BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
Get inspired by people who make a difference bigger than themselves with host Aaron Pete. From overcoming obstacles to finding motivation, these guests will inspire you to dream bigger and strive for greatness!
Popular guests include Premier David Eby, Vassy Kapelos, Brent Butt, Ariel Helwani, Rav Arora, Tara Henley and the Millennial Therapist.
BIGGER THAN ME PODCAST
155. Michael Moses: Confronting Residential School Denialism & Fostering Unity in Politics
City councillor Michael Moses confront Indian Residential School denialism and discusses the book "Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us". He also talks about his work advocating for marginalized voices in Williams Lake, highlighting the crucial role of diverse perspectives in democratic governance and the ongoing dialogue on Indigenous rights and reconciliation in a conversation with Aaron Pete.
When We Die TalksWhen We Die Talks explores life’s biggest question: what happens when we die?
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Welcome back to another episode of the Bigger Than Me podcast. Here is your host, aaron Peet.
Aaron Pete:Today I have the privilege of sitting down with a city councillor from Williams Lake, british Columbia. He is a member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band and an advocate for reconciliation. We talk about the book Grave Error how the Media Misled Us, and the Truth About Residential Schools, which was published by the True North Centre. My guest today is Michael Moses. Michael, it is such an honour to sit down with you. We had the pleasure of speaking at a joint conference together. I was really inspired with what you had to say. But first would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners?
Michael Moses:Yeah, thank you so much for having me here, Aaron. My name is Michael Moses. I'm a Lower Nicola band member. I'm also a city councilor in the city of Williams Lake and a director at large for the union of BC municipalities. What energizes me to get up every day is to be able to stand up for equity deserving groups and to do the good fight for Indigenous rights.
Aaron Pete:Interesting. Would you mind first outlining how you started on that journey? What made you interested in running for municipal council?
Michael Moses:Yeah, sure, this started probably about two and a half years ago in the city of Williams Lake when our prior mayor and it's really important to emphasize, prior on this one started sharing some residential school denialism posts on his Facebook. And this hit really close to home for me, as both of my parents attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School, and this was just shortly after the 215 potential burials were discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. I attended the next city council meeting with the Williams Lake First Nation Cookby, the chief, willie Sellers, who I believe you've also had on your program, and I sat behind him to provide moral support and I thought that night that we were going to see a great apology from a leader in our community. For the last several decades he's been our mayor, he's been our MLA, he's been the president of many of our societies.
Michael Moses:But rather than seeing a strong apology, I saw someone double down and blame the local chiefs for bringing it to the public and saying that this was his private Facebook so he should be allowed to say whatever he wants on it. And after that meeting I went home to my family and I cried and I asked my mother how can people still get away with this? I thought that we were further in the timeline than to have this sort of issues still in the public, and not just at the coffee shop around the corner, but right from the strongest leaders in our region. So that night was the first time that I considered getting involved in local politics, because I realized that we were going to need people to stand up for any form of moving forward from this.
Aaron Pete:Where do you think those types of perspectives come from? I'm just wondering what drives someone to have that type of perspective on an issue like this. Is it just that they want to be disagreeable? Is it that they're reading different books than me? Where do the origins of these perspectives come from? Were you able to delineate from anything that he was saying where and why he was motivated to take those perspectives?
Michael Moses:I can think of several reasons that someone could have these perspectives. The first one is just ignorance and a lack of education. The second one is exactly the opposite, in that they're very educated and they're very logical, so they'll take the time to recognize some of the truths from the situation and then not the rest. They'll take the logic from the situation, but not the emotion. They'll take the storyline as it's affected our country rather than the storyline as it's affected our people, um and the the. The third reason I can think of that that someone would take this stance is um is is that they they've been taught to be this way since a young age and this form of education unfortunately continues from generation to generation.
Aaron Pete:When you're thinking about running for politics. I think it's a process. You have that initial thought and then you kind of think about the realities of being in the position running a campaign, figuring out what your positions would be. What was that part of the process like for you?
Michael Moses:That process was a long haul and I'm really lucky that I had a little over a year to prepare for the coming election and for the results of the election.
Michael Moses:As soon as I recognized that this was a possibility, I made sure to start taking the time to educate myself on what the role of city councillor is, what they do, what they can achieve, where we can go from forward with the role into other roles. Recognizing that I had a steep learning curve ahead of me because I hadn't been involved in politics before, I made sure to get mentorship from prior city councillors, from regional directors, from prior mayors, mlas, chiefs, band councillors, presidents and executive directors of societies that I'm involved with, and to take it as a full-time position to prepare for the election, to prepare for the potential of being a city councillor and I did this for a full year, combined with attending every city council meeting as part of the gallery, just as a learning experience, to know what I'd be getting into, to make sure that, if I could get into the room, that I'd be entering it with my eyes wide open and with the knowledge and skill set to be effective.
