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The Current Transcript for February 27, 2017

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

The dishonest media did not explain that I called the fake news the enemy of the people. I'm not against the press, only against the fake news media or press.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: If uncomfortable stories in the news are denounced as “fake”, does that de-legitimize the need for accountability? If journalists are labeled enemies, does that erode journalistic efforts to document and chronicle the actions of elected officials. And in some cases, are journalists themselves culpable in this? There were many questions swirling after a week where some established US news organizations were shut out by the White House and some longstanding political reporters in Canada went to work for the government. In a moment, our Eye on the Media asks about the shift from freedom of the press to freedom from the press. Also today—

SOUNDCLIP

That is probably one of the most frustrating situations I've ever been in. It seems ridiculous for a delay like that to contribute to a stayed charge of that severity.

AMT: You may remember hearing that father who alleged his toddler was sexually abused, but who watched as the accused was allowed to walk because lengthy courtroom delays are no longer acceptable in Canada. Now the chief justice of Manitoba is weighing in on a proposal for a solution: a four-year experiment scrapping preliminary inquiries to try to speed up the system. Chief Justice Glen Joyal joins us in an hour. And they turned the world of psychiatry upside down.

SOUNDCLIP

Look at this inkblot. What do you see? An animal rug? An insect? A spacecraft landing on Mars? Well, there’s a personality test based on what people see in inkblots.

AMT: The creator of the Rorschach test argued he could see beyond a person's defenses to determine what they were really like by grading their interpretation of a series of inky designs on large cards. All these years later, the Rorschach inkblots are referenced in everything from fashion to politics, but do they contribute to psychiatry? In half an hour, our ongoing project, The Disruptors, examines the enduring controversy around Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Trump's media war 'calculated distraction' from Russia, say observers

Guests: David Frum, Paul Adams

SOUNDCLIP

We have a respect for the press when it comes to the government. That that is something that you can't ban an entity from. You know conservative, liberal or otherwise, I think that's what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.

AMT: Well, that was White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer in December. Fast forward a few months and Friday, several news organizations including the New York Times, CNN and BBC were barred from attending an off-camera press briefing in Mr. Spicer's office. The move caused an uproar among the Washington, DC press corps, many of whom called it a slap in the face to a free and open press. Here's what Sean Spicer had to say about that decision.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Are CNN and the New York Times not here right now because you're unhappy with their reporting? And why are they not in here?

VOICE 2: Because we have a pool and then we expanded it. We added some folks to come cover.

VOICE 1: But there’s enough room for all of us here.

VOICE 2: It was my decision to expand the pool. We’re going to aggressively push back. We’re just not going to sit back and let, you know, false narratives, false stories, inaccurate facts get out there.

AMT: Well, media organizations that were granted access to the briefing—informally known as a “gaggle”—included Breitbart News, Fox News, CBS. Then over the weekend, the US president Donald Trump announced he would not be attending this year's White House Correspondents Dinner, add that to the fact that his chief strategist Steve Bannon described the media as the opposition, and you have a pattern critics say is worrisome for American democracy. As part of our occasional series Eye on the Media, today I'm joined by two people to help shed some light on this. David Frum is the senior editor of The Atlantic magazine. He's in Washington, DC. Paul Adams is a former political reporter and foreign correspondent, now associate professor at the Carleton School of Journalism and Communication. He's in Ottawa. Hello to you both.

DAVID FRUM: Good morning.

PAUL ADAMS: Good morning.

AMT: David Frum, let’s start with you. What do you think of these outlets being shut down? Why do you think it happened?

DAVID FRUM: Well, we have a clear idea of why it happened and it's an idea that belies the old saying that the cover up is worse the crime. In this case there is no crime but the underlying story that is upsetting the White House is so terribly serious that as bad as what they’re doing into its press crackdowns is anyone getting close to reporting on the contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence and raising the question whether the Trump campaign was not just a beneficiary of Russian intelligence, but whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign. So we don't know that there was, but that is what sets them off. And just this morning, there was revelation of a new and in many ways even more shocking Trump press story, where Mike Allen in Axios reports that Sean Spicer arranged for the head of the CIA and the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—the body that is now investigating the connection—to speak directly to selected journalists and assured them there's nothing to the story. We can't give you any disproof. You have to take our word for it but there's nothing to the story.

AMT: Interesting because Mr. Trump was also tweeting yesterday and I'm quoting here, “Russia talk is fake news put out by the Dems and played up by the media in order to make the big election defeat and the illegal leaks.” We're back to him tweeting about fake news on this specific thing.

DAVID FRUM: This is one of the areas where you get Trump hyperactivity. You get Sean Spicer breaking normal press rules and when you get the most levels of abuse. It is because the story, what we have, what we know, which is that Russian intelligence helped the Trump campaign is already devastating information. What we are seeing are the emergence of suggestions that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign intelligence agency. I mean just to put this in context, in Watergate when Richard Nixon sought to read his opponent's communications, he at least used American citizens. In this case, if Russia read Democratic communications, Russia hacked Democratic communications, then the question is did the Trump campaign work with Russians on this?

