SPEAKERS

Phil, Kathleen, Nippin Anand

Nippin Anand  00:00

Hello and welcome to another episode of embracing differences with me. Nippin Anand, this is a conversation that should make us all think about how we as a species have understood and worked with cultural differences, historically and across geographies. I’m privileged to be joined by Professor Emerita Kathleen Mahoney, specializing in international human rights, humanitarian law, feminist legal theory, indigenous legal traditions, residential school litigation, and taught law professor Mahoney is, amongst many things, a fellow of Royal Society of Canada, senior fellow Raoul Wallenberg, Center for Human Rights, member of the law societies of Alberta and Manitoba and a king’s Council, along with Professor Mahoney, I’m also joined by Larry Phil fontaines, an indigenous Canadian leader and former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, best known for his central role in raising public awareness of the Canadian Indian residential school system and pushing to secure federal and papal apologies in 2008 and 2022 respectively. I met with Kathleen during my recent visit to Canada some two months ago, amongst the many great and selfless achievements, both Kathleen and Phil have worked together to bring a shift in public perception about the indigenous culture, not only within Canada, but also at an international level. To me, the success story is a telling example of what happens when we force our way onto another culture to create change, and often from a position of moral superiority, a common problem within risk and safety, and a common problem when organizations operate across geographic boundaries and across cultures where people from another culture differ in language, beliefs, habits, attitudes, rituals, tastes and even physical appearances. Our discussion in this podcast is focused on the Canadian Indian residential schools. And I think some background about the residential schools is necessary before we get started with this discussion starting from somewhere between 1831 and 1996 the Canadian government started an initiative termed as the Indian residential school system. The history of residential schools in Canada dates back to 1600s when they were first introduced as religious schools. The underlying idea of running these schools was to change the future of Canada by assimilating the native, indigenous people of Canada who belong to the land along with the colonialists, commonly referred to as the settlers, children as young as seven years old would be taken away from their families and educated out of their traditions, customs, language, beliefs and their ways of living and given a new identity in the name of civilizing them. The entire network of the schools was funded by the Canadian government department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches and later by the government itself. But these underfunded schools did more damage to the indigenous children and their families than the good. Death, disease, malnutrition, violence and sexual abuse of young children by the staff at school were rampant across schools, 1000s of children lost their lives and to make things worse, many young children were buried in unmarked graves by the school to hide their atrocities. The legacy of the system continues in Canada as we know it today, and it is often linked to an increased prevalence of post traumatic stress, alcoholism, substance abuse, suicide and intergenerational trauma, which persists within indigenous communities. For me, it begs for some deeper questions about how a so called civilized society understands culture and acknowledges other forms of life that don’t necessarily look alike, speak alike or believe alike, in other words, how we navigate and manages our differences, or rather, cultural differences. Phil and Kathleen’s story is a powerful reminder, and at a much larger scale, that we should be careful walking into another person’s ecosystem and intruding into their ways of being, a living with a view to force our beliefs and values onto them, a common problem that I see in many organizations, both in risk and safety, but how we typically approach culture and culture change. So let’s hear from both of them.

Kathleen  04:29

Hi, Kathleen, how are you

Nippin Anand  04:32

good? Good to see you,

Kathleen  04:35

same. Good to see you too. Phil, over here, in a second to finish it. Phil, this is Dr Nippin,

Phil  04:42

1. Dr Nippin,

04:44

hello. Dr Anand. Dr

04:49

Nippin. Anand,

Nippin Anand  04:52

please just call me Nippin. Good morning to you. We are in Scotland, and it’s snowing today. It’s the first snow of the season.

05:05

Our first snowfall yesterday night, and we had some more last night, and we have lots of snow, white all over.

Nippin Anand  05:16

Yes, we have a lot of snow today, and my wife had to go a little bit earlier to get kids from the school. She should be back anytime. Yes,

05:24

and what part of Scotland are you at? I’m in Aberdeen. Aberdeen, right? You know? Well, of course, you know this, but a lot of people from Scotland, the New York piece became part of fur trade in the early days of the Hudson’s Bay empire in North America.

Nippin Anand  05:49

Can you tell a little bit more about that? Well,

Phil  05:52

the Hudson’s Bay was give entered into this royal proclamation in 16 seven. Is it 1670 Kathleen, or 72 where they were afforded all of or not all, but most of North America as their domain, and they were free to carry out fur trade and and many of the people that worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company were from Scotland, the Orkney Islands. And, yeah, it was, it was huge operation, and they enjoyed, they pretty much enjoyed the monopoly, until the Northwest company came into being talking about Hudson Bay, right, right? The royal proclamation, the 16, seven, eight, no, no

Kathleen  06:58

1. 36 I believe the real problem.

07:03

No, no, I’m talking wrong word. The when they received the Oh, yeah, I’m not sure what the charter, yeah, that’s in the bay chart. Now we, we don’t want to talk about that today.