Aaron Pete:That's fascinating and so great to hear. When you're considering putting your name forward for a position like that, I think it's important to choose wisely who you speak with, who you get advice from on whether or not you should put your name forward. People who are going to be thoughtful and make sure that they give you high quality feedback on how to move forward and whether or not you should put your name forward. People who are going to be thoughtful and make sure that they give you high quality feedback on how to move forward and whether or not you should put your name forward. Like making sure that those core maybe five people are really going to understand the vision and take their time and support you. What was that like? To figure out who you were going to share this initial idea with? I'm going to put my name forward for this position.
Michael Moses:Oh, I thought you were just saying you're going to put your name forward. I was getting excited for a moment. Um so, so I was really fortunate with, with the, the support that I was being provided with, the people that I had around me at first it was my family, and that that is um, very, very strong to the core for me, very supportive, very loving, willing to question my choice, to make sure. I thought about it. But early on I started attending more meetings in the region with the Conservation Society, cmha that's, the Canadian Mental Health Association, the Friendship Society.
Michael Moses:And where I really was successful in creating relationships to surround myself with the right people was when I attended a meeting for a group here called CC Care that's our Caribou Chilcotin anti-racism group. And when I attended that meeting and let them know my intention, they immediately embraced me and began supporting me in every way they can, and that ended up essentially being my campaign team, and now I'm so fortunate to call them colleagues but also, I think, more importantly, to call them friends, and their full support and their knowledge and their assistance were so integral in helping me to prepare for the campaign, in helping me win the campaign and now also in helping me as a councillor, to ensure that I'm not only holding other people accountable, but they're holding me accountable, which is really important.
Aaron Pete:One challenge I think a lot of First Nations people face is that they're pulled in two directions One is to go serve on their local chief and council for their own nation, and the other is that they often pulled in two directions One is to go serve on their local chief and council for their own nation, and the other is that they often live in municipalities that face some of the issues that you've described. How do you think people should go about making this tough decision to serve their own community or to serve a broader public in a municipality?
Michael Moses:This is a really tough decision for people who live closer to their community, because when a strong leader decides to get involved in local government or in provincial government or something to that extent, rather than their band's government, they're dramatically lowering the capacity and the strength of their own First Nations government, and this is a decision that definitely can't be taken lightly. In my instance, I'm originally from the Merit area as a member of the Lower Nicola Indian Band, but my family moved to the Caribou Chilcotin when I was about 10 years old, so I've been displaced from our traditional territory for a bit over 30 years now. So my choice between First Nations governance or local governance wasn't really an option. I couldn't choose between the two.
Michael Moses:I had very strong leadership in my family lineage and through my father, my uncles, my grandparents and all the way back, almost every single one of them has been chief believe that if I were to have remained in merit, that I would be serving my community in some capacity. I thought that that was no longer an option after being gone so long, but I feel like I found an alternate way to help our people, and that's actually led to my ability to still help the Lower Nicola Indian Band by becoming a board of directors for their development corporation. So I've been able to still be able to assist in ways that I didn't foresee, and that's been such a blessing.
Aaron Pete:What has it been like being on council? You talked about how you spent a year trying to get comfortable and understand the position. Was it what you expected and what change do you feel you've been able to bring in?
Michael Moses:It was 100% what I expected when you take the full year to prepare for something and to examine it closely and to look at it from all the different angles and to get teachings from people that approached it from very many different angles. It really allowed me to have a mindset inside the room that I was already experienced at the position before I had even achieved it, before I had received enough votes from our community to get to enter the room as a councillor instead of as a constituent, just to watch. But I feel like the biggest change that immediately happens as soon as a first nations person is enters these rooms as one of the elected positions is that the, the, the feel in the room is automatically different the, the, the way that the, the other counselors, the way that the staff approach situations. It is as if they're already holding themselves accountable rather than waiting for someone else to hold them accountable. Some of the conversations that would have happened three years ago that I would have heard from the mayor, from the council, from the staff.
Michael Moses:They happen dramatically differently now and they end in a different trajectory, which is pretty exciting to recognize that just having a First Nations or Indigenous person in the room is so effective and then that it gets dramatically larger when the person has one of the elected positions and then it gets dramatically larger again when that person has taken the time to educate themselves on how to be effective within the system. It's it's amazing to get to witness this firsthand, and I'm really hopeful to be able to assist a lot of other Indigenous people with reaching these sorts of goals in the future. My brain for the coming months on whether or not I'll be taking people away from their band's capacity if I try to push them towards municipal or provincial politics, and that's going to be something I'll have to wrestle with inside my own mind in the coming time. So I'm really glad you asked that one as well.