AMT: Paul Adams, how do you interpret all of this?

PAUL ADAMS: Well, I think you can see it as, on many levels you can see it as just an expression of pique by a very immature man who doesn't like certain stories. You can see it—and I completely agree with David Frum—that part of it is calculated distraction from this much more important story about Russian involvement in the Trump campaign. But I think you can also step back a little bit and say look, take apart this phrase “enemy of the people”, which Trump has aimed at the media. The enemy there is obviously the media, but who are the people? This phrase comes from Soviet terminology. It was a phrase used to isolate anyone who opposed Stalin, in particular. And when you look at the history of the definition of “the people” in the 20th century with the various isms, “the people” were not every citizen of the state. “The people” were a particular ethnic group, a particular cultural group, a particular class of people. And then you know look at Trump's history. Barack Obama, an African-American, was not citizen enough in his view to be president. A Mexican-American judge was not citizen enough to adjudicate over him in his fraud with Trump University. Some of the people around him do not believe that Muslims, ordinary Muslim faith is compatible with being an American. Extraordinarily during the transition in the early part of his presidency, he has not done what every other modern president has done, which is to reach out to those who didn't vote for him. In fact, he propounded the preposterous lie that three million people were illegal aliens who voted for Hillary Clinton. And now he seems to be saying through this exclusion of certain media outlets that liberals, Democrats, that he doesn't need to speak to them. The New York Times and the CNN, the people who watch and read those outlets, they are not part of his definition of “the people”, which is a narrower. It's really white Americans and it's white Americans who are Republicans, who are supporters of his. And there's this kind of redefinition of “the people”. It's not even clear how you know he had difficulty even condemning anti-Semitism.

AMT: What impact will this have on journalists’ ability to do their jobs, Paul?

PAUL ADAMS: Well, I think it puts them on the spot because Trump is using the conventional Republican idea—which there may be some truth to—that journalists tend to be more liberal and democratic and he's obviously appealing to that belief and that feeling. But there's something more fundamental going on here. His disregard and those around him for facts and argument, this is a kind of rejection of rationality that used to embrace the whole political system. You know journalism is a little bit like science, if not so dignified perhaps, in that it believes that there are facts that are knowable and that there is logic that can be applied to them and that this is the way the public debate should progress. But the Trumpism is a little bit more like some fundamental religious beliefs, that it's actually a reaction to and a rejection of rationality in a core way. And this means that the press corps are pitted against Trump not as liberal versus conservative, but as rationalist versus irrationalist. And that's a really a fundamentally difficult thing for journalists even to wrap their heads around. It's not something they've ever had to think about and they haven't thought it through even yet.

AMT: Some are saying Friday's move was not unprecedented in Washington. I have a clip of David Martosko, Washington bureau chief for the UK's Daily Mail speaking to CBC on Sunday. In the Obama years, this was a very common occurrence. The big difference was that the press secretaries for President Obama did it in secret. They would have press aides go and tap people on the shoulder and say you know psst, in 20 minutes there's going to be a gaggle in Jay Carney's office or something like that. This at least I think is transparent. I think a lot of the media frankly overreacted to this. I think they're afraid that the natural order of things they've gotten used to is being threatened dramatically. I mean what could be next is maybe you know they only do these televised briefings once or twice a week and a lot of reporters who go to these things with elaborate hair and makeup hoping to get on TV will find their own profiles diminished.

AMT: David Frum, is the media overreacting?

DAVID FRUM: No. No. Nothing that is happening during the Trump years is an overreaction. The danger is under reaction. And it has to be said, the Daily Mail is actually part of the Trump-recruited media. So that comment has to be taken in source. Just to build on what Paul said about what is going on here, what the Trump administration is trying to achieve. When we say media, those of us of a certain age, we imagine media companies. We think of CNN and the New York Times, Reuters, AP, Washington Post. It’s important to keep in mind that the most important media company in the United States by far is Facebook. And among the top five, you will find names—I think the New York Times and CNN belong there—so does Fox News. So does Reddit. What the Trump administration is trying to do is to empower supporters who are already, as Paul said, inclined to lock themselves away from upsetting information into bubbles in which they are given permission to ignore that information, to deny the reality. And this is especially important because the most damaging story facing the Trump administration is one that will touch potential supporters, that for Republicans, for conservative minded people, for the people giving the Trump administration support, the most damaging of all the scandals out there is exactly this Russian hack. Trump wraps himself in patriotism. These people claim the flag. They are standing fast against the non-existent flag burners in the United States. The idea that they are working with a hostile foreign intelligence agency, this is not just Watergate, but Watergate plus [unintelligible]. That is a particularly serrated knife edge pointed at them. And so they must cut off their supporters, as Paul said, and people who are inclined to distrust, they must isolate them. And that's what this denial of reality is about.

AMT: Paul Adams, have we seen ever a Canadian equivalent of what we're seeing happening in the White House then, between the White House and the press?

