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The Current Transcript for October 28, 2024

Host: Susan Ormiston

Prologue

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TIMOTHY SNYDER: Freedom has to mean. It has to mean loving things. And it has to mean admitting that you love things. And that's why it always requires a little tiny bit of courage.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder wrote much of his new book "On Freedom" in Ukraine. What he's seen there since the war began has reshaped the way he thinks about what freedom is. But his thoughts apply far beyond that conflict to the US election, and to how each of us had personally as well. Last night, Matt Galloway interviewed Timothy Snyder onstage at the Vancouver Writers' Fest. We'll hear their conversation in just a moment. Also this morning, when journalist Tanya Talaga's great uncle requested government documents about his mother, he was told she didn't exist and for years he searched for traces of the women in his family.

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TANYA TALAGA: He was looking for why it was they were so silent, why they weren't proud of who they were, what had happened to them to erase identity, memory, everything.

SUSAN ORMISTON: In an hour, how this erasure affected Tanya Talaga's life. And what digging for truth about her ancestors uncovered about Canada's history. Good morning. I'm Susan Ormiston, sitting in for Matt Galloway and you're listening to the Current.

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Tim Snyder on avoiding the trap of ‘negative freedom’

Guest: Timothy Synder

SO: Today, we are bringing you Matt Galloway's conversation with author and historian Timothy Snyder. It was recorded last night at the Vancouver Writers' Fest. Timothy Snyder's new book is called "On Freedom." Here are Matt Galloway and Timothy Snyder.

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MATT GALLOWAY: Hi, everybody. How are you doing? We live in a difficult, an extraordinary, intense and bizarre, peculiar times. And I can't think of a better person to help us try to understand what's happening now and where we may go than our guest this evening. Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin professor of history and global affairs at Yale University. He is an expert in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union and the Holocaust. His books include Bloodlands, Black Earth, The Road to Unfreedom. And many of you may, of course, have read his book "On Tyranny." It was a New York Times number one bestseller. It inspired a rap song. His new book is in many ways a follow up or at the very least, a companion piece to this. It's called "On Freedom." I'm not sure if it will inspire a hip hop song or not, but it does quote the great Gillian Welch, which we may talk about over the course of our conversation. Please welcome, if you would, on stage, Timothy Snyder.

[Clapping]

MATT GALLOWAY: Thank you for being here.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Glad to be with you.

MATT GALLOWAY: So the election is a week away. How are you feeling about everything? We'll talk about some specifics, but how are you feeling a week out?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I mean, one always worries about the progressive Americanisation of Canada and asking how you feel to be any of a conversation.

MATT GALLOWAY: This is a time of big feelings.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Strikes. I mean, this just strikes me as itself a little bit disturbing. So, I'm going to how do I feel, though? Like, I feel good because I've been doing things and that's like, it's a, it's a tough time. It's a tough time in the U.S. There are tougher times other places. But I've been out there doing the things that I think I can do. And so, I personally feel good.

MATT GALLOWAY: You've been on the road quite a bit over the last little while talking about this book. I just came back from the United States. We were down in Arizona and in Michigan speaking with a lot of people, trying to gauge the mood of the country. I mean, you talk about what you're doing in the fact that you feel good. How would, how do you understand the mood of your country based on what you've seen over the last few weeks?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: There, there isn't one mood is the thing, right? There isn't one mood. And also there aren't really exactly two camps either. It's a big you know, you know this it's a it's a big, diverse, confusing country. And the way that people come to the elections is often very different from how we would think they would come. You know, as you know from talking to folks yourself, a lot. So that said, a lot of Democrats are terrified by the national polling and by the closeness of the swing states, which is understandable. A lot of, a lot of Trump folks are gearing up to say that the outcome is a lie regardless of what the outcome turns out to be. And there are still, there's still that fringe of people, and I belong to that fringe who thinks that the outcome could be very good and we may actually, may actually turn a corner. But you can't really summarise it in one thing because even though I feel generally good, I'm also pretty much 100% convinced that there will be violence around Election Day and that will just that we're just going to have to deal with that.

MATT GALLOWAY: Why is this thing so close, do you think?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I think, poll, I mean, I don't want to be too meta and Constructivist about it, but I think polling itself is a reality. Like I don't think it measures a reality. I think it is a reality and that if we could just do what the British do or, I don't know, maybe don't do this anymore, but if we could just have a couple of months off without polling before the elections, it would be really good. Not just for our moods, but I actually think for the elections because I think the poll, the, that form of polling where I don't ask you who, I don't ask you what you care about and I don't ask you what policies you want or approve of. I just say, here are two people. How do you think or how do you feel? Right? Which is really what it comes down to. Like in the moment, how do you feel? And I think that creates this reality. And I think it in itself creates this sense that, like, it has to kind of close in or as everybody wants to say, tighten up towards the end. And everybody loves the polls because the polls give you something to constantly write about. In an era of journalism, honourable exceptions aside, where it's so much easier to just talk about the mood, you know, than to comment on the numbers, than to actually dig in on what policies people want, because that is a deep problem with these elections. And, I mean, that's something I feel bad about that there are so many policy problems which don't really get discussed or investigated because we do so much of this like horse race back and forth, him or her. What are the strategies, what are the gimmicks? You know, rather than thinking, well, actually, you know, most people, which is true, by the way, most people, the vast majority actually prefer Kamala Harris's policies. But that, that's not reported in America, like let alone in the rest of the world because we're stuck on the polls. Why is it so close, though? I mean, the two party system is part of it, right? That you can reliably get an us and them out of the two party system the entire way that Trump is dealt with. Like, Kamala Harris has basically tried to run an honourable campaign, which has mostly been about policy. You know, bless her heart. And, and Trump has done nothing except literally nothing except look for attack lines. And unfortunately, that's enough to get close, right? Unfortunately, that's enough to get close.