Aaron Pete:Yeah, I think that one is a particular challenge because we have some really great chiefs within our region, and I think that one is a particular challenge, because we have some really great chiefs within our region and I think a lot of people wonder are they going to put their name forward for a broader hat, or do they feel that their investments are better served on a local, very specific level where, like right now, from my perspective, it's too important? I need to focus on making sure that my community rises out of important. I need to focus on making sure that my community rises out of poverty. I need to make sure that people have food on their plates in my community every single day and that we're addressing some of those crucial mental health concerns.
Aaron Pete:I couldn't even put anything else on the table with those priorities in mind making sure we have housing, those type of issues and I've been personally inspired by the fact that you can make a difference in your own community. I worked as a native court worker for four years and saw people addicted to drugs, people struggling with homelessness, people struggling with mental health issues, people feeling like they weren't able to be their best selves and a lot of the resources just weren't cutting it. Now I'm able to come in to a community and say we're going to build the exact resources I wish I had when I was a Native court worker. We're going to deliver the resources our people deserve and need access to.
Michael Moses:I want to take a moment here, Aaron, just to tell you that I'm extremely proud of the work you're doing.
Aaron Pete:Thank you. That means a lot from somebody who knows so many of the challenges our communities face With being in this role. You're now a part of a team on a council and you have to work collaboratively and obviously there was people with different perspectives on the previous council. Do you feel you were embraced by that team? Do you feel like you're a cohesive team now that's working towards common goals? What has that experience been like?
Michael Moses:Yeah, for the most part, our team is cohesive. We definitely disagree on many topics, the most divisive topics that would generally be seen as right versus left. We do still have that line kind of drawn in the sand where it's hard to go across the other side and hard to convince anyone else to either. But I feel like that is just democracy at work, and if we didn't have people disagreeing on topics like that, then I think our council would actually be doing a disservice to our community. So, having the many different views and the many different angles and the debate, the very healthy debate, is so important. Healthy debate is so important. In regard to being embraced by our current council, I've been really fortunate that I believe this is true Even with the few that I debate with the hardest, and that the public might even view us as being almost like nemesis to each other. I still feel like that we have a healthy relationship where we respect each other and once the debate is complete, then the debate is over and we move on to the next topic and if the divisiveness isn't in the topic, we end up being a very strong team Rather than a team who is strong through debate. We were strong through collaboration, then, and either way is extremely important.
Michael Moses:In this current council we have six councillors and the mayor, so we have seven total.
Michael Moses:In the last election I'll be a little bit bold here the mayor kind of sunk his own ship when he decided to make such bold statements regarding residential schools.
Michael Moses:He sunk the ship of half of the council with them because they supported him and didn't ask him to step down. So in our current council we actually have five out of seven that weren't on council in the previous election. Our mayor is South Asian, I'm First Nations and we have four women on council. So we have such a diverse council that the outcomes of the votes can be surprising at times. But the support that I've received on First Nations topics in specific has been absolutely astounding, and the caring from the rest of the Council in regard to these topics and to myself has been a great surprise, because I didn't quite know what to expect and when I would enter this room as a Councillor, especially considering the history of the prior council and the region that I live in, which is pretty fraught with discrimination. So having a council that has been so supportive has been an amazing surprise and something now that I really rely on it now.
Aaron Pete:One of the pieces I really admire about you and that really stood out to me when we were on that panel together was your willingness to talk about the elephant in the room. I find in this time there is a lot of fear or concern about having the tough conversation when we're talking about the previous mayor and his opinions on residential school. It went by way of election. The general population was able to vote on which ideas they agreed with and disagreed with. We have another community right now that's facing a very similar issue, but there's talks of demanding resignations and that seems somewhat different to me than holding an election where the population is able to vote on which ideas they agree with and disagree with. Do you see a difference there, or do you think it's right that they're calling for the resignation of the mayor of another community?
Michael Moses:this is in the city of quenelle. Yes, um, I think both are right. I I think that if, if the, if the rest of council or a significant portion of of their constituents demand a resignation, that I think that's within their right. But it is also ultimately the mayor's decision in the end whether he does resign or not. So demanding it doesn't necessarily make it happen, as we also found out in Williams Lake a few years ago. But waiting, waiting for the election a few more years goes by a lot faster than we often want it to or expect it to. So that election will come around the corner very quickly. And just to send a message out to Cornell start lining up your strongest candidates, get them ready, because if you want to see change, be a part of it, get that campaign running. See if you can organize a volunteer team and be the change.