PAUL ADAMS: You know relations between the press corps and a prime minister ebb and flow. They tend to get worse towards the end. They were never good with Stephen Harper but they were pretty poor by the end of the liberal regime that preceded it. I think that—but this is different from the normal kind of ebb and flow where you have a honeymoon typically at the beginning, which is also a honeymoon by the general public. And then you have you know there's an inherently adversarial relationship and that deteriorates and absolutely, it's the first amendment right of the president to talk to people and not to talk to other people. It's absolutely the prerogative of politicians to choose whom they speak to and when they speak to them. And often we have these kind of debates which would seem to the public like guild privilege, you know that happened here in parliament in Stephen Harper's time about who would pick the questioners at press conferences, where the press conferences would be held, could the media stand outside the cabinet room when there were cabinet meetings going on, these kinds of things. And those are important to reporters because they're about performing the normal accountability function that the media perform, but they're not on the same scale of what we're seeing. And they happen in a completely different context. When people say you know Obama did this with Fox, this kind of thing, it's decontextualized.

AMT: Right. Now Paul, just last week there was criticism, including from other journalists, that some long-time political journalists left Parliament Hill and the press gallery to work for the Liberal government without a cooling off period, like maybe from Friday to Monday or something. It's not the first time that has happened and there are criticisms that journalists then are just in the pocket of government that they can go over so quickly. Does that play into a lack of trust in the media?

PAUL ADAMS: Well, I'm sure that for many people, they see you know prominent columnists go into the PMO and they say aha, you know. But I think that Canadians tend to be a little prissy about this. People who move back and forth between public service and the media actually are able to enrich both sides. I mean David Frum’s a perfect example of that. You spend some time in the service of government and you come back into the media with an enriched understanding and also the public has to judge you on the basis of your past and your associations. You know the responsibility for journalists is to when they are journalists, to apply the principles and standards and ethics of their profession and so if ever there's a journalist who's bending his or her reporting in order to get a job, then that's a terrible thing. But it's also a terrible thing when reporters bend their reporting to cultivate a source, to keep a source onside and keep the information flowing. So there are lots of temptations for reporters. But I think that there's been an overreaction to the idea that some journalists would move into the public sector and also that some people would move out of public service and back into journalism. I think we're, as I say, too prissy about this.

AMT: And I have another clip here that I want to run. This is President Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon speaking Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

SOUNDCLIP

I think if you look at you know the opposition party and how they portrayed the campaign, how they betrayed the transition, now they’re betraying the administration, it's always wrong. And if you remember, you know the campaign was the most chaotic—you know by the media’s description—most most chaotic, most disorganized, most unprofessional, had no earthly idea what they were doing. And then you saw them all crying and weeping that night on the eighth.

[Sound: Crowd cheering]

AMT: David Frum, what strategic effect does referring to the media as opposition and going back to the election have for the Trump administration?

DAVID FRUM: Well, the Trump administration faces a political problem which is the de facto head of Democratic Party, President Obama, is not only 20 years younger than President Trump but also 20 points more popular. They are constantly aware and former President Obama is not doing what the Clintons did which is going off to self-enrichment. He is, he’s taking a little holiday now but it's pretty clear his main energies are going to go into building some kind of political force. The Trump people are terrified of that. Once he emerges, they have the fight of their lives on their hands. On the other hand, they know the media poll badly, especially when you refer to them collectively. If you ask people about the New York Times, it's more credible than President Trump. But if you ask about the media, they're less credible. So you can see the [unintelligible] there. And one more thing just to say, to give you an idea of what you're up against. Steve Bannon, everything that he said as wrong was completely right. It was the most chaotic campaign ever. It’s the most chaotic administration ever. And by the way, it wasn't just the media who expected President Trump to lose, the man is now called President Trump. It was Reince Priebus who was talking to reporters on the night, what am I going to do now? It was Donald Trump who apparently is reported by people who talk to people around Melania Trump to have confessed, I don't think I'm going to make it. He got into office on a lucky bounce. He got a smaller share of the vote than John Kerry in 2004 and barely more than Michael Dukakis in 1988. It's just the ball happened to bounce in a lucky way and so there he is in the White House and maybe he brought the Russians with him.

AMT: And Steve Bannon is also calling the media “corporate globalist media”. Why?

DAVID FRUM: Because they're so rootless. Because they are connected to, because he's trying to suggest they belong to some shadowy international conspiracy. I don’t know.

AMT: So we’re back to again really trying to deflect because the real shadow is over the Russia issue.

DAVID FRUM: Yeah. Look, what he's trying to suggest is they pluck certain chords. There are a lot of people who do business in more than one country. George Soros is not the only one but he's the name they always cite.

AMT: And so what is this doing for democracy when the media is attacked like this? Paul Adams, briefly.

PAUL ADAMS: I think it's very troubling. The conflict with the media is a narrow part of a much larger story of an attack on democracy that includes the challenge to the rule of law, to the court. You know now you have a supine Congress, at least for the moment. You know there's a much broader challenge to democratic values embodied in the Trump administration. But the media story is one part of that.