MATT GALLOWAY: How do you understand why, why so many tens of millions of Americans see him as the person that will lead them out of the position that they're in or lead them to something? How do you, how do you understand it or can you understand it?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, first of all, I don't think it's I mean, Americans here or there. It's people. People are vulnerable to this kind of thing as they were. You know, the Germans were just probably more sophisticated the 1920s than we are in the 2020s. But, you know, they went for something. It's not so much Americans. I think one has to kind of put, give credit where credit is due. He is a charism--. I mean, this probably, he's probably not your kind of politician, I'm going to hazard a guess. But he is a charismatic, and charisma is very subjective, I know. But he is a charismatic, intelligent, tactically sophisticated politician. That is part of it. He knows, he knows what he's doing. The image that he's like constantly off message or he's demented or whatever is like that's just, that's people coping with the reality. He is he is a intelligent politician. He's willing to do he's, he's willing to get into that special place where he's the person who breaks all the rules. And that's, and that's attractive for some people. And then we do have this deep. There are, there are, because of the way America has sought itself out since the 1980s, since the Reagan administration, there is a deep sense of grievance among people who think they should be doing better. Let's put it like that. By which I mainly mean white males. There is a deep sense of grievance among people who think they should be doing better. And that's a combination of two things. One is the breakdown of the welfare state and the breakdown of American wages so that objectively folks are doing less well than they might expect or than their parents are doing. Plus, a deep racial history where some people are going to be more upset and react in certain ways when social mobility breaks down and Trump picks up on all of that. And then finally, one, one has to say social media. I mean, you know, your straight remark in your introduction. Americans spend seven hours a day in front of social media. That is much more time they spend with other people. And like, if I could only characterise social media in one adjective, it would be fascist. Social media makes people much more prone to a politics of us and them than they would have been otherwise. And Trump knows how to use that. He is, in large measure, a kind of social media creation, a creation of the era of social media.

MATT GALLOWAY: So this week, two newspapers, two large newspapers refused, or the owners of the newspapers refused to put out endorsements, ostensibly for Kamala Harris, the L.A. Times and then The Washington Post. The story with The Washington Post and the Times is that the editorial boards had cooked up. And written up an endorsement and that the owners of those papers in some fashion pulled the chute on that and said that this endorsement will not go forward. The Washington Post has said that we now don't do this, their words, we don't do endorsements. We didn't do them before. There was a break in which we did. And now we're not doing them again. We want the readers to make up their own minds. Marty Baron, the legendary editor of The Washington Post, called this cowardice and disturbing spinelessness. How do you read the decision by...? And I focus on the Post because of its history and tradition and the influence that it has. How do you understand that characterisation?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So let me start with sort of the structural and on the moral. Anybody out there who thought the oligarchs were going to save us. I mean, if they can't even get us to a presidential endorsement, it's pretty unlikely they're going to get us to Mars or immortality or whatever it is that you were expecting them to do. Like, I think like the first quarter of the 21st century has been in large measure, like it's been imagination conquered and made pure isle by a few billionaires, such that we've lost the future. And then, when these guys are confronted by any actual challenge in the actual real world, they present themselves, this is my second point. The least vulnerable present themselves as the most vulnerable and the people who are the least vulnerable, the people with these huge fortunes who really can't lose no matter what happens, they act as though they were the ones who had the right to move first. And meanwhile, the people who are going to hold, the people who are going to win, who are going to hold, who are going to hold back Trump, the people who are, the people who are gonna do this are the ones taking actual risks, right? Everybody, like the, the two men who held back those endorsements are among the people taking the least risk in the world. But they're acting as though somehow we're really at stake. And that's the sad thing. This is a business decision. They think of it as a business decision. Like they're thinking, oh well, I have other holdings and, you know, therefore I can't put my, I can't put Amazon at risk or whatever. But if, but it's not a, it's, even as a business decision, it's stupid because you're showing power that you're going to fold even before the power is in office. Right? You're showing that you can be pushed around, but that the sad thing about presenting that as a business decision, of course, is that it is eminently political. You can't just do something that you think of as a business decision and then write a rationalisation trying to explain to the rest of the country that, this doesn't mean anything to you politically, because to me it was just a business decision. What it means politically and this is where it becomes a moral thing, because in the final analysis, politics has an inevitably moral component. What it means is what, you know, Marty Baron said, it is, it's cowardice and it's politically meaningful cowardice. The chapter one of "On Tyranny," which you kindly mentioned, is entitled "Don't Obey In Advance," and not obeying in advance. Not, not taking part in anticipatory obedience is, in my view, one of the main lessons of the 20th century.

MATT GALLOWAY: Anticipatory obedience.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. So when. And that's, so that is the, it's a, it's a normal human pattern. You see power shifting and you adjust to where the power is. And if you do that, though, without thinking, then you're not going to live in a Democrat-- democratic society because you'll be you'll be caving in pre-emptively to the aspiring tyrant. But the key thing is, it's not just your failure. It's a, it's a change in the political equation because you're giving your power away often without thinking about it. And judging by the drivel that was given to us as an explanation for why this happened. These people were not thinking in these political terms at all. So, I mean, it's hard. It's honestly, it's, this is so cartoonishly bad that it's hard to find, you know, the proper terms to condemn it, although I'm trying.

MATT GALLOWAY: But you don't sound surprised.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I got to say that even I was a little surprised by this. I was a little surprised by this, because it's, it's not only cowardly, it's also just. It's also just dumb. But there is that, There isn't, not that those two things are necessarily in opposition, but. But. I'm going to, I want to add, I want to add a positive to this, though, which is that the reaction has been meaningful. The reaction from... [cross-talk]

MATT GALLOWAY: People within the papers themselves.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Well, yeah, I mean, of course, like then like I'm fielding calls from news from, from reporters, you know, who are inside those news organisations who are covering the story themselves. Right? And from reporters all over the world as well. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a really good opinion piece about this. The Guardian is writing about it. The New York Times. I mean, maybe they'd already planned this, but The New York Times just published page after page after page of quotations, which amounts to a very strong condemnation. But, but what it really meant was among people, like, people can, like, people can think, oh wait a minute, like we are being betrayed now. We're watching a betrayal before our eyes. And in 9 or 10 days, we have a chance to do something about that. So politically, I think it's actually hurting Trump is what I'm trying to say.

