautiful thing he'd ever heard in his life. And you can have like 200 men's voices singing out on the water like that. They all talked about it. Everybody who encountered them talked about how beautiful the music was.
Jean Teillet: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 complements, 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, and but a lot of them were funny songs and some of them were kind of jazzy and where the and 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 to you. That's jazz, that's what that 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 matey. That's.
Jean Teillet:The other thing that came across to me over and over again is that everybody complained about how noisy the matey were when they were in the camps.
Jean Teillet:They you know the, the first nations complained about how noisy they were and settlers complained about on those, if they were, and they 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 won a little bit of peace and quiet.
Jean Teillet:But nope, the fiddle, it just dance and sing all night long and so, and nobody else liked, but they clearly did so. It's a very vibrant people, full of you know what a view, and and they are constantly on the moon and constantly singing, and I am. To me that was just extraordinary. So I think they get a lot of that from their voyager fathers. It comes down to the rhythm 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 ballad. It's noisy, loud, goes at full speed and they never, they're not interested in quiet. So you know, they're not the matey, are not the quiet noble savages. There's just that's, if you can ascribe a character to a people, they're not they're just not.
Aaron Pete: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? And 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's, 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 Mitchiff language?
Jean Teillet:yeah, so the the language that's the language of the native nation. It's a really unique language, so it 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 Frank, a European, they would move to French, because French and Cree were what you would call the lingua franca of fairies, 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 Mitchiff language to anyone other than another Mitchiff, 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 not Cree. What are they talking? And so he went over and talked to them and 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 essentially what he's saying is that it is like there's only one other language in the world that's like Mitchiff 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 I were speaking the chif and you spoke Cree, you would understand a lot, but you'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 the rest of it. So, 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 Mitchiff has.
Jean Teillet:So it's a very unique language and there are dialects of it. If you're up in Northwestern Saskatchewan, it is basically more Cree than French. If you down where I'm from Red River, metis, in St Boniface, manitoba it's got more French, less grief, 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 Mitchif or Southern Mitchif and so, but it isn't. So it's not a patois, 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 Mitchif we have actually written down from like 1820. So we know it's been around for about, you know, at least 200 years and it is a really it's very unique to the Métis.
Jean Teillet: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 uh, lead into other groups. So so, yeah, mitchif's, and it's very much spoken today. There's lots of Mitchif, 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, starting to Terry Lynn, um, davidson, williams Davidson and she 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, a lot of people, but there's only three really fluent left. Well, I don't think Mitchif's anywhere near that. I think there's quite a few people who are really fluent.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, for the Helclamelem language. There's only one fluent speaker left in who's able to speak that, so it is considered an endangered language.
Jean Teillet:Yeah.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, 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?
Jean Teillet: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. So, and I think we're on the way to recognizing their rights. 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. So 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.
Jean Teillet: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 Stalo right, you know where's the boundaries are. 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 Katmuc and the Stalo go? You know those are. You know 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 does it feel? Yeah, we fight over those boundaries, but the core group is solid, and so I think those are the things that people need to recognize. And then 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 Métis Federation has a treaty that's coming.
Jean Teillet: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'm actually retiring my law career pretty hopeful.
Jean Teillet:I also see so many wonderful young people coming up who are picking up the battle and carrying it on. I'm, you know, there's a beautiful young Métis lawyer, geneviève Benoit. She used to sit on my lap in color when we were at Métis meetings back 25 years ago. She's a lawyer now she's working for the Métis Nation. She's wonderful. So I just think I'm very, very proud of our new young generation coming along. They're doing well. I look at the Manitoba Métis Federation. They just bought a huge major building at the corner of Portage and Main, which is the major intersection in downtown Winnipeg. 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.
Aaron Pete:I can decree more.
Jean Teillet: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.
Jean Teillet: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, Erin, and your generation, Just pick up the ball and run with it.
Aaron Pete: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.
Jean Teillet:Thanks for this Erin. I really enjoyed it.