AMT: And David Frum, you were talking to us just a few weeks ago about the move toward—the slow move—to autocracy. Does this fit the pattern of what you are talking about?

DAVID FRUM: Absolutely. The casting of the press is your primary enemy and the attempt to build your own leader-focused truth system that empowers your followers to disregard information, that's absolutely out of the playbook of Hungary, post-Mandela South Africa, the Philippines—all of these de-democratizing countries. This is not autocracy of the heavy handed totalitarian mid-20th century. It's the way we do it in the 21st century through deceit and corruption, not through violence and diktat.

AMT: Gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time today.

PAUL ADAMS: Thank you.

DAVID FRUM: Thank you.

AMT: David Frum, senior editor at The Atlantic. He joins us from Washington, DC. Paul Adams, associate professor at the Carleton School of Journalism and communication. He joined us from Ottawa. Let us know what you think. You can tweet us @thecurrentCBC, find us on Facebook or go to our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link. The news is next and then how a series of inkblots turned the world of psychiatry upside down. We're talking about the little known history of Hermann Rorschach’s personality test in our next half hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

How Rorschach's 10 inkblots turned psychiatry upside down

Guests: Damion Searls

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, a Manitoba judge speaks out about long court delays that are jamming the wheels of justice. We'll hear his solutions from the bench in half an hour. But first, here's an ink blot. What do you see?

SOUNDCLIP

[Music: The Disruptors theme]

VOICE 1: Why don't we just talk?

VOICE 2: Ahh, the talking cure. Classical Freudian. Good choice. If it will help speed things along, my answers to the standard Rorschach inkblot test are A, a bat, B, a bat, C, a bat, and D, my father killing my mother with a hypodermic needle.

[Sound: Laughter]

VOICE 1: Why don’t I just start?

AMT: A disturbing insight from the brain of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper. Since it was first created by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach 100 years ago, the personality test has gone from the confines of psychiatry to popular culture. As part of our project, The Disruptors, we're looking at Hermann Rorschach and how this famous and controversial inkblot test changed the field of psychiatry. Damion Searls is the author of a new book called The Inkblots: Herman Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing. And Damion Searls joins us from New York City. Hello. Welcome.

DAMION SEARLS: Thanks so much.

AMT: So just so we all understand what we're talking about, what is the Rorschach test?

DAMION SEARLS: The Rorschach test is something that we all think we know about. I certainly thought that it works the way we all know from movies, where they smear up some and can show it to you and as if by magic, you suddenly find yourself saying I see the murder weapon in the closet if you're the bad twin or you see a happy fluffy bunny if you're the good twin. What it actually is more a test of how you see, not what you see. So there are 10 inkblots that Hermann Rorschach made and those unique 10 are the ones that are given in every single Rorschach test. You don't make your own. And the 10 were designed in order to us to really divide you up into sort of how you approach the task. Do you start with the big picture and then zone in on details? Do you get kind of lost in the weeds? Do you use the colour because some of the cards are coloured and so on. So it's actually those more formal things that the doctor will then code and score and evaluate.

AMT: And you say that very key word: design. These were designed. They were not arbitrary blots.

DAMION SEARLS: Right. Hermann Rorschach himself was actually a really visual person. His dad was a drawing teacher. He used to make picture albums and sort of carve toys for his kids in the wood shop. He took photographs of all his patients and sort of organized them as a way to understand them. So he took the approach that sure, you could take the Freudian approach and put someone on a couch and listen to them talk and listen to what they say and don't say. But he thought that how you see goes deeper in a way than what you decide to say, how you decide to present yourself.

AMT: Well so, tell us more. What can the Rorschach reveal about someone's psychology?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, the 10 blots have stayed the same. But other than that, the use of the test has changed a lot over the years. He initially used it to sort of diagnose the different patients in his asylum and also started to use it more as a personality test for things like if you are introverted or extroverted, how you approach the world, were you sort of pedantic or you know rigid or not rigid, things like that. And then over the years, especially after it really became central to the budding field of clinical psychology, it started to be used for everything. In mid-century, it kind of went crazy the same way Freud did. So you know if you were a man and you saw a muscular male torso where a lot of other people saw a fleshy female torso, you were probably homosexual. If you saw pall of black smoke, you were probably suicidal and time for electroshock. I mean it was rarely used in this very ham-fisted way and now it's used in a much more sort of sober scientific way.

AMT: Well, you write that when someone is intentionally or unintentionally suppressing other sides of their personality, the Rorschach might be the only assessment to raise a red flag.

DAMION SEARLS: Yeah. And that's partly because it's visual. You know when you're asked a question, when any of us are, we're really good at sort of framing how we want to respond. And on most psychological tests that use questionnaires, it's pretty easy if you're asked you know I sometimes hear voices other people don't hear—true or false—like you kind of know what to say. But should it look like a bat or not look like a bat? And it does look like something. I mean that's the thing about these 10 blots. They really aren't random. You're not sort of forcing an interpretation onto the cards. The cards really do feel like they're forcing an interpretation onto you. They're not literal like photographs but they really do look like things while still giving you the chance to sort of show how you approach them by saying what they look like.