Nippin Anand  07:17

And you know, what’s interesting is that you talk about the Hudson Bay, and I heard your videos in six parts. And as much as Hudson Bay affected you, we, I mean, I come from India originally, we were affected by the East India Company along the same lines. So the very interesting parallels there,

Kathleen  07:41

yeah, yeah. Well, the East India Company that was a British company too, wasn’t it? Yeah,

Nippin Anand  07:46

that’s right, yes, yes. And, you know, very similar parallels, a very similar narrative, because it all started with economic exploitation and ended up into something very political, colonization and so on. Yeah. But you know, just to I was in Canada from the 29th of September and this year, and I was jet lagged, because we have about seven hours of time difference, eight hours of time difference between you and us. And I just, I was lying on the bed and just wanted to read something around indigenous history. It’s always been an interest for me, and I’m anthropologist, and I went on the YouTube and saw your videos, and I was I watched them all through the night. I didn’t sleep at all, so I finished four parts or five parts, and I took so many notes from there. And that’s when I contacted you, Kathleen, because I was so fascinated by that talk and I really wanted to have a chat with you. So thank you so much for taking the time. It means a lot to me. Yes, I don’t know where to even begin, but it’d be so wonderful just if you started off with the light introduction about yourself, and then we can talk about whatever you think might be an appropriate topic to discuss. I have some things in mind, but I yeah, we can maybe, Kathleen, you can start with an introduction, and then Bill could talk about himself. Let me see where it goes from there.

Kathleen  09:15

Sure. Well, my name is Kathleen Mahoney. I’m a professor emeritus at the University of Calgary law faculty. My area of expertise is basically human rights, indigenous rights, personal injury. I’ve done a lot of work on feminist legal theory, and I do litigation in the courts. To some extent, I did some work with Bosnia Herzegovina in their genocide action in the International Court of Justice. I’ve done quite a bit of appellate work in the Supreme Court of Canada on equality issues, arguing for basically intersectional intersectionality as. As women particularly, but people are concerned that are multiply affected by laws that have a adverse impact on them. And yeah, and for the last 20 or so years, I’ve been working with the Indian residential school settlement agreement and the TRC. I led the negotiations for the Assembly of First Nations under the leadership of Phil to achieve the Indian residential school Settlement Agreement, which was groundbreaking in Canada because it used indigenous principles way outside the boundaries of law, of common law, to demonstrate that to really come to a solution that would be transformative with respect to the relationship between indigenous peoples and the rest of Canada. It required, you know, a different way of thinking and a different way of approaching legal issues, because clearly, the Indian residential school disaster was a legal issue with respect to negligence, crime, a breach of contract, all of those things, and on one hand, it could have been decided within the parameters of British common law and French civil law that formed the basis of our legal system, but that wouldn’t have solved the enormous problems that were facing Canada with respect to reconciliation with the indigenous people, which was importantly primary policy rationale for the Trudeau Government. So it gave us the opportunity to do things differently, and as a consequence of the settlement agreement, it opened up a whole range of possibilities and results for indigenous people, with respect to other mass human rights violations and cultural genocidal acts that had been perpetrated against them, and allowed them to get remedial remedial satisfaction. So yeah, it I’ve done a lot of things in my in my career, my rather long career. I’ve been a professor for over 40 years, but I would say the most satisfying work of my career and the most rewarding in the sense that experiencing the results from an ideology certainly has been the indigenous files that both Phil and I have worked on together. So that’s rather long winded, but it gives you a bit of an idea of what my what my background is,

Nippin Anand  12:43

absolutely and just hour an hour ago, I was revisiting all the videos Kathleen and and the same thing resonated with me, that you actually used a belief system, and You use that belief systems to help people understand that it’s not lawless. It’s not it’s, it’s, it’s a it’s not vague. It has its own structure. It has its own beliefs. It’s had its own myths and then surfaced it to help people understand that the legal system that we try to impose upon it doesn’t quite work. And we have a very I found it fascinating, actually, in the way you, you, you just described it very often. And we have a classic problem in this our industry, which is the maritime oil and gas industry and many high risk industries where we employ people who do not belong to a certain belief or religion or faith, and we then we use the Christian religion, the Christian faith and and the Western legal system to brutalize them in some ways. You could say when something wrong happens, and that’s we. And so we never come to understand their ways of thinking, their beliefs, their myths, their stories, and we end up making the situation worse, which, in your words, is two structures colliding with each other. I wrote about it, and it’s fascinating what you said, Yes,