MATT GALLOWAY: Can I go back to something that you said earlier? And you when you said it, I think a lot of people would have taken a breath in, which is that you'd almost certainly believe that violence will follow the 5th of November. When I was down in the States, one of the things I heard from people on both sides of this political divide is that they were worried about violence after the election.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: It's going to happen, but I don't particularly think we should be all, you know, panicking about it. I just think it's baked into the set up in that for, for three reasons. I mean, the first is that when you practice a politics like Trump practices where violence is sometimes just under the surface and sometimes above the surface, when you, when you encourage people to carry out acts of violence, you know, I mean, this is a guy who urged the assassination of Hillary Clinton, as maybe we may have forgotten. This is, this is a person who encouraged people to, you know, to rid him of his vice president after the vice president failed to, fail to take part in this coup. This is a person who encouraged a violent attempt to overthrow the entire American constitutional system. This is a person who in his rallies urges people to take violent action against other people. When you do that kind of stuff, people are going to be violent around you and also, incidentally, towards you. I mean, that you're because you're telling them that violence is the answer to problems. And so then your own people will eventually become dissatisfied with you. And, you know, and that's the story of Trump's assassination attempts, by the way. Like, these are, these are disappointed people of his own, of his own group. So one of it is that like he's just created this atmosphere. And the second is he's had so long to do this that there just, you know, among the you know, among the 250 million American adults, there just have to be some people out there who are thinking, well, when Trump says that, he what? Because he's going to lose the popular vote almost certainly. And but he's going to declare I mean, it's going to be really surprising if he doesn't declare victory on night one. Right? But he, because he's, he that's what he did last time. And he's, he's not going to help himself. I mean, he is, he is intelligent, like I said. But he also has weaknesses. And one of them is that he just can't stand the thought of losing. And so, he's going to declare victory on night one. And then, there's going to be data which suggests he hasn't won on night one and then, it's going to look like, well, the conspiracy against Trump is underway. And that's true for a lot of people who believe in Trump's big lie that he won last time. That's going to seem like a license to do something, right? That's the, that's the second reason. And the third reason why I think it's so likely is that we've just we've seen violence on other occasions before. So, by, by his people. So, I think it will be early November rather than January, because Trump's not in power. He's out of power. There's another thing, which is the Russian factor. The Russians are trying to get us to do crazy things around November 5th. And although it might seem implausible, there are examples of Russian, like Russian, Russian trolls getting real Americans to do things in the real world, unfortunately.

MATT GALLOWAY: What was the question that you wanted to answer with this book? Because in some ways, after "On Tyranny" came out, people were asking you questions, and that leads to you thinking about how this book might come around. What were the questions that people were asking?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: So on, "On Tyranny" is about how to play defence. It's called "20 Lessons from the 20th Century." And it's, when I wrote "On Tyranny," I was a historian who'd written "Bloodlands" and "Black Earth" and books about the worst things that can happen. I was in the middle of a book called "Road to Unfreedom," which was about the emergence of what I think of as the new fascism. It was a kind of history of the 2010s and jumping out of that at the time of Trump's victory, I was trying to condense 20 lessons that people could follow as guidance at a time when I thought that Americans needed guidance. And that's been really helpful. I mean, it like, even now with The Washington Post L.A. Times thing, folks immediately jumped on lesson one, which is don't obey in advance. And I was really glad. I was glad that was out there as guidance because it's needed. But even so, no matter how well you're playing defence, you have to be able to go on offence or to jump out of the sports metaphor when you are trying to defend something. Eventually, you have to know what that something is. And so, a question from "On Tyranny," which got me towards "On Freedom" is, you know, Professor Snyder, what is this thing that we're trying to defend? If we get over this crisis, what would a better United States look like? What would a better republic look like? If this is, if this is the threat of tyranny, what would freedom mean? And so, the questions I was trying to answer were what would a better America or a better future look like? But also what is freedom? What is freedom? This thing that Americans think, they think they know what it is, but it's actually quite difficult to answer. And I think getting that answer right turns the conversation away from what's wrong now to what could be right in the future.

SO: Your CBC News is coming up next. And then, in six minutes, we'll bring you the rest of Matt Galloway's conversation with Timothy Snyder from the Vancouver Writers' Fest. I'm Susan Ormiston, and you're listening to The Current.

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Tim Snyder on avoiding the trap of ‘negative freedom’ – Part 2

Guest: Timothy Snyder

SO: I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to The Current. Before the news, we were listening to Matt Galloway's interview with Timothy Snyder recorded last night at the Vancouver Writers Fest. Timothy Snyder is an historian and the author of several books. His latest is called "On Freedom." It follows his previous book, The New York Times bestseller "On Tyranny." Let's return now to the stage at the Vancouver Writers Fest.

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MATT GALLOWAY: There are a few things that you write about in the book that helped inform the definitions that you come up with in freedom. One is what happened to you in 2019 when your appendix burst. What did you learn about freedom when you almost died?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I'm going to start that in a light-hearted way. And then I'll and then I'll move towards the more serious. So, my light-hearted remark would be, when you're dead, you're not free. And that's something I know. I mean, that's something that honestly, I think at least Americans need to hear. I mean, I'm thinking like I was in Dallas, Texas last night, right, eating brisket. And so, like, I'm kind of still making my cultural adjustment here.

MATT GALLOWAY: The meat is churning through you.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: It was good brisket. But, you know, like a motto of New Hampshire is, is live free or die. Whereas, like, I'm in favour of live free like and die like, you know, like, as late as possible. Right? Like, put that off. So, a couple of things. I mean, one way that I got in trouble was that when my appendix burst, I ignored the pain. I didn't pay attention to it, and I was unable to tell doctors and nurses how much I hurt. And partly as a result of that, I was misdiagnosed at the beginning and then, wasn't treated. And so I got peritonitis and then I got sepsis. And that led to the almost dying part.

MATT GALLOWAY: You were very close to death.

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. [MATT GALLOWAY: Yeah.] Yeah. And so. But that not like... One way to think about freedom is freedom from, and freedom from is important. Like it's a part of freedom. Not being able to resist is very important. But there's also the question of in the name of what are you resisting? So in this very simple example, having a high pain tolerance is can be good, but in the name of what, right? Like, ultimately it has to be in the name of my thriving or helping other people. It's not necessarily good in itself. Like, only on its own, having high pain tolerance can be kind of dangerous. The second thing which came in was that was race. So, I, when I was sick, I was in a hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. It was a third hospitals. And that was the place where I almost died. And a friend of mine very kindly came and spent the night in with me, like in the, in the emergency room. And that, you know, that I was really happy that she did. But the tragic thing about it is that her presence might have made things worse, which is weird. I mean, very strange because she's a physician and, and her intuitions about what was happening were better than those of the physicians in the emergency room. So, how could it possibly be that her presence made things worse? And this is the horrible part, because she was black. And because she was black, when she said something, I could see how the doctors then one of the things, the opposite thing, you know, like they were reacting against what she said for straight up American racial reasons and racism having to do with her almost killed me, which, of course. And that's like and of course, there was something ridiculous telling the story about like these white adjacent stories. Right? Because in that moment, I was just getting a taste of what her like a tiny taste of what her life is like. Just a tiny taste, but it's like a little tiny taste can almost kill you. Then, it's a sense, you know, you just it gives you at least a way to think about what it does to other people. And then, that's connected to the lack of American health care in general, because we, we won't have national health care because we and this is not like my white person "we." We think that other people will exploit it somehow. And we, we are taught to think that we are hardy, like hardy, self-sufficient, pioneer types who don't really ever need doctors. And then those other people, right? Those immigrants and those black people, they're going to somehow abuse the whole system. And that's not fair. They're going to abuse it. They're going to take our tax money and somehow abuse health care. And on that understanding, we cut ourselves off, right? Trying to punish other people for what we imagine they're going to do. We cut ourselves off from health care and everyone ends up being worse off. In a world of negative freedom where you think freedom is just about yourself and you against the world and your impulses, you're never, you don't identify with other people and their predicaments. And as you don't identify with other people in their predicaments, you end up making yourself less free because you don't see the things that you could do together. Right?