AMT: Now Hermann Rorschach studied psychiatry in Zurich and one of the leading researchers in the university where he was, was Carl Jung. What influence did that have on how he pursued his research?

DAMION SEARLS: Yeah. He really was in the ideal time and place to be a young psychiatrist because he was born in 1884. So he goes to university, medical school in Zurich in 1904. Freud is just starting to publish but has a kind of narrow range of clients on a couch in Vienna and it was Rorschach’s other teacher, Carl Jung's boss—a man named Bleuler—who was the most important person in bringing Freud into medicine and actually applying it in sort of real world hospital situations and things like that. So Rorschach was learning Freud while not being under Freud's thumb in Vienna and being free to sort of take it in new directions. Jung, for his part, is sort of developing what's now known as the first modern psychological test which is the word association test. And so Rorschach learns that too. And at the same time, Jung is interested not just in being a doctor but in being a real thinker and exploring sort of how different people see the world. And that was another kind of generalist interest of Rorschach’s that Jung inspired him for.

AMT: Now we are going to put some samples of the Rorschach’s on our website, www.cbc.ca/thecurrent. There was a time when the community, the psychiatric community did not want see stuff made public for people just to look at it in passing.

DAMION SEARLS: Right. And that's because there's only 10. So there there's no alternate version or anything like that. I have tended to try and put on the web things like alternate versions or there are some drafts of his and things like that. Not like the real ones themselves. But the fact is that the real ones are up on Wikipedia. So that cat is out of the bag. You know the people in the psychology community who still want them kept secret just haven't faced the fact that they're not secret anymore. The good news is that—if you're a Rorschach proponent—is that the data seems to show that having seen the images doesn't affect the test. It's actually not simple to give. There's not like a decoder ring where you know on this card you should say it's a bunny or whatever. That's one of Rorschach’s advantages over other tests. There's a story I mentioned in my book about a cop who is being hired in the eighties in New York and he was given a simpler test called the tree house person test and his buddies told him whatever you do, put leaves on the tree and put a chimney on the house with smoke coming out so there are people inside. Whatever you do. And so that's what he did and he passed the test. But there's no cheat sheet for the Rorschach. So that's one reason why publicizing the images is not as bad as maybe it sounds.

AMT: Tell us more about how he came up with the inkblots.

DAMION SEARLS: Yeah. In the narrow sense we'll never know because that's the one black hole in the archival record. So there's never been a biography of Hermann Rorschach—which is kind of amazing— before this one. And it turns out there's a lot of stuff in the archives. He writes these very loving and supportive letters to his younger sister. There's all sorts of other writings besides the Rorschach test that are really interesting. But for this year, year and a half between when he reads someone else's kind of crude inkblot idea and this like aha, I can do this to when the test is long since done, there are no letters. There's no diary. There's no nothing. So we'll never know exactly sort of the trial and error loops that he went through. But the bigger picture is that, as I said before, he was a visual person. He was dealing with seriously psychotic patients who you couldn't always really talk to and he was interested in trying to connect with them visually. And he started off this test as what he called a perception experiment, not a test at all. He just wanted to learn how people see things and then he just realized that different kinds of patients or different kinds of people were approaching the task differently and that it wasn't just an experiment. It could be used as a test.

AMT: And how did he grade the responses?

DAMION SEARLS: Yeah. That's a great question because I think the other thing a lot of people think is that it's just about oh, you see your mother. Oh, you see a bat. What he actually did was give these codes based on the kind of response it was. And these were surprisingly simple things. If your answer described the whole picture, then you'd get a W for whole because it was a whole response. If it described a detail, it would get a D. If it used the colour because some of the cards actually have colour, it would get a C. Things like that. And there was some attention paid to the content of the answers, like you would get an A if it was an animal, things like that. But really, that's it. He would sort of come up with some ratios or like do you move from W to D or D to W, and that was it. That was enough for him to make a diagnosis.

AMT: And how did he decide what was a reasonable response?

DAMION SEARLS: At first when he invented the test of course, he just had to you know make his subjective decision. But the thing about him is that even though he was kind of an artist going into making the blots, he was really a scientist coming out. So his first priority was to get as big a sample size as he could and get away from his subjective judgments towards something more objective. So instead of saying oh, I think this is a bad response, it doesn't really look like a crab, he could look up in a table and say that like fewer than one out of 100 people call this a crab. So it's a very unusual response. And that's something objective if you have a big enough sample size. He actually has this very funny line in one of his lectures. He describes one of the cards and he says well, to me subjectively, I think it's two witches in New Year's costumes and their cloaks are billowing in the wind and between them is a woman with her head bent forward. So if you ask me, that's the only good answer. But a lot of other intelligent normal people say it's a bat or a crab or a skull, so I guess I have to say those are normal too. And that's his like funny version of saying that he's not trying to be subjective. This test isn't meant to sort of subjectively judge how good your answers are.

AMT: HAnd he died in 1922. How old was he?