Kathleen  14:07

well, and you see that that’s the the unfortunate consequence of colonialism and the mindset of the early colonial masters who were working on the principle that came actually originally out of the Vatican, out of the papal bulls, which said that if you’re Christian and you’re going you discover, and I use the word loosely, a land mass, such as North America, and the people are not the people you find there are not Christian. They’re not really there. They’re there for you to use, to take their land, to enslave or to kill. But if they’re not Christian, they’re they’re less human, and they’re easily and granted permission to exploit. So those early, primitive and brutal concepts of colonialism still exists. Yeah, because just as we just said, I mean, the fact of the matter is that no society can exist without laws, and otherwise they don’t sustain themselves. And so the fact that indigenous populations were sustained here in North America for 1000s of years prior to colonization, that fact, in and of itself, tells you there was a system of laws. However, the colonial mindset was that well, that they mean nothing. They’re savages. They have no idea of how to run a society. So we will completely erase what’s what structure was here to control human interactions and human behavior, and we will impose ours, and that, to this very day, has created so many problems, so many violations of human rights, so much misunderstanding, so much discrimination in every level, so much lack of productivity, So much lack of of being part of a society that we see in Canada, and I’m sure in many countries around the world which experience the same colonization, you know. So that’s why today in Canada, the great movement of especially young people, is to decolonize our fundamental infrastructure applies to education, to health, to law, all of those things so that people can have a fair chance of of experiencing and sharing in the society and what it has to offer. So our little contribution in the Indian residential school seven opened that window of you might say some shed some light on what could be accomplished, right with some understanding and and helpful allies on the other side of the table that were prepared to, well, maybe I’m giving it being a bit generous here, we had massive leverage to accomplish this, but to demonstrate that, you know, this could, this could result in something positive for the country, and indeed, I think it wasn’t. It was Phil who said, we’re not going to do this unless it’s transformative. It has to change things. It just can’t be same as usual. Once we’re finished this process,

Nippin Anand  17:19

perhaps it’d be good idea to bring Phil into this conversation now, because I think maybe Phil give us a little be, a little bit of introduction about yourself, but also talk about the whole idea of the Reformation schools as what Kathleen touched upon. Just give some context to it, because the listeners won’t know what we are talking about here.

17:39

Well, I’m a bit older than Kathleen, but I don’t possess the storied history that she she represents. I grew up on an Indian reserve in in in Manitoba, like right at the Lake Winnipeg, the Winnipeg river flew right through our community. I attended residential school in Sagi, my community, for seven years, then I went to another residential school in Winnipeg, and so first public school I attended was for my last two years of high school. So most of my early life was focused on saguin, the community, and from even though the residential school there didn’t really allow I and my siblings and all of the other people that attended this that residential school run by the oblate fathers and managed by the oblate nuns, we weren’t really part of the community because we were we were confined to the school grounds, pretty much, pretty much, for all of our times the residential school. And then when I was finished my schooling, I was pretty aimless for some time until I encountered some young First Nations educated people, maybe 15 of them in Winnipeg, where I attended residential school. Then I joined a social activist group of young people financed by the federal government, called the company of young Canadians, and that began then my career in First Nations politics, both at the community level. People and beyond. And so much of my life has been in First Nations politics, representing first nations interest at the local level, meaning the community level, First Nation communities at the provincial level, and then nationally. When I was National Chief for the Assembly of First Nations for nine years, I had also served nine years with the assembly Manitoba chiefs. So politics became a large part of my life, and in the early days, I didn’t know or quite understand where all of this was going to lead to, other than I was not satisfied now, indeed, I was quite unhappy with the way things Were with government and our communities I knew very well, as did many of my contemporaries, that contemporaries that the government had far too much control over our lives, and so the determination was to get rid of the government, to Get the government off our backs, and to enable ourselves to exercise greater control and greater autonomy over the lives of our people and our communities. And during the course of that long journey, I call it a long journey, because it wasn’t easy the issue of residential schools. The residential school experience loomed large in this discourse, this narrative that we were, that we were that we had introduced to to Canada, and I was determined to to bring this experience. I was unknown in Canada. It was a very dark chapter, but unknown to most Canadians. I was determined to to bring light to this matter. So I spoke publicly for the first time in 1989 to an assembly of chiefs. Didn’t want to hear about it because it was too private, just too embarrassing to too many, too shameful, and you know you weren’t going to talk about residential schools and abuse in residential schools at these very important chiefs gatherings and assemblies. So I was chastised initially, but when I went publicly nationally, it it was, it became unstoppable. This, this talk about residential schools, then we ended up, as Kathleen noted, in negotiations with the federal crown and with other plaintiff lawyers and others at one time, as many as 80 lawyers around the table, and we pursued this resolution, this resolution of the matter that it Be fair and just to indigenous legal traditions. And I put together a team that represented this, this unique view at the negotiation table. Kathleen was our lead negotiator, and it worked out quite well. It was to our advantage that we we brought this understanding to the table, and the agreement that we crafted opened the door to so many subsequent actions on the part of different quarters of our community, whether it had to do with non residential school students, day schools, day scholars, child welfare, missing and murdered indigenous women, a whole number of very important actions that began because of the work that we’ve done, and the most important piece of all of this early early intervention was the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. That was our creation, Assembly of First Nations, our team at the table, the TRC, was our creation. Absolutely without doubt, that’s a true history here. Anyway. Great.