[Audience clapping]

MATT GALLOWAY: You can clap. I want to ask you about Ukraine, but you mentioned COVID. And when that, it feels like that sense of empathy was tested in such an obvious way during the pandemic with people who were yelling at each other because they did or didn't want to wear a mask or get a vaccine or what have you. What do you think that that did to how we understand the idea of freedom? That thing that we lived through?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. That's such a good question and gets to the heart of how I'm thinking about freedom in the book. What I'm concerned with is, is the American habit, which and you've got some of this here in some of your politics, too. The American habit of thinking freedom, a freedom as negative. So, it's, it's me against the world. It's me against the system, me against the government. And there are a lot of problems with that. I mean, there's a logical problem, which is if, if it's just freedom from then where, for what purpose? Right? And then there's a sort of the psychological problem, which is that if you if you grow up thinking that freedom is just you against somebody or against a barrier or against the government, then you don't ask who you are and you never find out who you are. And then, you can't be free. Right? And so like, negative freedom in day-to-day practice is a trap. Like, it actually prevents you from being, from being free. And there are other problems with negative freedom, too. Like, you shrink the government so much that you can't then create the conditions for freedom or and this one is very apropos, your earlier question about violence. If you, if you're in the habit of thinking of freedom as you against the government, it's a very small shift. And a lot of Americans have made it now to thinking that freedom is me against my fellow citizens. So with the masks and such like, it's an absence of empathy. I agree. But I think it's also a misunderstanding of freedom. If you think of freedom is just like me against stuff than natural, you're going to rebel against the masks and against the vaccines and stuff. But if you think of freedom instead as what kind of person you want to be, or if you think of freedom in terms of something that has to be created together, then you get off on a completely different foot. We don't know who we are unless we have other people in our lives. And if we don't know who we are, then we can't be free.

MATT GALLOWAY: One of the, you have five forms of freedom and one of them is sovereignty. In the context of Ukraine, what is, and I, partially just because you wrote so much of the book there, but you have such great affection for Ukraine. What does that word mean to you now?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: So, Ukrainians are the only people I know of, maybe there are others who talk about freedom more than Americans, and they were talking about it in a way which was very interesting to me. In the book, I privilege conversations with President Zelenskyy, but there were a number of other conversations, hundreds of them, in fact, where I just ask people like, you know, people on the front, people who had in towns that have been occupied: What do you think about freedom? And interestingly, like the way that, the way they came down really helped me with the argument I was trying to make because it was always positive. I have yet to run into a Ukrainian who says all we need to do is get the Russians out to be free. And of course, that would be like if negative freedom were ever understandable, it would be then because of course, that you could say these people like the Russian occupiers are, they're kidnapping our children, they're killing our local elites. They're torturing a very considerable portion of the population. So, surely when you get rid of that, that's a liberation. But Ukrainians tend to use the word de-occupation, which I think is very helpful because de-occupation reminds you that getting rid of the evil is only the first part and you still have to bring back the good. I start the book with a conversation that I had with an older woman called Maria, whose town was completely physically destroyed by the war. And then, the ruins were occupied by the Ukrainian army. And we're talking in front of her little corrugated shack. And, of course, it's better that she's alive and it's better that her towns are no longer occupied. And it's better that she has the shock and that she doesn't. But then, you know, it would still be better if the ruins were cleared and if the buses were running again and so forth, like that would be something more like a liberation. And so, the conceptual part and the experience and then, also the moral part where with like February, I'm kind of haunted as an American by February 2022. In that moment, the Biden administration was actually correctly telling the world what was going to happen. The Russians were going to invade Ukraine. They did. But the thing that haunts me about that moment was that we assumed the Ukrainians would immediately collapse, fail. They would be over in three days. That was the official wisdom inside the Washington beltway, just as it was the official wisdom inside the Kremlin. The Ukrainians, of course, didn't fully. Zelenskyy stayed. They fought much, much better than was anticipated. What haunts me is us. Why did we think they would flee? Why did we think that exactly? And I think that has to do with, with negative freedom, that this makes Americans uncomfortable. But I think it's because we just actually couldn't imagine that people, in fact, would fight for freedom. Much as we talk about it.

MATT GALLOWAY: What do you mean?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Look, if you're so like I mean, this negative, positive freedom thing very deeply. Like for me, it's not just some kind of linguistic game that I'm playing at. I think it goes very deep to using the word freedom to bring yourself to a mental world where in fact you're not free. And so, if you're, if you're in a negative freedom world, then what you think is like, it's just me and the barriers, right? You think "I'm fine," right? It's the barriers that are the problem. "I'm okay, I'm great." And you never really have to ask yourself, what do you stand for? Like, what would you take a risk for? And then, the moment comes when it turns out the barriers are too much for you. And what do you do? Like for you, freedom is just, freedom is impulse. You run like hell. And I don't think we could imagine them doing anything differently because I don't think we could imagine ourselves doing anything differently. And that's what, that's what haunts me. Because one of the reasons that the Ukrainians did resist was that they thought it was worthwhile doing so. They weren't thinking that freedom was something which just, you know, is just an absence. They were thinking it's about the things that you do. There's a connection to the American mistakes that followed because, I'm going to rack up points with the Canadian audience for this stuff. But, but when we are, we are not a people who quickly admit our mistakes. And after February 2022, we needed to quickly admit our mistake. So, the Ukrainians didn't flee. They did fight. They were incredibly effective. And we weren't ready for that because in our mind, the Ukrainians were going to lose. And it just, and we weren't able to move quickly enough to think, okay, actually somebody's going to lose. But it doesn't have to be the Ukrainians. And Fall 2022 was the best chance for the Ukrainians to actually, for the war to end in there in the right way. But we were just not moving quickly, quickly enough at that point.