Aaron Pete:Beautiful. Do you think that people holding these positions should basically force them out of office? And the reason that I ask this is I do worry about us developing more divisive positions where the right feels like they're not allowed to say certain things or they're not allowed to view certain things, or their political perspectives aren't acceptable in the general public anymore, and then it encourages more anger, more animosity, more. If you say that they'll tear you down, they'll destroy your life, like it creates this sense of us versus them rather than, to your point, education, discussions, breaking these issues down. Do you have any concerns that moving in that direction can create more divisiveness over the long term, in the direction of Requiring resignation, asking for resignations, pushing for those ideas to be pushed down and eliminated, and that people can't hold those in public office?
Michael Moses:Yeah, that's a tough call. One of the things is that this can be somewhat different in each local government, as we have control over our own code of conducts. So what is good for Quesnel might not be the best for Hope, and vice versa. So if they see the need to have some teeth to their code of conduct, then they can put it in there themselves, in in William's Lake, where, where we try to avoid allowing the code of conduct to be used as a weapon. So if, if, if we were to allow too much teeth into a code of conduct, it will actually make it so that our process is a lot weaker Because, as you said, people will be scared to voice their views, and some of these views may be disagreeable, they may not be palatable, but they're views that unfortunately exist.
Michael Moses:They're part of our reality and we need to hear them to be able to move forward from them. We need to hear them to be able to educate people about them. Whether we agree with them or not is besides the point, as long as we can move forward and in a caring fashion, and educate each other and support each other.
Aaron Pete:You're one of my favorite people. That was fantastic. Are we able to talk about this book, grave Error? As you pointed out at that panel, it is one of the most popular books in Canada right now. It is becoming very quickly a bestseller and, for better or worse, I think it's important that we talk about it. When you started hearing about this book, how did you feel?
Michael Moses:It was reminiscent of the first time that my parents started teaching me about residential schools. The anguish that this book has caused even just to my family is pretty dramatic and I don't have a very large family affected by this book so far. You can feel the passion, you can feel the pain, you can feel the frustration in their voices when they talk about this book. I would recommend that anyone who is interested in hearing about Indigenous response to this book to go and watch the meeting I think it was from the start of April of 2024 of this year the city council meeting from Quesnel. It's on YouTube. You'll get to see several chiefs talk about the book. You'll get to hear many residential school survivors, many elders, many cultural leaders talk about this book and the effect and a very significant portion of the rest of the country.
Michael Moses:I've been excited for these last few years of doing work in local government and regional government, provincial, federal, to be able to forward topics on Indigenous rights, indigenous culture, indigenous education, indigenous language, indigenous land all these topics that I've been so passionate about in forwarding. I see some of them stalling now because of this book. I see the forward motion is slowing down. I see in Quesnel that some of the bands won't even work with the local government there. Now, and this is something that we're only at the tip of the iceberg regarding this book. It's going to continue as the book spreads across our regions, our communities, our country, and I really hope that we can get ahead of this in some way in regards to education, in regards to support networks. That was my first reaction to that book.
Aaron Pete:My suspicion is I felt that this has been coming for some time now, and the reason that I feel like it was eventually going to come is because one thing that they do say that I agree with is that there was a moral panic and there was an initial reaction to the 215 that went global and you just can't even imagine anyone being able to ask any questions during that period of time. There's, there was no. Well, how many are we sure? What was the evidence used like? That wasn't a focus and and perhaps it shouldn't have been at this time. We're coming to realizations as a country and we need to to reflect on that and take that in that a lot of people were learning about indian residential schools for the first time during that 215 discussion, and so there needed to be a space for that.
Aaron Pete:But when I look at land acknowledgements, I don't like them, because what I think they do too often is they force people to say things they don't understand, they don't care about, and they can get resentful around that. Some people like I see them put it in their email signature, I see them say it at meetings and they'll be like I like to declare the unseated and they are not engaged in what they're saying are the unseated and they are not engaged in what they're saying. And when you get people to start to say things that they don't believe or they don't understand, you start to get that resentment why do I have to do this? Or, like I've seen, people say the name wrong and they're trying to learn how to pronounce a First Nations word and then somebody goes you're saying it wrongly, you're doing that wrong. And then people go whoa, okay, I thought I was doing the right thing here. Now I'm getting called out, now I'm upset and now I don't want to participate. I had concerns about that because I'd watch professors in my university do it and not care about what they were saying, and it's like we don't want that type of reconciliation. We want people at the table who genuinely want to be there.
Aaron Pete:And then there there has been very little discussion about the complexities of Indian residential school. Certainly, the overwhelming feeling of everybody I know was that Indian residential schools were horrible, but I do have a few people that I know who have been able to share their family's experience, and it was somewhat what they describe in the book. Now I think what they did in the book is over-exaggerate everything positive about everything in there, but it's almost a reaction to the overwhelming narrative that has existed, and so to me the book isn't surprising that eventually, the silent minority was eventually going to speak up, and this speaks to so many people who are tired of land acknowledgements, tired of feeling like they're settlers on land that their great-grandparents have been on for a long time. It's a reaction to that. Do you see what I'm saying, or do I sound like I'm out to lunch?