Nippin Anand  25:17

You want to say more? Do you want to say more? Did I interrupt? I

25:23

have a lot to say?

Nippin Anand  25:27

Yeah. No, no, you talked about a dark chapter that you opened up and because of, and it was deeply embarrassing, and you use the word you were chastised. But just to give a listener a sense of perspective, what was dark about this reformation schools? What was it that was that was so embarrassing about it? Well,

25:51

residential schools and and what preceded residential schools, industrial schools that existed for over 100 years and approximately 150,000 children first nations. Children attended these schools that were largely operated and managed by different denominational groups, the most prominent being the Roman Catholic Church entities, not talking about one month monolith here these, these are, were various entities and so structured to protect them in terms of legal liability. That’s, that’s what we were dealing with. And it was, it was a matter that wasn’t part of the public discourse. It was Canadians talking about residential schools, talking about abuse in residential schools, talking about language, the inability for language retention to be part of our experience, our cultural practices, our customs, all of that were casted aside in these in these schools, right? And we were there to be Christianized and to be assimilated meaning. Forget about your language, forget about your culture, and we will keep you in these places, and we will ensure that you don’t spend a lot of time at home, because if you do, you will become just like you were before you entered the school. And Kathleen can speak to what one famous Canadian leader said about that experience. And so these these schools were situated in every part of the country. And as I said, the largest percentage of these schools were run by the Catholic Church entities, most by public fathers and sisters,

Kathleen  28:05

yeah, and I think Nippin, I think that the what captures the Canadian policy at the time was a comment by a man called Duncan Campbell Scott he was in charge of implementing the assimilationist policy and what he’s purported to have said was, we can’t kill the Indian, but we can kill the Indian in the child. And then our first prime minister, John A Macdonald, when he was asked, Why are you separating children from their families and communities for their entire childhoods growing up? He said, Well, if we just have them coming to school during the day, what we’ll be doing is just having savages that know how to read and write. So the objective, clearly, was to change the identity of the children so that they didn’t fit into their communities, and many didn’t even really fit into their families again after 11 or 12 years of not being home, some children travel from vast distances to attend these schools or were taken and never went back. So when they did finally go back to their communities, they couldn’t speak their languages, they had a different cultural outlook on life and so on.

29:15

You became a stranger in your own family, you know, and little different for me because I had older siblings that had all attended this one residential school that I was at for seven years. Our mother and father attended the same residential school. Our grandmother, on my father’s side, attended an industrial school off reserve in Saint this place called Saint Boniface. So we had years of residential school experience in our community, in our family, and so we knew about the school. And. Knew what it was about draw or draw, family connections and and it wasn’t seen in the most positive light. It was I, you know, 10 years of my life were, were away from my family when I when I finally emerged from the residential school, I was a young guy, you know, and for the first time, I was able to sleep at home, eat at home, while I went, attended school off reserve. And man, oh, man, I, you know, it was freedom, and I couldn’t handle it. I really couldn’t handle it. I have to admit, it was too much. The cultural shock was an enormous challenge, I would say, burden. But you know, that might be overstating it a bit, but it was. It was not easy for us the first, how would you put it, the first group that attended public schools in our area. I mean, we are. We were all coming from the very similar backgrounds and similar challenges, and it wasn’t easy. And in the residential schools I attended, the two of them, plus the public tool, they’re brilliant students. They’re brilliant kids, boys and girls, and they didn’t have a chance. They didn’t have a chance to emerge as very accomplished men and women as it grew into adulthood, they just felt right away side.

Nippin Anand  31:59

Of course, I mean this, there’s so much to explore in this space. I don’t even know where to begin. But what you’re essentially, I mean, in many ways, your world and my world is miles apart because you are talking about systematic discrimination, prejudice and so on. What I My world is more around accidents and safety and risk and so on. But still, there are so many parallels here as we start to go a little bit deeper. Because as I hear both of you, one of the common themes that emerges from from what you’ve been talking about, is the myth of salvation. Is that, my God, I’m here to save your life. So I arrive at your shores, you look like very strange people to me, where I know how to save you. And that’s the starting point for destroying somebody’s being, their existence, their culture, their narrative, their beliefs, and I find it fascinating, because that’s precisely what happens in risk and safety. We have learned academics and professors who genuinely believe that their structure can destroy your culture in the name of Making you safer. Such a fascinating parallel, no different, absolutely, no different. So you go to so the thing is that much of risk and safety is a Western narrative. It is a Western narrative, and much of the workforce to which it is applied to is not Western, predominantly, not Western in my world, at least. So I’ll give you an example. I was in investigating a Middle Eastern worker a few, a few weeks ago who had fallen off a forklift truck. And as part of the investigation, the question I was trying to ask was, so you’ve had this accident, you’ve had a broken leg, what have you learned from this accident. And his response was, what is there to learn? Is God’s will, and now you’re trying to put a structure to it. You’re trying to convince this person that there’s a cause this accident, and if you follow this process, thou shalt be saved. And every accident investigation misses the point, every event misses the point that you are into somebody else’s belief system here, and you need to understand their belief first before you impose yours onto them. And you know, so we have all sort of very fancy laboratory based safety concepts, but they have very little application in the Risk and Safety world, because they come from this, the myth of moral superiority that I’m here to save your life. I don’t know what what your thoughts are about it.