MATT GALLOWAY: You write about factuality and the importance of a shared sense of ideas and truths. And you say that without factuality, every form of freedom is menaced. But you also say that facts are not what we want or what we expect. They do not follow our prejudices, but they knock holes in them. Why is that? I mean, it sounds obvious, but why is a shared understanding of what's true important to freedom? And do we actually want that? Do we, I mean, do we actually want that sense of facts that challenge us?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: I'm going to say a segway here, because in my riding on Ukraine and Russia, very important to me were the handful of, of Russian journalists ever fewer now and the larger group of Ukrainian journalists who actually covered the war beginning in 2014, the people who at sometimes at great physical risk to themselves went to the territories that Russia was invading, invading and actually covered that war. Those people, they enabled me to actually have some understanding of what was happening in Russia and Ukraine rather than always reacting, reacting to the disinformation, because so much of what we do is we react to the disinformation and we try to, you know, provide a counter story to some story which is meant to disable us. But the more important thing is to actually know what's going on. Like, that the Russians are using this type of artillery at this range and they're destroyed, this village. And I know because this reporter was there and she filed this report, and that's why "Road to Unfreedom" was dedicated to the reporters as the heroes of our time. And I still have a very strong intuition that what we need are, are the human truths. So, factuality isn't the same thing as information, right? Like, we're bombarded with information based upon what a profit-making entity thinks will attract our attention. But the things that are given to us to attract our attention are not the things we need to know. And to make a kind of blunt force point that I feel morally compelled to make, we actually know less than we used to. We know a lot less and we think a lot more slowly. And we remember a lot more poorly than we did before social media. And if you don't know that...

[Audience laughs]

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Okay and there is no other shoe to drop, that was the only shoe that was going to drop. Okay. And so, what was factuality has to involve, in my view, local circumstances, local conditions. You know, is there, is this stream polluted or this elected representative corrupt? It's all about local things which are reported by local people and on the basis of that, we can build forward to the idea that there are other reliable reporters, like national reporters or scientists or historians, other human beings who have their own methods that generate factuality. Contrary to what libertarians want us to think, there is no free market. There's no free market in general. It's an idiotic idea, but there's no, there's no free market of ideas. Like, the best ideas do not rise to the top. That's just insane. And the truth certainly doesn't rise to the top, right? Factuality has to be garnered, worked at. It has to, it takes a lot of effort. Humans have to go places and then, it's not, it's not what we want to hear necessarily. But that's part of freedom, right? Like, freedom isn't easy. Empathising with other people isn't necessarily easy. Hearing the things that aren't that aren't what you want to hear isn't easy. That's why it's so easy to have an authoritarian regime. I mean, that's easy, right? I mean, that's easy. The hard part is not having an authoritarian regime. And, and the point of, the point about freedom is that it requires collective work, but it also requires each of us to have a little bit of an edge, in my view, of freedom, where I really think the virtues are real. Like, I sincerely believe that there is such a thing as integrity and grace and beauty and loyalty. I think those things are as real as this carpet or this stage or the stairs. They're not real in the same way, but they're just as real. And freedom is the condition in which we can value what we value, balance our values, create unique combinations of values as we live. Realise some of these things that freedom is that thing. Like, it's the value of values because it's the, it's the condition in which we can realise all the other values and that's good. And so, different values are good, like that's fine. But if we have different values and we have different facts, then we can't do anything together. Like, if, if I say there's water pollution and you say there's not water pollution, we're not going to go anywhere. Right? And, and, or if there's no factuality, we're not going to go anywhere. So, like, if I say there's water pollution and you say, well, what is water pollution anyway? [Audience laughs] You know, then we're also not going to get anywhere. Right? Oh, and one more little thing that like, facts are hard, but they're also unpredictable. Like, what is, what turns out to be the case is often unanticipated. And so, pursuing facts is one way to be an unpredictable person yourself. And being unpredictable is essential to being free.

MATT GALLOWAY: You have an audience full of people here who presumably value freedom and want to know what they can do to enhance not just their own freedom, but, but work for freedom in in a broader context. What would you say to them? I mean, what... There are a couple of points of advice that you have for people. One is, is you volunteer to coach a team to help raise a child that's not yours, pay for a newspaper subscription, although maybe that's been questioned, given the lack of endorsements. [Audience laughs] Do physical exercise before you look at a screen in the morning. What are some of the things that people could think about that could help inform their daily practice of, of creating and enhancing freedom?