Michael Moses:No, I can definitely see what you're saying. The way that the media grabbed hold of the 215 and spread it across the country or even internationally was very quick and it likely was a little bit calculated, in the way that it was spread, to be very fantastic and very extreme topic. It was something that our country and the rest of the world needed to see and to hear. Could it have been done with a little bit more insight and after a little bit more research, and perhaps after the vans had decided how they would go about examining any evidence that they were finding? Definitely it could have been held back and done a little bit more appropriately, a little bit more accurately, a way that the topics in this book wouldn't exist, but unfortunately that wasn't the way it happened. So now we have these topics where we're still in the process of gathering evidence, where we're still not completely out of the dark information-wise, and I don't know why this is such a major issue.
Michael Moses:I recognize that not having the evidence being tangible and being examinable is something that is extremely attacked in, not only in this book but on a lot of the articles of the authors across all their platforms.
Michael Moses:But the reason that this is is because the bans are in complete control of how and when this information will be gathered, uncovered and released, and they're taking into account very important things such as the actual residential school survivors, the families of the people who passed away, their cultures.
Michael Moses:These are topics that they have to take into account before they just decide to start digging and to find what's in there, that there's so much nuance to how this is to be done that we are being a little short-sighted and a little impatient when we want to see the evidence now, when we want to know whether the arguments in this book are valid or not. And, to be honest with you, this book is not important enough. This book is not powerful enough. This book is not significant enough to force the hand of the First Nations bands to do this any quicker. This is to be done on the schedule and on the healing time of First Nations people, not on the demand of people who want evidence, not on the time of people who want to cause divisiveness, not on the schedule of people who want to undermine DRIPA, who want to undermine UNDRIP, trc, mmiw, who want to discredit our strongest Indigenous leaders. They do not get to choose when and how this happens, and I can understand how that frustrates them.
Aaron Pete:One of the other pieces that I felt was a piece that I actually agreed with them on was that they wrote that 68 churches were burned or vandalized after the 215 discovery, and I don't think that that's ever an appropriate reaction by the populace to start to take these steps.
Aaron Pete:I think that, at least from what I've understood from interviewing a historian, keith Carlson, that Indigenous people were actually and this again can't speak for everybody in Canada or everybody in BC, but within the Stolo region were very interested in Christianity because it solved some community problems, one of which was arranged marriages. Within our region, this was a different path. This meant love could lead rather than arranged marriages and forced marriages, and so there were pieces of it that were really insightful and valuable to cultures where they were willing to adapt to their belief system for it. So I disagreed with the 68 churches being burned or vandalized. I understand where people are so frustrated and when they look at the church as the place that led the way on so much of this horrific stuff. I just don't think that type of violence is the answer. Do you agree with that?
Michael Moses:Yeah, I agree, violence should rarely be the answer to anything. Burning of churches does not raise us above the topic topic. I feel this was probably a pained and traumatic and knee-jerk response to the information that they were finding out about that. It's not a reaction that I would take or condone. However, this is a different topic than what's in the rest of the book.
Michael Moses:This is one of the many times in the book where they take a factoid that is actually not significant to the topic that they're talking about, but there's a line between the two and they try to overblow it so that it is the topic and it and it makes it so that they point out one wrong thing, a big, a big wrong thing, don't get me wrong a wrong thing about a response to the topic but not about the topic.
Michael Moses:Um, that you'll see this rinsed and repeated through the book, where they take a tidbit that is related to the topic but not the topic, and then throw a magnifying glass over it or take a quote or a factoid that is about the topic, magnify it and then state their opinions on it as if it's part of the fact, and so I agree with you that these weren't good responses. Burning churches is not the way to go. But if we're talking about the book, then talking about the burning of the churches is wrong. But it's not significant to the 215. It's not significant to the residential schools. It was a response to these topics.
Aaron Pete:One of the parts that really grossed me out was the way they talked about us yet again being impoverished and illiterate. Was just how do you write this in a book Like, how do you say this about a people Like were we millionaires with Bugattis? No, but were we rich in our culture, in our sense of community, in our connection and living off of the land? I would say yes, and part of the reason that Indigenous people find themselves impoverished today and over the past 150 years is very much because of the Canadian government, like within again this territory. We had the Douglas treaties where they had anticipatory reserves that gave space for Indigenous people, for them and their potential children, so they were larger sized reserves. Then Joseph Trutch comes in and he minimalizes all of those up to 90% in some cases, and so the land in which we inhabit is so much smaller in many of our communities than what was supposed to be. And to say that that is our own fault, I think is incredibly inconsiderate and irresponsible. And then to talk about our literacy rates we were some of the best communicators because we came from an oral tradition, so we may not have had a focus on writing, but that's not a consequence of us not being interested in writing. It's that our whole culture was predicated on a different style of communication than other ones, and it doesn't make theirs better Like.