Kathleen  34:55

Well, the legal system certainly is a parallel to that right. But the principles of tort law, for example, which would apply to accidents, have all sorts of tests and all sorts of principles that lead the courts or lawyers to determine whether or not there is liability for that particular accident, right? So one of the more interesting elements of it is the reasonable man test, right? So when you’re doing law, especially tort law, in the area of accidents, you ask the question, would a reasonable man have foreseen that this would happen. And so the reasonable man, of course, is a mythical character, and who is he or she? But she wasn’t allowed into the discussion for Well, still, it’s still the reasonable man in all the law texts. But so you predict, you use the reasonable man to figure out, what would this if, to use your example person, that’s a Middle Eastern person, but the Middle Eastern factor doesn’t come into the equations. What would the reasonable man do? And that would be a reasonable man known to law. So he would be white, he would be British, he would be educated. He would be someone who thinks about his or her actions before they do them. They would think about other people and his or her impact on them if they do X, Y and Z, as opposed to a, b and c, and so that’s the test of tort liability. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, Nippin, but you know that’s a perfect parallel to what we’re talking about here in the residential school experience and the way that indigenous people were treated by our government for 150 years. It would be what would a reasonable man say these children need to be successful in a white world. Oh, they Well, they would first of all take cut their hair. They would take off those clothes that they’ve designed for themselves. They would no longer be nomadic. They would sit in a school and be taught by religious people, the elements of Christianity, and they would come out the other end being successful white people? Well, that’s not the way it works. You come out the other end with a lot of people suffering from tremendous psychological harm and dysfunction and memories that that have harmed their their psyche and their ability to relate to others and their ability to form families. I mean, it just goes on and the damages that that we were exposed to from the hundreds and hundreds of people, the 1000s of people that came forward to make these claims, the harms were incredible when you sat down and talked to them about their their lives, their their physical and psychological harms, their loss of opportunity, their loss of income, all of those things were enormous, and cost the government of Canada billions in compensation. But I mean, compensation was only one small factor of the reparations that were required. And you know, whether or not in the long run they they will change, something is still yet to be known, but what the truth commission did, which was a collective remedy, as opposed to individual, and that’s the other thing about our legal system. It’s all about individuals. It’s not about people who think in terms of the collectivity, right? But the truth commission, the healing funds, the commemoration for those who had passed on and all these elements of our settlement were very much collective remedies, and with the view that if these things were to be embraced by the indigenous population as well as the mainstream population and the truth be known, that we could make some progress towards a reconciliation meaning and appreciation and respect for the other culture and what had been done to them, the lands that had been stolen, the children that had been abused, intergenerational harm that results from this kind of experience in one’s life. So I see a tremendous I agree with you. The parallels are clearly there between assimilation and accident prevention. It’s the same mind frame, right? It’s the same frame thinking.

Nippin Anand  39:27

And it’s so interesting, you know, just a very random thought came to mind, which is, you are being discovered, and I’m the Explorer, and I, you know, you touched upon it little earlier, to say that when you meet somebody who’s not from your from your faith or not from your worldview, that person is regarded as somebody who’s been discovered because you explored them. Very, very, very interesting. But Kathleen, just going back to the the huge success that you produced at. A result of what you did. How were you when you look back at it and you reflect upon it, what made it so successful? Because, in a way, you’re surfacing a belief. You’re bringing forward a way of thinking that does not exist in the mainstream thinking. How were you so successful to bring all this to surface and and help people realize that what we are doing or we are not in the right trajectory, if we really wanted to engage with this problem?