TIMOTHY SNYDER: Yeah. Before I answer that, I just want to say that there is there is a kind of dialectic to all this because I don't want this to be understood as a, as a sort of self-help book where I say the only thing which is wrong with you is that you need to sleep 7.5 hours and not seven hours. With freedom, two things are always true at once. It's always true that the conditions have to be right. Right? So, if the world outside is too unpredictable because climate change or because bad roads or because tyrannical leaders, or because massive income inequality or whatever, if the outside world is too unpredictable, then we're going to be too predictable. We're going to be frightened. You know, we are going to be herded. So we need to have a certain level of predictability in the outside world so that we can become unpredictable ourselves. So we can't we can't be free just by kind of following my, my list of things. We also have to be free by doing the things together that create the conditions for, for freedom. Like, if we think, if we think of an infant like I can't give an infant my, my self-help lessons. Right? That doesn't make any sense. But what we can do together is create conditions whereby parents and caregivers can raise children more easily and therefore give a child a better chance of growing up with the capacity to be free. So, I just, I need to push a little bit on the institutional side before I move on to the individual side, because the individual side is also indispensable, like they're the practical things, but they just lie there. Unless we think some things are good in the world. And I'm going to try to figure out what those things are. So, I mean, really, really striking to me is the idea of freedom that my friends, people I admired, the anti-communist dissidents had because their idea of freedom, although many of them ended up in prison or in the gulag or in psychiatric prison, their idea of freedom was not this grand thing. It wasn't like, it wasn't me against the, you know, the whole Soviet state. It was more like, I want to live a normal life. I want to do the things I actually love. I want to speak the language I want to speak. But in Votzof Howlle's [Spelling unknown] case, you know, his example was literally good beer is better than bad beer. Like that, you actually care about things. I mean, when Howlle went to prison, it was because of a rock and roll band. And when I asked Zelenskyy, like, what do you think freedom is? He said, Learn to play the guitar. Join a band. Right? Like, and that was at a moment when his army was, as we would say, quote unquote, "liberating." And most of Kharkiv for each of that was September 2022. And so, like, freedom has to mean, it has to mean loving things and it has to mean admitting that you love things. And that's why it always requires a little tiny bit of courage because it's so much easier to look around and see, oh, how's everybody else reacting? And what other people think is okay. And like, it's so hard to say, Well, I actually love this sport or actually loved collecting this thing or I love this hobby. I love this kind of music, right? That's freedom. Like, freedom is being the weird person who you actually are, owning up to it and finding other people to do those things with. And then when there is any pressure on being that eccentric, weird person that you are, then you resist, right? Because you have your own sense of what's normal. And it's my, it's my firm conviction not only because of moral reasoning, but mainly because of historical experience or historical research, among other things, on the dissidents and on Holocaust rescuers, too, that the people who end up doing the extraordinary things in the extraordinary moments are the ones who were doing the kind of invisible work of freedom the whole time. Like, they had their little principles that which they didn't make a big deal about, but they had their norms. They had their values. And then when things changed, they didn't change. And that's the trick, right? That's the whole trick. Like, in our, in our Hollywood movies, when there's a fight for freedom. You mean the scene? It's basically like this, right? You're just like, ironing your clothes or something, like you're just having a normal life. And then, you know, an invasion comes from space and you rally and it turns out like you love freedom and you go out there and you defeat the aliens and like, that's the negative freedom fantasy, right? Like that, you're fine. And then the threat came from outside and you rallied because you love freedom. But that's not what freedom is like at all. Like, freedom is about having a whole bunch of little values that are personal and taking little tiny risks, like the risk of admitting you love something. Like, that's a risk, right? Like, it's hard to do, hard to do multiple good things at once. But if you practice, you get better at it. Doing that, like that's being free and then, you know, real and then realising like the last form of freedom is solidarity. Realising that this is true of you, it's true of everybody else, and we have to create the conditions where we can all become these experimental leaning forward, you know, slightly vulnerable people. And so I do have a list of things, you know, and I will just mention one of them. The greatest source of unpredictability is a thing that brought us here together for this conversation, which is books. Books are a huge store of unpredictability because books give you access to a whole range of values from the past and from the imagination of people in the present, which you could never get to on your own, right? So whereas, like computer screens tend to make us more predictable, books tend to make us less predictable, and books are a good example of that funny thing, which I guess since you're here, you had enough courage to admit that you sort of love.

[Audience clapping]

MATT GALLOWAY: Timothy Snyder, really a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.

[Clapping continues]

SO: That was Matt Galloway speaking with author and historian Timothy Snyder. Snyder's new book is called "On Freedom." Their conversation was recorded on stage last night at the Vancouver Writers Fest. Coming up after your regional update...

SOUNDCLIP

TANYA TALAGA: The women in my mother's family and many First Nations families, we're all about survival. Surviving for our children. Finding our children. Keeping our children and never letting them go.

SO: [Music: Theme fading in] The journalist Tanya Talaga has been piecing together the lost history of her Indigenous family. Coming up, what she uncovered about Canadian history in her search to know where she came from and who her ancestors were. That's in 90 seconds. I'm Susan Ormiston. And you're listening to The Current. Stay with us.

[Music: Theme]

And how Tanya Talaga uncovered her family’s lost Indigenous history

Guests: Tanya Talaga

SO: I'm Susan Ormiston and you're listening to The Current.

SO: Tanya Talaga had driven this stretch of highway hundreds of times past the big blue and yellow Ikea store, past the strip malls, past the high rise buildings in Toronto. She didn't know she'd been driving past her great-great grandmother's gravesite. Her family had been looking for Annie Carpenter for more than eight decades, and they had looked at Tanya, the journalist in the family, to solve the mystery. Tanya Talaga tells that story in her latest book, The Knowing. And in doing so, she also recasts part of Canada's history. I spoke with Tanya Talaga in August. Here's our conversation.

SOUNDCLIP

SO: What did you know originally about your great-great grandmother, Annie Carpenter, when you started out on this journey?

TANYA TALAGA: What I knew about Annie was contained in a brown filing folder that my Uncle Hank had left my mum and had made its way to me when he died. And he had for years been looking for his mum, Liz, and his grandmother, Annie. And when I say that he was looking for why it was they were so silent. Why it was they never talked about who they were, where they were from, why they weren't proud of who they were, what had happened to them to erase identity, memory, everything. So, when he passed away, my mother gets this filing folder. She brought it over to me shortly afterwards, and she said, here, this is for you. And in this filing folder was all of these pieces of paper. It was filled with names, people I'd never heard of. There were maps of Northern Ontario First Nations with little circles around them of First Nations communities. There were baptism records, marriage records, and there was a death certificate. And there was one death certificate of an Annie Gauthier. And Annie Gauthier was my great-great grandmother. At the bottom it said that she died at the Ontario hospital. Where was the Ontario hospital? Where was she buried? It's at the Lakeshore Cemetery. Where was that? I had no idea. And my mum had been searching for Annie --Annie is her great grandma-- since she has been in Toronto.

SO: So, when your great uncle requested official government documents about Annie's daughter, what was he told?

TANYA TALAGA: That she didn't exist. It sounds bananas, but that his mother didn't exist. And he wasn't just told this one time. He was told this twice. Every time he would write-- and this was before the age of the internet, too. This is, you know, an older man trying to find out information about his mom and about his grandma. And so, he would write letters to the Department of Indian Affairs, because that's what it was called at the time. And he would write letters to the province of Ontario, looking for his mom's birth certificate, looking for information about his mom. And he would get letters back that said, we have no Elizabeth Gauthier in our records to be born between 1900 and 1910. And that was in the brown filing folder. And I reference it in the book because to me it was an example of the erasure or not being registered or seen by Ontario or Canadian government authorities, which is not unusual for First Nations people, older First Nations people. Like, we weren't running off to, you know, register a birth with your local vital statistics department. That wasn't something that we did, right?

SO: You talk about the motivation for this book, in part being everyone wants to know where they come from, who their ancestors are. What did this erasure look like in your personal life?