DAMION SEARLS: He was only 37. And he had just published the test less than the year before.

AMT: And so how well known was that inkblot research at the time?

DAMION SEARLS: At the time, not. I mean it had its champions in the Swiss psychiatry community. It was starting to get known. It was starting to face the first sort of wave of criticism quite naturally and he was starting to respond to it. But really, really he died right away and the whole history of the Rorschach test is this sorcerer's apprentice thing where it takes off in all these different directions without the real expert there to control it. And it especially takes off in the US.

AMT: How did he die?

DAMION SEARLS: He died of appendicitis—a ruptured appendix and an infection—which is strange because he was a medical doctor. His wife was a medical doctor. He was living in a hospital where he worked. So there was this sort of chain of tragic coincidences and it was 1922 without antibiotics that we have now. So he died.

AMT: When did the Rorschach test become a regular part of psychoanalysis?

DAMION SEARLS: It really did that in America. It sort of went to different countries by different coincidences. Japanese scientists found it in the bookstore. American scientists studied with Rorschach’s best friend a couple of years after Rorschach died. But in America, it really tapped into something for the same reason Freud did. The US had sort of shifted cultural values from kind of stable character, like are you a good solid person, to this more amorphous and subjective idea of personality. You know think of The Great Gatsby. He's not Gatsby the Good. In fact, he's a criminal. But he has sparkle, he has shirts, he has style and that was really what American culture started to value in the early 20th century. And so how do you get access to it? You can't do a test because the whole point is that every situation you're in, you just react to in your own special way. Well, then along comes this thing that sort of can claim to be the x-ray of this invisible skeleton inside you that's your personality. So it really takes off in the thirties and then when clinical psychology takes off in the forties, the Rorschach is there to become central in the field.

AMT: How profoundly did it influence the understanding of psychology and psychoanalysis?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, I think there you have to bring in the culture as a whole. I mean after World War II when Freudian ideas start becoming well-known to the man and woman on the street, the Rorschach blot is too. You have Life magazine having something about inkblots reveal your personality and you have it showing up in film noir and things like that. I mean the inkblot was really what the mind looked like. It was sort of shorthand as this visual code for what it means, to the point where in the fifties it's used in perfume ads. One of my favorite is a stock broker ad where it has this sort of little stock chart with all these tiny letters and numbers and splattered on top of it is a huge ink blot. And the tech says do you even know your investment goals? Well, AC Becker knows them better than you do. You know. So an inkblot just meant the mystery of your mind. And that has gone sort of back and forth between the cliché, which you know you might say isn't really very psychological, to the actual psychological test. I mean one reason it's so controversial is because it's so famous and one reason it's still famous is because it's still in psychological use.

AMT: Well, you write about the use of the Rorschach test during the Nuremberg trial when top Nazis were put on trial for war crimes. What were the people who gave the tests hoping to learn?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, you know here you have this historically unique group of people and you have the new modern world's best way to reveal the personality. So goldmine if you're a historian or a psychologist and you want to find out you know what makes the Nazis tick. What's the Nazi personality? So it wasn't ordered in the courts but the prison psychiatrist, who happened to be the man who had co-written the textbook on the Rorschach test, as well as the prison psychologist who sort of immediately started feuding with him, they both just decided to give the Rorschach test to Hermann Goring and all these other leading Nazis.

AMT: And did the tests find any kind of a psychological commonality among those Nazis?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, that's the problem. [laughs] The test didn't and that was really shocking to all the leading Rorschachers at the time, to the point where some of them sort of pretended it did and said oh yes, you know they're all evil and crazy. But what the results actually showed was sort of the same range that you'd get if you tested any other 20 people.

AMT: That's the scariest thing of all, I guess. Huh?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, right. To the point where they kind of sat on the results. They—I mean I wouldn't say suppress them. It's not like they shut down anyone trying to publish them. But they didn't publish them themselves, probably because they couldn't really believe what they were seeing. You know they were sure that evil at the level of the Nazis would have to have a certain kind of mind behind it. This was before sort of Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil almost 20 years later. And here was this test that they all trusted but that was not showing that. It turned out the test was right and they were wrong.

AMT: Interesting because we wanted so much. I guess everyone wanted so much for them to be the other as opposed to the next door neighbour.

DAMION SEARLS: Absolutely. And this prison psychiatrist, you know he's an interesting guy. His name is Douglas Kelley. He came back and sort of had this award-winning TV show called Criminal Man, where he started making the same kinds of arguments where he says you know how does a criminal look? It's a myth. Criminals don't look a certain way. So he was sort of this voice trying to say that people are people and some are good and some are bad and that's not the same as whether they're sane or insane. But that was not a popular message coming right out of World War II.

AMT: How do you respond to those who say that the test is pseudo-science?