Kathleen  40:34

Well, I’m Phil can talk talk about this too much more knowledge, really, than myself. But from a legal perspective, I’m a lawyer. What we had was leverage over the Canadian government until, you know, until you if you have a reluctant person that you’re trying to negotiate a settlement with, and you don’t have leverage, they take they’re in charge, right? And this has always been the case with Canada and the indigenous peoples, because they were they made them impoverished. They made them, you know, unable to participate in an equal fashion and compete. So what we managed to do when Phil went national and told, as he mentioned, with his story of the the abuse and his life in residential schools, people started to come forward and said, Well, I’m going to go to court. And so there were 12,000 individual claims made almost overnight, there were several class actions launched such that the judge who was appointed to be in charge of managing this bimoth of legal action said it will take 52 years for the courts to get through these claims, and in the meantime, we won’t be able to do anything else. And so the government then felt new they had to do something outside of the court system, okay? And that’s when we saw a tremendous opportunity, because settlement agreements, although they have to be approved by the courts, are much more flexible in what you can do, because you’re essentially making law between yourselves the two parties that are entering into the contractual settlement arrangement. So when Phil said it had to be transformative, and then we went to the people, which is also unusual. In class actions, you don’t get instructions from masses of people. The lawyers decide what to do. We didn’t do it that way, and in fact, our team was mostly non lawyers. They were survivors and leaders and an elder and people that weren’t legal practitioners. There was myself, who was an academic lawyer, and one other who was of actually a former Jesuit who was a class action lawyer, but the rest of the team were authentic people that had lived through the experience, or their parents had lived through it, and could speak at the table, which Basically hushed everybody up because we were the only our team was the only real, authentic team at the table. So we were able to, I think it’s fair to say Phil Can, can agree or not, but it’s, I think it’s fair to say we controlled the negotiations, and we also had a government who, with the Justice Minister at the time was the famous Erwin Cotler, who is known to be a human rights champion. We also had allies. Phil had allies over many, many years in politics, within the government and the bureaucracy. So, you know, the stars were aligned in some ways. It’s not to say that couldn’t happen again or couldn’t happen in another context, but in our situation, there was a lot of things came together that were that made it work. I mean, However, having said that the night we signed the agreement, the next day, the Liberal government fell, and the Conservative government took over, and I don’t think, frankly, would ever have had the success we did had there been a different government. We were too far down the road for them to turn things around, and so they had to follow through. So it was leverage. It was, it was, think it was a lifetime of experience on the part of our team, and especially Phil our leader. It was an intelligent understanding of what needed to be done to transform the relationship. And it was a commitment on the side of the government, okay, we’ll do it. Just get it done. You know,

Nippin Anand  44:33

yeah, I can’t agree more, because when I when I heard Phil talking, and it was very emotional, the authenticity of the story. And you use the word authentic quite a few times. Phil, if you look back at at at your story, what was so what do you think was so transformative about it, from your point of view, that so many people came and found resonance with the. Out with your life story.

45:04

I think the most compelling part of my story, my my narrative, was that I appeared to be to be this powerful person, and I wouldn’t go as far to say indestructible, but a person that emerged from all of the transgressions part of government and church officials and the dysfunction in our communities that was largely the the beyond not unexpected, but that’s how it became unexpected outcomes of the residential school experience. But I was presenting myself in the in a way that most Canadians saw first nations leaders being able to appear before cameras talk to somewhat intelligently about our issues. But in fact, the real story was that there were so many of our people that had been damaged, severely damaged by the residential school experience. And when I talked about the dark period, the tragic period, that’s that’s what this is about. And and so we are now on a path. Some people call it reconciliation, others use other words. But we’re on a path to try and recover, uh, lost lives from every community, and that’s not an easy journey. You look at the child welfare system, you look at the penal system, and you look at the homeless, you look at the poor housing conditions,

47:27

safe drinking water, that’s absent for most of our communities, that you’ve put that all together and and the anchor to all of this was that the desire on the part of governments and private interests to take over First Nations lands, because our lands were extremely valuable. We had minerals, we had timber, we have farmland. And so how do they get that? Well, you make them more sedentary, where we ensure that our people are no longer nomadic. And the vehicle to do that was residential schools. The most effective tool to do that was to place our communities in residential schools. So they succeeded. Governments and the churches succeeded in keeping us in one spot over years, but once our people were released back into the communities, it was a sorry state that emerged from this experience, and we are still dealing with it this day, and and it’s a it’s a significant challenge for the entire country, and what has exacerbated This whole story is the discovery of all my graves in different sites where residential schools operated, and there have been various numbers attached to this notion of discovery, 4000 6000 8000 I don’t think we should quibble about the number. The big thing there is that there are on marked graves of children that died in residential schools, boarding school, same thing, or industrial schools. For one of those schools that my grandmother attended. I have a record of every student that attended the death of a number of them, what they died from, who their parents were, where they were from, so they lied on Mark Gray’s not as a the result of a deliberate action on the part. In the church. They were poor people were church. They were school children. So they had they didn’t have monuments. My great grandfather is buried in the same cemetery as a number of these First Nation children were buried. This is Anand marked grave. I don’t know where he’s buried in, in Saint Boniface. And so we’re now trying to write a new chapter, the brighter chapter. And we’re not doing it alone. We have a lot of Canadians helping us write this story. Kathleen and colleagues like her are central to this very important process. You talk about narrative, you talk about writing, it’s a new and different chapter is going to emerge from all of this, and it’ll be the truth of the matter and beyond the truth, there will be reconciliation, if so desired by the people that are writing or people that are the subject of the of the sequence of putting down our stories. Not everyone believes in reconciliation. There’s just so much anger that’s carried by so many, so much distrust, so much