TANYA TALAGA: A silent mother. A grandmother who had so much that she kept inside, but I could see it on her face-- what she lived through. The women in my mother's family, and many First Nations families, I know to be true, we were all about survival. Surviving for our children. Finding our children. Keeping our children. And never letting them go. But our children were gone. We all had family members that didn't come home from Indian hospitals. Tuberculosis sanitaria from, quote unquote, "lunatic asylums." From Indian residential schools. There was a, you know, a great Uncle John. Didn't he go to Shingwauk, and didn't he not come back? I don't know. We can't find his name or his information, but it's a story that's passed through our generations. And that is also the name of the book, The Knowing. We all know of these family members. And you know, when Kamloops happened with the spirits of the 215 sort of waking this whole country up to what we knew.

SO: In the Kamloops residential school.

TANYA TALAGA: That's right, that's right. This is my knowing, but it's also everyone else's. This is the country's knowing too, right? I mean, the TRC in volume four of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission when they came out with their groundbreaking, unbelievable report, it was all about the children that were gone.

SO: Tanya, The Knowing is a very, very powerful metaphor. It's, singular and different to Indigenous families, is what you're suggesting. I want to talk a little bit about the Kamloops Residential School, because you describe it in your book. Three years ago, you were covering this story, the very disturbing discovery of 215 suspected graves of children who died there. Just give me a flavour of what you experienced when you went there. You write about the canoe ceremony, about bringing the spirits of the children back home.

TANYA TALAGA: It was remarkable. You know, I remember getting an email from, [unclear.] She is at Kamloops still. She works for Kúkp7 Rosanne Casimir. And she had reached out to a handful of Indigenous journalists to come to Kamloops and to write this story. And this was before, you know, everything was breaking loose all over the place with the news of the 215. And when I arrived, it was absolutely remarkable. I'll never forget those days. People were coming in from I think there was 18 communities in the area that had children coming to the school, but they came from beside that outside of B.C. they came from all over, you know, Alberta, from the north, from parts of, which is now the states. Right? Some of those nations. I went to the Powwow Arbour, and there were people there from all of these communities, and they were drumming. We were in ceremony. It was a sacred space. And it continued like that for three days. I remember sitting on the front lawn outside of the front doors, the imposing front doors of the school, and I saw out of the corner of my eye this truck come down. A couple trucks, actually, and on top of the truck was this long, beautiful wooden canoe. And all of these people got out of the truck and they were dressed in their regalia, and they lifted this long canoe off, and they drummed and they sang, and then they put the canoe on the lawn, and they addressed us all, and they said they were from Squaw First Nation, and they said they were there to tell the children that were buried at the school that it was okay. They could leave now. It was time to come home. And their spirits were to get in the canoe, and the canoe was going back with them.

SO: You're closing your eyes, telling that story. You remember being in that moment. Powerful moment for you.

TANYA TALAGA: I'll never forget it.

SO: I'm sure. And in a way, you were looking to release the spirit of your great-great grandmother, Annie Carpenter, on this journey.

TANYA TALAGA: What was remarkable to me that when I was there at Kamloops, was pieces were starting to put-- fall into place in my mind, in my own mind, right? About, about Annie, about the missing folks in my family. I mean, did Annie have more children? Was it just Liz and Louise? I found out that she was remarried when she was in her, you know, late 30s. Oh--so then that told me she must have had more children as First Nations woman. And finding out where she had come, the ground she had covered. And, you know, sitting there in ceremony, it all started to come to me that this is all part of the same story. Annie represented the children as well, that were gone, that were missing. Because where was Annie? What happened to her? How did she get erased and forgotten? We have no idea. How come she got from where she was living at the time, which was, you know, along the shores of Lake Superior. She was in a place called Graham at the time. How she got from there all the way-- this is the bottom of treaty nine-- all the way to the Ontario hospital, which is now Humber College, you know, for people listening from modern day Toronto. How did she get there? I actually still don't have any idea. And I've looked for the records, I have done searches, and I've been told that those records have been destroyed, and so I can't answer that question. How did she survive? I don't want to ruin the end of the book, but of course you know that she did not.

SO: The Indian Act, of course, is such a powerful piece of legislation. During the time she was alive, it was passed not long after Annie was born. What impact did you learn it had on Annie and Liz and other Indigenous women?

TANYA TALAGA: Part of the reason why I really started to hone down on Annie, other than my own family's search when I was writing this book on Indian residential schools was because of that. When I looked at when Annie was born, we had a census from 1881 that shows that she was from Fort Albany, along the James Bay Coast. There she was with all of her sisters and her brothers. She was ten years old in 1881. All right. The Indian Act was passed in 1876. Rupert's Land, the HBC, which is such a huge part of her life too, because...

SO: Hudson's Bay Company.

TANYA TALAGA: Yes, Hudson's Bay Company, because her father, Jean Baptiste Carpenter, worked for the HBC as a quote unquote "servant." And so, she was born at the confluence of these two massive parts in Canadian, quote unquote, "history." The sale of Rupert's Land to Sir John A Macdonald and the starting of the Indian Act. And so, when you asked me about how the Indian Act impacts my family and specifically impacted them, I say this in the book, Annie was born in the mouth of genocide. She was. And to me, it all became clear that this is the book I had to write. And what happened to the women in my family? And when you ask, how did it directly affect her, other than that, was the fact that she was enfranchised. So, that meant that when she married a white man, she was no longer seen as a status Indian or a member of her community. So, she was effectively erased. And the letters I have from the Indian agents at the time is they're, you know, unbelievable. Like they say it, like it's oh, it's like she graduated out of a class, you know. Oh, this is so wonderful. She's no longer, you know, a status Indian. She is now a white man's wife.

SO: You know, we all grew up learning about the Hudson's Bay Company. We still see it. You say, you suggest that it's a piece of history that Canadians often, too often, romanticize. What has been left out of the story, especially as it relates to women?

TANYA TALAGA: Well, we can have a whole other three hour show on that, that's for sure. I think that we really need to take a harder look at our history in this country. And I'm just going to make a plug for the work of Dr. Anne Lindsay, as she is an incredible University of Winnipeg professor. She has been an incredible historian. She's done a lot of work on slavery and the fur trade. And I think this is something that we need to include in our history books a lot more than we do. How our people were viewed, and why were they viewed in the ways they were? Well, when you look at the governors of the HBC who was running Rupert's Land, these were folks from Great Britain that all had ties to slavery. The Royal African Company, African National Company, East India Trading Company. Plantations in the Caribbean, those ideals of empire, of imperialism, those ideas of who is worthy, who is not, the othering of our people, I really do believe comes from that period. We have seen this talked about in the United States, but we don't see it here. We don't talk about the caste system here. I think of the work of Isabel Wilkerson, whose book Caste is incredible. It's a Pulitzer Prize winning book. She looks at how come, when we're speaking about race, we also don't talk about Caste. And when you look at the Indian Act, when you look at Indian residential schools, the proof is there.