DAMION SEARLS: Well, science has responded to that is the thing. The main criticism along those lines is a book from 2003 called What's Wrong with the Rorschach? And most of the time when someone is quoted in a popular article or comes on the radio, it's one of the co-authors of that book who says yeah, it's been debunked but unfortunately it's still used. The fact is that science has moved on and really addressed a lot of the criticisms in that book. There was a gigantic article in the leading journal of psychology in 2013 that was so convincing that even the authors of that What’s Wrong with the Rorschach book said okay, yes. This gets the job done. You know this is what we were calling for. In the nineties these people had said there should be a moratorium. The Rorschach should never be used in clinical or courtroom settings until it can be proven. And after this 2013 article, they said okay, well we're not calling for a moratorium anymore because you've put it on scientific footing. So if what you want is science, then the Rorschach really does have that.

AMT: And we know that during the US presidential campaign, some pundits were calling the election a Rorschach test. What do they mean by that?

DAMION SEARLS: Yeah. This is one of the things that drew me to the project because you know I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a personality testing crusader. But I had seen everything in the world called a Rorschach test, in the sense that we all know where it just means you can think whatever you want. There's no right or wrong answer. It just says who you are and your reaction to it is what matters. The thing itself doesn't matter. So a newspaper instead of actually saying if a budget proposal adds up, we'll say the budget is a Rorschach test and then you decide whether it adds up or not and then they move on to the next article and they haven't alienated anybody. This to me was so central to what the idea of the Rorschach test was that I was really surprised that it only started in the sixties. Like the test is from the teens, from 100 years ago, but people never talked about it that way until the sort of sixties moment of questioning authority and sort of rebelling against the man in the white coat telling me what to do and stuff like that. But since the sixties, I mean hundreds of times a year in the New York Times alone and you know just look up anywhere. Everything gets called a Rorschach test. I think in a way, the interesting thing for us now is to realize that the real Rorschach test isn't that. The real Rorschach test is real images that have certain qualities that call forth certain kinds of responses. And if you don't have those responses, it actually says something about you. It's not random and it's actually used in a real way as science you know. So it's not a Rorschach test. The last chapter of my book is called “The Rorschach test is not a Rorschach test”.

AMT: Despite all of this, if Hermann had lived into old age and his career had continued for decades longer, do you think it would have changed? What do you think would have happened with his insights?

DAMION SEARLS: That's always a tricky question you know because he had this creative idea. So someone else could have had the idea they would've. I think that it probably in some ways would have been a narrower test in the culture because he would have sort of kept the reins on it to some extent and it wouldn't go crazy like it did in mid-century. But I also think it might have gone deeper. I mean he had come up with this sort of by trial and error or by artistic instinct, if you want to call it that. And he always knew that he didn't have a theory behind it. He didn't know why colour answers meant that you were you know this kind of schizophrenic instead of that kind of manic depressive or whatever it is. But he just found that that was the case and he was already trying to sort of dig deeper behind what made the whole test possible and didn't have a chance to do that.

AMT: Well, it's fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for bringing us all of this all of these stories. Thank you so much.

DAMION SEARLS: Oh, thank you. Damion Searls, author of The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test and the Power of Seeing. He joined us from New York City. Stay with us. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One.

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Would getting rid of preliminary inquiries speed up justice?

Guests: Glenn Joyal

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. Across Canada, lawyers, judges and victims are facing the same problem—cases are being dropped because long court delays have been deemed unconstitutional. Last summer, the Supreme Court of Canada issued what is known as the Jordan decision. The decision set strict deadlines stating that less serious offenses must be wrapped up in the courts within 18 months while more serious charges including murder have a 30-month deadline. Since that decision came down, defendants accused of everything from impaired driving and drug possession to aggravated sexual assault and murder have had their charges stayed. In response, some from inside the criminal justice system are suggesting ways to streamline the process including the elimination of preliminary inquiries. In Manitoba, three of its chief justices and its attorney general have sent a proposal to Canada's Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould to try this approach for four years. For more on this proposal, I am joined by chief justice Glenn Joyal. He sits on the Court of Queen's Bench in Manitoba where the most serious cases are tried. He joins us from our Winnipeg studio. Good morning. Hello.

GLENN JOYAL: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: First of all, just make sure we understand the legal terms. What is a preliminary inquiry?

GLENN JOYAL: A preliminary inquiry is a hearing that takes place prior to trial, in many cases, many months, in some cases years before the trial itself. And the purpose for the hearing is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to put the accused to trial. The crown will typically call a number of witnesses at that hearing. In some cases, all of the witnesses it might call at the trial and defense has an opportunity to cross-examine. The accused or the defense, him or herself can also testify. That is rare. But typically the crown puts those witnesses on the stand and defense counsel has an opportunity to cross-examine. That can sometimes take a day, sometimes weeks. And the problem that we're now facing in respect to the parliamentary inquiry is the delay it takes to first schedule that hearing and the impact that that delay has in the eventual trial when that trial is ultimately set down.

AMT: And is the preliminary hearing a right in the Constitution? Is it a right in the justice system?