51:32

so or not so much, but so many people that see this as an opportunity for themselves, you know, they want to take advantage of something that might propel their careers, their lives, and it’s a mixed bag. There’s no perfect solution to this, and we’re not looking for for perfection in this. We’re looking for a way of it. And I think we, in the main we have the answers. The answers are represented by people like Kathleen, colleagues of hers, and in many different sectors, many different institutions, whether their education or the finance and environmentalists, yeah, many different centers of very important activity and interest are there with us. So we’re in good shape. We have a premier in Manitoba that’s indigenous, First Nation person. We have other elected members and various legislatures, the premier of Nunavut, the first real province created for our people as First Nation, well judges, various levels of the judicial system. We have lawyers, all kinds of lawyers. There’s a professional class that’s emerged in our community that is introducing badly needed changes in the way we look at ourselves, the way we want to present ourselves, the true self to the nation. And it’s a pretty exciting journey.

Nippin Anand  53:37

It is. I mean, yes, I was

Kathleen  53:39

just going to say something else too, but because you asked Phil about why would he be accepted, you know? Why was his Why was his statement so powerful? I think one of the reasons is, too. Is that like, I’m not indigenous, I think it’s probably obvious, but I’m Irish in my background. What? But we had never been taught anything about residential tools. What we were taught as white people European descent and other immigrants too, South Asian people or Muslim people or Philippine people. I mean, we got all those people in Canada, but there they were taught, just as I was, was that Canada is a wonderful human rights nation that values equality and that welcomes immigrants and you know, everything have health care and good education, everything is great in Canada. That was what we were taught. And we were proud of that. We were taught to be proud of that. And then when Phil told his story in 1990 on national television, it was a shock. Went through the country because people had no idea, and you have to understand too these these schools were usually in very remote areas where white people didn’t go, or people. Of other cultures didn’t go and had no idea. And so when we say we’re writing a Chapter, you know, the dark chapter, and writing a new chapter of Canadian history, it’s an existential exercise in many ways. It’s, it’s, it’s, who are we as Canadians, and how do we want to be viewed? Because we’ve got to deal with this. The trc forced Canadians to deal with it, and Phil’s story and others that have emerged since. So how do we deal with it? If we want to, if we want to be who we were taught we were, we have to make fundamental change. So I think that’s another reason why Phil’s story was so powerful and it was so articulate, and he presented it in such a way that that people were profoundly impacted by it, certainly people who believed that in human rights and believed that the story we had been told about what Canada was, Kathleen

55:56

watched the interview before

Kathleen  55:58

I ever knew Phil, before we ever met. It knocked me over. You know,

Nippin Anand  56:04

you know what was? What was most heartbreaking for me was was to hear somebody’s identity, their name, being taken away and been given another name to say that’s no longer your name. This is your name from today onwards. And of course, there were many heartbreaking moments in that story, even when you hear it and you’re absolutely right, Kathleen and Phil The trouble is that today, many people in position of authority and power are just not ready to face a truth that makes them uncomfortable. When you bring people to the edge of their of their of their belief, the first reaction is denial. Complete denial doesn’t happen. It cannot be the case. And I think one of the ways to to test somebody whether they are really ready to unlearn and learn, because the first step in learning is unlearning is to bring them to the edge of their belief. And I think it does not happen often. And you talk about deny deniability or denialists in your, in your in that, in that video, also, and we have a very similar problem. There is no interest to step outside of your own belief and actually meet somebody in their belief system, very, very hard, very hard for most people.

Kathleen  57:19

Yeah. Well, another aspect of my career, before I got involved with with Phil and the indigenous file, was judicial education. I was one with some other colleagues, women colleagues, law professors. Basically, we founded a group called the Women’s legal education and Action Fund to ensure that our new Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 would be interpreted to deliver what it promised in terms of of human rights. It was a it was our first constitution that gave individuals human rights against the governments that control them. And so we realized that, well, look, if it’s the same old approach with the new instrument, ie, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, will get the same results. And so we started a movement. Actually, it was very controversial at the time, but when we looked at judges decision making, when it came to things involving women, which whether it was sexual harassment, sexual assault, support upon divorce, whether it was workplace discrimination, women never seemed to be able to make an impact within the legal culture, and so we showed judges, who their their own decisions, how biased some of them were. And that started a whole movement about looking at the traditional use of precedent and what’s within those precedents whose vision, who is the reasonable man, what is common and common sense? What are the bedrock principles upon which our legal system is built to come to these kinds of decisions? So that opened my eyes enormously as a lawyer, to realize the system within which I was working was essentially fair to a group of people, but they were the group of people who made the laws, enforced the laws, interpreted the laws which weren’t women, which weren’t brown people, which weren’t other minorities, the disabled or LGBTQ. It wasn’t those people. It was a very small group of people using the law to promote what they felt was fair and just for them. So that was an insight that that I had and we worked with all over the world, actually, including in countries other than, you know, common British common law countries, Vietnam, for example, China, but the US, Canada, England, south, South Africa, India, all of those places with the common legal heritage. This, the problem was identical. And so we worked with judges and worked with women’s groups, worked with activists. Asked human rights seekers to demonstrate that look, the principles have to be examined for their basic fairness. Are you being inclusive? Are you looking contextually at the persons before you You’re not a woman or you’re not disabled, or you’re not in a person of a different race, but do you know their context and their context can change a person’s thinking? So you know that was part of my background as well, coming to this challenge, and it was essentially the same, only far more widespread. Within Canada, the discrimination was so heavy and so deep in our in our country, in every way you looked at it.