Aaron Pete:I wrote a whole paper on this in law school. The problem with the process of writing everything down although it's often held up as the best path is that what you end up with is people who don't know what Shakespeare meant, who have a Bible and who have never read it, who have all of these books that they've never actually opened. The benefit of an oral culture is that you pass everything that you know on verbally, through stories and through connections over time, and so there are advantages to an oral culture. The downside is that you don't have that documentation, that 200 years later you might not have something written down. So what was your reaction to some of the rhetoric about Indigenous people in the book?
Michael Moses:In regards specifically to what you're talking about, about being impoverished and uneducated, these are school systems and economic systems that we were displaced into and we've only had 150 years to react.
Michael Moses:I'm sure we both know many First Nations people who have excelled in the education system, who have excelled in business, who have excelled in the education system, who have excelled in business, who have excelled in politics.
Michael Moses:These type of growth, they take time, and I believe that we're on a very positive trajectory in this regard, especially as we have leaders much like yourself being willing to utilize their education and utilize all the time in their day to ensure that their people have all the opportunities that they can get.
Michael Moses:150 years is just a blip in the time of our people in Canada, in the country now called Canada, and I think you'll find that when you double that amount of time, these rates of poverty, these rates of education, the numbers will be dramatically improved. And I just want to point something out really quickly that I believe the last stats I've heard on illiteracy in Canada is that one third of our country has a reading level below grade eight. Less than 5% of the people in this country are Indigenous. I'm sure you can correlate those maths to each other, to the. It's not indigenous people in our country that are lowering the literacy rate and I want to read that paper that you wrote in law school. If you could forward it to me, I would read it for my own education.
Aaron Pete:So thank you Fantastic. The other really heavy part is around the word genocide. It's been talked about, I think, by many different people and I think it ultimately is very complicated and I don't know if there is a correct answer when we're having this conversation. They point to the fact that the statistics of Indigenous people, of the general population, actually increased over the past 150 years that we saw, I think the numbers are around 150,000 Indigenous people 150 years ago, all the way up until like 1.4 million in 2021, something like that, and so to their argument, if it's a genocide, you would expect to see that number drop. During the Holocaust, you would have seen the numbers of Jewish people decreasing, not increasing.
Aaron Pete:The word cultural genocide has been used. The word cultural genocide has been used. There's different terms around that idea that the removing of our culture had health consequences. I think you might see that the statistics of genocide, of death rates among indigenous people being incredibly high in comparison to the population, which would go to the point that it is a genocide. Speaking from my own experience, my grandmother had many children and she was hurt in her heart from the experiences in Indian residential school. I don't think she was the best mother to those children, and those children had worse health outcomes as a consequence of that. So many of these things are being passed on, and this is where it leads into this idea of intergenerational trauma contributing to many of these issues. How do you feel about the term genocide being used in this regard? Do you think it's accurate and do you think they're just playing statistical games when they say that our population actually increased over the past 150 years?
Michael Moses:Definitely statistical games are being used. As I pointed out earlier, the authors in the book love to point out a factoid, magnify onto it, add on their opinions as if they're parts of the fact and they ignore the surrounding facts of that one factoid. Regarding genocide or not genocide, cultural genocide, which they love to point out in the book, isn't a real term. Um, terminology gets created as it's required. Uh, if, if we haven't seen this before, if we haven't seen this before. That is why the term now exists.
Michael Moses:When we talk about cultural genocide, we're not necessarily talking about the loss of lives or the gain of lives or the number of First Nations people that exist across the country. We're talking about the loss of language. We're talking about the loss of language. We're talking about the loss of culture, the loss of land rights, all of these topics that have been more or less taken away from our people in abundance Not completely taken, but to a point where we're struggling to re-retrieve them to have our children learn the languages.
Michael Moses:I'm embarrassed to say that I don't know Inklikatmuk or Segweppenstein. I don't know either of my parents' languages, and saying that out loud right now makes me recognize that I need to dedicate myself to those topics a little bit more, because if I can't set that example, how can I expect anyone else to anyone else to, when they share their views that genocide did not occur or that cultural genocide does not exist? These are the views and opinions of people that are very much so trying to cause divisiveness, and we don't need to look much further than that. The government of Canada and the Catholic Church have both referred to these instances as versions of genocide that we have some people who want to focus in on specific facts, twist other facts and to misinform people by claiming they're misinformed. I don't actually care what their view is on whether they say it's genocide or not. Their opinion on the matter is not relevant to me. When the government of Canada claims it, when the Catholic Church claims it and when the Assembly of First Nations claims it, I'm sated.