SO: You quote a number of very powerful men at the time, including, the guy who ran HBC --Hudson's Bay Company-- at the time, Simpson. How did he describe in your research, Indigenous women?

TANYA TALAGA: That guy was a character. George Simpson, he openly referred to Indigenous women as half breeds, as brown bits, as commodities. Brown jugs. And he ruled for decades. And not only did he rule for decades, he had at least 13 children with mothers who were Indigenous. And after the women would have his children, he threw them away. He didn't want anything to do with his offspring either. He would try and marry off some of the women as well to his subordinates. And he said, you know, "If you can dispose of the lady, it will be satisfactory, as she is an unnecessary and expensive appendage. I see no fun in keeping a woman without enjoying her charms. But if she is unmarketable, I have no wish that she should be a general accommodation shop to all the young bucks at the factory, and in addition to her own chastity, a padlock may be useful." We romanticise this period also, too, in Canadian history with the quote unquote "country wives," right? Like all of us First Nations women were hanging around waiting to get married to European men. I can't imagine that a 12-year-old or a 13- or 14-year-old girl during the time of the fur trade would want to leave her family, her mom, her dad, her community, her language, to go off and be a bride to some man that she doesn't know him, his culture, his language. But it was her, that girl, that made the family survive.

SO: Tanya, you-- the breadth of your book is very broad and stunning, really interweaving today's experience with the history of this country. How would you say what you've just described hundreds of years ago with the Hudson's Bay Company and Annie's life at the time with the experiences of Indigenous women today?

TANYA TALAGA: Annie died in 1937. That was less than 100 years ago. Our women are-- they continue to disappear. They continue to die, to go missing. One of the things I wanted to accomplished with this book was, where did the trafficking of our women start? Where did the murdered missing Indigenous women and girls’ genocide start? It started here. These are the attitudes that were ingrained, built into the fabric of Canadian policy, bureaucracy, society. We are still fighting those images, those words, those feelings, those racist slurs. Today, our women are still so vulnerable.

SO: We started our conversation talking about this grave next to the Ikea in Toronto along the highway many of us drive frequently. You visited the grave with your mother. What did it look like? And what did it mean to you and your mom?

TANYA TALAGA: I have driven past that site so many times, I can't even tell you how many times. Right along the Queen Elizabeth's way, to get to Shirley Gardens, to get to that giant Ikea, to get to the airport or to Hamilton. And all this time, her gravesite was right there. How cruel reality is. How bizarre. When we first went there, we met Edward Janiszewski, and he is with the Lakeshore Cemetery Project. He used to work at the Lakeshore when it was a psychiatric facility. It's now CAMH. And it was him that found the papers that showed there was a graveyard for this institution, this very large institution that's in Toronto right now, and no one knew about it. When he asked people he found the graveyard. It was overgrown. It was a dog run. It is right off of this massive highway right in the heart of Toronto. And he started a committee to clear it and make it better. And he did. But there are 1511 people buried in this giant graveyard that's the size of a city block. Less than ten per cent have markers. When we first got there, my mother and my daughter and I, to go visit Annie, Ed met us and showed us this graveyard that they have now cleaned off. And so, now you can actually go there and see. And it's just like this field of unmarked graves. And there was a project in that the Canadian government had recently to commemorate with headstones, First World War veterans. And luckily from those spots, I know where Annie is because I know there was a First World War veteran near her. And so, I can sort of figure out where she is. But Ed knew the exact plot, and we went there and there is actually a little funny story about the first time we went there with Ed, and he took us. And, you know, I had my smudge bowl. We were crying. It was a huge emotional moment, and I could see Ed out of the corner of my eye, looking a bit nervous. And then he comes up to me and he said, Tanya, I'm sorry, this is the wrong spot. And so, we were smudging and crying and like, you know, welcoming...

SO: Somebody was the beneficiary.

TANYA TALAGA: Exactly. And so, then we moved we went to the right spot and then we did it all again. And now we visit Annie. And through the course of finding Annie, a group of us have come together from Grand Council Treaty three, Anishinaabe, Aski Nation, Anishinaabe Nation, Kimberly Murray's office, the office of the Special Interlocutor, and the Ontario Coroner's Office. And through finding Annie, we have found 32 other First Nations people buried in the grave. And we also have elders on our committee, too, including my cousin Victor Chapas. And we are now looking for the family members of those 32 others.

SO: So, now that you've found Annie's resting place and those others, what do you hope Canadians take from what you've written?

TANYA TALAGA: This country, our cities, our towns are built on our bones. They're built on our loved ones. And this is an ancient history from 500 years ago or 300 years ago. Annie died in 1937. What happened to Annie's children? What happened to Annie's brothers and sisters? Children and their children and their children? It is still happening in this country. We still have women that go missing. Boys, men that go missing. We still have children dying in the waters in Thunder Bay. This is all connected. We're still fighting for that equity and to be seen as the first people of this country, and to be given that seat at the table. Not ceremonial or something that is like, you're just doing it to have us there. No. The treaties make us partners in this land. Like it or lump it Canada, we have to make it work.

SO: I'm going to end it there. Tanya, thank you so much for sharing your journey.

TANYA TALAGA: Chi-miigwech.

SA: Tanya Talaga is an award-winning author and a member of the Fort William First Nation. Her latest book is "The Knowing." You can stream the Books companion docu-series also called "The Knowing" on CBC Gem. Tanya talked about her poignant experience at the site of the Kamloops Residential School and the work she's doing now with Kimberly Murray, the special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian residential schools. Well, this week, Kimberley Murray is releasing her final report, an indigenous led reparations framework. And I'll be speaking with Murray Wednesday on The Current. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. And we'll leave you with a song by the artist Aysanabee from Sandy Lake First Nation in northern Ontario. This is "We Were Here." I'm Susan Ormiston in for Matt Galloway, and thank you for listening to The Current.

[Music: We Were Here by Aysanabee]

Monday, October 28, 2024 Full Transcript

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