Nippin Anand  1:00:45

You know, in 1977 there was this big air crash, paradm accident between two aircrafts taking out from Tenerife Island. And then came more accidents and more disasters. And so we had a series of interventions in the Risk and Safety world, such as grow resource management, to empower the people who who don’t have a voice. We have another tool called stop the job authority, where you have you give tools to people in order to speak up. These days, there’s a more contemporary thinking called psychological safety. And my point is this, that we never get to understand the the context in which the marginalized and the powerless operate. So you give them tools after tools, but they don’t. We don’t quite realize that what it takes to actually speak up to somebody in the position of power and truth. And I think what what you talk about is, is exemplary, because you articulated your story and people resonated with you, I find it so inspiring, so powerful. Yeah, I think we the ability to to understand the truth of the marginalized and and the and the and the powerless is very hard for most people, especially if they don’t come from your belief system. That’s why I was talking about the salvation myth that in our world, and I think some ways in your world, the idea that I am here to save your life is such a misleading idea. We we step into another person’s boundaries and we want to save them. And I think that’s misleading in many ways. Is there anything you wanted to say before you leave, just to bring it to from your end?

1:02:31

No other than it’s an interesting way to start the day.

Kathleen  1:02:37

I would like to say something, though, as a lawyer and someone who has had my vision expanded enormously, is that indigenous people have a lot to teach us. Non Indigenous people, their values, their incredible commitment to each other, their generosity, their way of looking at the world as something that we’re part of, but not dominant over, in terms of the environment and the whole community responsibilities that they have. I mean, it’s an incredible culture I’ve discovered, and I certainly didn’t know that before my commitment to this work and my connection with Phil so I think that, you know, the world would be in a much better place, actually, if we had more indigenous principles guiding us. So that would be my final statement.

Nippin Anand  1:03:40

Thank you so much for your time. Have a lovely day. Yes, you too. Have a great day. There are so many takeaways from this conversation, and each of us will take something different. Mine are something like this. Historically, Christianity has emerged as the dominant moral framework for the prevalent legal system across the world, we look up to judges and lawyers as the ultimate authority that holds the truth, but as we discovered, judges and custodians of legal systems also suffer from biases, like all humans do. Truth is not neutral. What is considered true is rooted within a certain worldview that we call culture, even from a legal standpoint, culture precedes and predetermines our perception of what is right and wrong and what is acceptable and unacceptable, that which we cannot imagine and therefore cannot comprehend through our own culture, we tend to dismiss and even demonize Much of what we call culture change happens by force, systems, processes, dashboards, KPIs and even ammunitions, arms and force I come to you from a dominant culture, a colonialist, a missionary, an inspector, a safety manager, a leader or a takeover company. I try to change your culture by force. What I’m really doing is overriding and dismissing your rituals, ethics, symbols, tastes, preferences, beliefs, habits and the foundation of your very existence. The implications of forcing our own culture onto other person are serious and profound. The damage can be long, lasting and irrevocable, not just to the humans, but to the entire ecosystem. This itself should tell us that culture is not a construct, but a balanced ecosystem. The essence of all organizing requires people to come together and understand each other. We cannot force our way on others if we want them to be part of our organization. It is often that when things go wrong, we tend to use metaphors such as reasonable person, common sense or even normal day to establish the extent of the problem, in order to ensure justice, fairness and order. But what is reasonable, common or normal is nothing but the collective view of the ruling class, the managers or the top management. The question is, whose collective view prevails? The judge or the one being judged. Real change is achieved when leaders, managers and change agents dare to step into another person’s culture and listen to their stories, experience their world and feel what they feel. Empathy is the key to cultural intelligence and culture change. The single most powerful way to influence culture is the human ability to share stories. It’s through a heart to heart connection that we create a change that can sustain if you want to hear more about the work of Kathleen and Phil I encourage you to watch their six part video series. The link will be included in this podcast. If you are interested to learn about culture and how to create a culture of learning, join us in Aberdeen from the fifth to the seventh of March at our social psychology of risk conference. You can find out more about the conference by visiting our website, novellus.solutions. I hope you enjoyed listening to this conversation and it made you think and reflect. If you have please subscribe to our channel, Team novellus on YouTube. You can also listen to this podcast on Spotify, podbean, or any of your favorite platforms, although I prefer watching visual stories. Thank you for listening. You