Aaron Pete:What were your feelings? I know you've read a majority of this book and are just finishing it. What were your feelings reading it throughout? I was surprised. I felt like I was going to be able to sit down and read this book and I had a feeling I was going to know some of the positions and understand.
Aaron Pete:But the big the taste in my mouth that I'm left with is just like a lack of care, like a lack of like feeling that people's lives actually mattered and that, like we, we have these stories. Like it also clearly tells me they don't know very many Indigenous people who have gone through these things. Because, like I can't go into my community and not hear some of these stories come up throughout my day. Like I just can't not interact with some of the very real experiences people had in these places. And I mean, one of the numbers that they put out is $4.7 trillion over the past 150 years that have been given to Indigenous people. Like, does it look like we've got some sort of $4.7 trillion sitting around somewhere? Like if you added up all of and again this is where you speak of like misleading information, if you added up all the money the federal government has spent and all the money the provincial governments have spent over the past 150 years. It would be some absurd number like 400 trillion dollars spent over, like it would be an unruly number that you wouldn't be able to put into context. So I don't find 4.7 trillion dollars to indigenous communities over 150 years very enlightening as to what that actually looks like now.
Aaron Pete:Do I think that there's corruption within First Nation communities and band councils not always acting in the best interest of the people? Absolutely. I wrote an article on that. I think that needs to be called out. That doesn't mean it's every community and even the people who I think are mismanaging their money. They're not millionaires. They're not managing like an insane amount of money. It's still not enough to manage the schools and the systems that we have to operate within First Nation communities, and I say that as somebody who does a lot of this work and looks at the budgets that we're dealing with. So what was your general sense of the book? Grave Error?
Michael Moses:Yeah, I'm almost complete the book and, like yourself, I thought that I was going to be able to sit down read it in one sitting, because it's not a very big book and it's not very hard to understand. It's pretty plain language, very to the point, very populist. The book is a hard read and it's caused me some loss of sleep. It's caused me some stress through my days. My mother has also tried to read the book and I'll take a moment to give a quick backstory on that. Both my mother and my father attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School and as little as two generations ago from myself, from my mother's family, we've had people who died at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and did not return home to our families. I just recently said that in public for the first time at a city council meeting. It's generally not something that I talk about in public. When my mom tried to read the book it it made her cry, it caused her a lot of anguish and I asked her to to just let me finish it and let me shoulder shoulder this, and I think it's something that I'm hopeful that our Indigenous leaders, cultural, political knowledge keepers that, if they feel up to the task, that they ought to understand the points of view that are out there and against us. The book is causing a lot of divisiveness and hatred to become allowable, and I think that's one of the points of the book is to give people an outlet to be able to feel allowed to share these views and allowed to share these emotions and allowed to point fingers at people. Um, if, if, our, if our leaders can take this on our shoulders, I would hope that our residential school survivors, our elders, our ancestors won't have to. I don't feel like this is something that we of us would, and I would ask that Indigenous people who read this book or who choose not to, that they choose not to partake in the hatred that this book is causing, hatred that this book is causing, whether it's in response to hatred pointed towards us or hatred pointed towards the schools or whoever they deem responsible for them. I don't want us to be set back decades in our healing, and it feels like that that the potential of this book could cause that.
Michael Moses:My, my hope is that we can lean on each other in this time, to to lean on our, our cultural leaders, our political leaders and our knowledge knowledge keepers, to support each other, to let each other know that what we've gone through has been traumatic and it has been wrong and it has caused us so much pain, but that we can still support each other, we can still be thriving members of society, we can still give and receive love, and we don't need to be baited into the hatred.
Michael Moses:Because that feels like what this book is trying to do. It's trying to undermine UNDRIP, trying to undermine TRC, trying to undermine any individuals or governments trying to undermine TRC, trying to undermine any individuals or governments who want to hold those up. It's trying to slam our greatest leaders, such as Leah Ghazan, roseanne, casimir Murray, sinclair and so on forth. We need to continue to view these leaders as exactly what they are, and those are the most experienced and the strongest of us that are standing up for us on a day-to-day basis, doing some of the hardest jobs that we can imagine and sacrificing all the time in their lives to ensure that the rest of us can live a little bit easier. And I really hope that this book does not achieve, in lessening any of their impact and any of their hard work that we've been so fortunate to get to witness over this generation their hard work that we've been so fortunate to get to witness over this generation.
Aaron Pete:What would you say to the authors of this book if you were able to sit down with them and have a conversation with them? Because I think it's important that we remember that we're all just people. We all want love and affection and care, and we might disagree on very important issues, but we're all still just people. We want to come home to a loving family. We want to be financially comfortable. This is all just a human endeavor. What would you say to the authors?
Michael Moses:I'm so torn and in one vein I don't want to speak to them at all. In another, I would love to tell them stories of my family, to tell them experiences of my parents, my uncles and aunties, my grandparents, my uncles and aunties, my grandparents. To tell them names of people in our family that were loved and adored and cherished and did not come back home, show them the difficulties just from my family's experience not a pan-Indian experience, but just our personal experiences and unfortunately recognize that it will probably fall on deaf ears and that they'll write another article about it After that conversation. They would probably write an article about me and my family and downplay the results, downplay the pain, the trauma. This leads me back to the first vein where I'm not sure that the conversation can happen.
Michael Moses:Me back to the first vein where I'm not sure that the conversation can happen. But I recognize the conversations like that need to happen so that we can move forward together, so that we can heal together, so that we can learn together, we can educate each other. Because I see some of the logic in the book, I see some of the brilliance from the authors and I think that together so much healing could be done and so many years can be saved from the need of more healing, because that's what this book is going to cause is the need for more healing, more time, more reconciliation and I'm not sure I'm up to that conversation personally, but I know the conversations need to happen and maybe some of the people that they're so targeted in the book are the people they should be having those conversations with.
Aaron Pete:One of my big takeaways from the book is the importance of these conversations, because I can so clearly see that they feel like they're being silenced, like they're not being listened to, that there isn't. There's no discussion of the other side of the story or other perspectives in it, and so it feels like they picked up a bat and they came out swinging because they want their perspectives to be heard, and I think they leaned very heavily on pushing the politics of it all in order to to get that message across. So I don't think that this book was unbiased, but I also don't think that the media coverage of this was unbiased either. I think they have a point in that, and the part I hope they could take away is we didn't do that. That wasn't driven by First Nations people.
Aaron Pete:It's the same thing I get when people go what am I supposed to call you? Is it Indigenous? Is it Indian? Is it Aboriginal? Is it First Nation? What am I supposed to call you? And I always try and remind people when I get those type of questions. There's no First Nation community sitting around there saying what should we change the name to? This week, we've got bigger fish to fry than that. That is usually the provincial or federal government going. How can we be more politically correct? How can we be more respectful? I know community members who say I'm still an indian. It says it on my status card. I don't care what you call me like, I still have those family members and they have a point to make. The last question I have on this point is what advice do you have for people who are going to be picking up the book Grave Error after our conversation and wanting to understand these issues further? What recommendations do you have?
Michael Moses:All right, I love this question For people who are going to pick up this book. I feel like there's a few things that you're going to need to do. You're going to have to also pick up other books. Make sure you make sure you pick up books from Bev sellers. Make sure you pick up books from Phyllis Webstead, from Bob Joseph, from Jody Wilson-Raybould.
Michael Moses:Make sure that you're you're going to ground yourself in, in knowledge and in caring from authors who have actually experienced these topics, who have either attended the schools, had parents who attended the schools, who have worked with organizations like the TRC or IRSS, who have been part of the governments, who have been trying to move forward from this, and also be ready to deal with the emotions that are going to result from reading this book. Make sure that you have people that you care about, that care about you, that you have family members around, that you're ready to take care of yourself afterwards, because some of the topics in this book are very painful. Some of the views are very pointed and they're sharp and they're pointed at you. So make sure you're ready to continue healing after in a very intentional way. That would be my advice Educate yourself more and take care of yourself.
Aaron Pete:Michael, I find you to be so thoughtful, patient. I feel that energy of wisdom coming from you. How can people follow the work that you're doing and the impact you're having within your region and the messages you're trying to get?
Michael Moses:out. Thank you so much, aaron. Some ways that you can follow me are on. It feels so petty to shout out my social medias after this conversation. These topics that we're talking about are so important and they're so, so overwhelming that asking people to follow me on LinkedIn feels so ridiculous right now. But you can find me on all the major social medias. My website is michaelmosesca. I have a newsletter there. I post every few weeks on the newsletter about positive Indigenous culture and current events. I try to bring some brightness into the world through education and on Indigenous topics, through positivity, and I think I need some of that. I need some more of that right now, and I think that the people who will pick up this book also will as well. So come share this journey with me. We can support each other.
Aaron Pete:Michael, it was a pleasure to sit down with you. I'm sure this is the first of many very deep, thoughtful conversations. Again, I find that when a book like this comes out, the reaction is burn it, get rid of it, let's not talk about it, let's hide it under the bed or something. And your willingness to talk about it and try and deconstruct some of these ideas and respond, I just find that incredibly admirable. So I'm very proud to call you a friend and I hope you have a better day, but thank you for coming on and being willing to discuss these difficult topics. Thank you.
Michael Moses:Aaron.
.png)