GLENN JOYAL: No. The preliminary inquiry has been determined not to be a protected constitutional right. The Supreme Court has pronounced on that at least a couple of times. And neither is the discovery function or the function that the defense counsel often invoke, which involves cross-examining the accused at the preliminary inquiry. It's certainly an incidental benefit to a preliminary inquiry. But it is not a constitutional right. That doesn't mean courts aren't attentive to ensuring that the accused is provided as much of that benefit when a preliminary inquiry takes place. But now that we're talking about this existential question of whether or not preliminary inquiries should take place, I think it's important that your listeners understand that the preliminary inquiry is not a constitutional right. It is not protected by the charter.

AMT: Okay. How would eliminate them help with the backlog? Eliminating. Sorry.

GLENN JOYAL: Well, if you accept the premise that I offer up, Anna Maria, that the scheduling of preliminary inquiries is itself a process of delay. In many perhaps most provinces across the country, it can take sometimes between 18 months to 28 months or longer—depending on the region and depending upon the particular area of province—before the preliminary inquiry can be scheduled. Once that preliminary inquiry commences, there is obviously the hearing itself. Once that takes place in the committal, which is the determination by the judge that the matter be sent on for a trial, there is the rescheduling of that matter for the trial itself. And that can oftentimes take a fair bit of time. So effectively by eliminating the preliminary inquiry as we're saying, replacing it with a new out of court discovery process which I think addresses some of the current concerns—not all because you won't ever address all the concerns that defense counsel are raising in this context—but addresses some of the concerns. By replacing the preliminary inquiry, you're effectively cutting in half the time that would be spent for society to get ultimately the adjudications that we think they have a right to have. The costs of the preliminary inquiry obviously are significant. They’re not only with respect to the accused situation which is obviously a situation where they're being denied, oftentimes while they are in custody. The adjudication of the matter within a reasonable period of time and we take the position that if you don't belong in custody, you should know that earlier than later. But not only is it involving accused persons, it's an access to justice issue more broadly. You have situations where families, complainants, victims, witnesses are waiting to give evidence in a matter which is, needless to say, oftentimes traumatic. The quality of their evidence, the clarity of their memory, the quality of physical evidence, the forensic evidence is compromised by definition with the passage of time. In Manitoba, we have a particular problem because we have a disproportionate impact in so far as we have a very, very large Indigenous population in custody because they can't get bail for all sorts of complicated socioeconomic reasons. So the longer the delay for the ultimate adjudications on calling it, the more disproportionate the impact on that population. We have a moral imperative towards that particular group and dating back to 1999, then Provincial Court judge Murray Sinclair, now Senator Sinclair, recommended along with Associate Chief Justice Alvin Hamilton in the Aboriginal Justice inquiry, they recommended the elimination of the preliminary inquiry for that very reason. And they recommended along with that the accompanying replacement of an out-of-court discovery process and that's precisely what we're proposing to the federal minister of justice.

AMT: More broadly an out-of-court discovery process for all cases essentially.

GLENN JOYAL: Well, not all cases. What we're proposing is an amendment that would see section 536 of the Criminal Code effectively end the election for parliamentary inquiry for those accused persons charged with offenses punishable by a period of imprisonment of 10 years or less. For those offenses punishable for a period of 10 years or more, we're replacing the preliminary inquiry with the out-of-court discovery process. And those individuals, when they get to the Court of Queen's Bench, the superior court, my court, would come and make application to have access to that out of court discovery or out of court examination process. And the judge in question would make the determination as to whether it's justified. And then there would be a limited period of time provided out of court for that type of examination. But it would certainly speed up the period of time for which is currently now taking back priority of getting to trial and it would also, I think, in a way that satisfies me would address many of the concerns that defense counsel have with respect to getting the information they want.

AMT: Okay. A couple of questions about that. First of all, out-of-court discovery process would still actually carry the weight that the information that you discover in preliminary would have?

GLENN JOYAL: No. The disclosure or the discovery that the defense counsel want in the preliminary inquiry, they get that by cross-examining the witnesses. They also do it in the context of this primary purpose which is to determine whether or not the primary purpose of the preliminary inquiry, to determine whether or not there's enough evidence to send the accused to trial. This would be entirely for what is the incidental purpose of the parliamentary inquiry. The idea of defense counsel being able to discover witnesses, examine them to get more information. It wouldn't ultimately lead to the determination that the accused not be put on trial. But that's information defense counsel certainly could be using at trial for cross-examination purposes or for their own purposes in terms of investigating the offense for which their client's been charged.

AMT: And while that discovery process is going on, you would have the accused in some cases still incarcerated. Correct? They would be jailed.

GLENN JOYAL: They would be if they're denied bail. But by that time, the trial will have already been scheduled and the 18 to sometimes 23-month period that is now currently tied up with the preliminary inquiry will have been eliminated.

AMT: And so how much of a speeding up could you do? Would you be able to cut—what do you estimate you'd be able to do by doing it this way as opposed to the way that's happening now, that you can’t do?

GLENN JOYAL: That's a very good question. Without wanting to sound too simplistic, one and one is two and if you're suddenly dividing that by at least a half, you're arguably going to divide or you’re going to be producing at a speed which is at least halfway more rapid. But this is what we certainly want people to understand. This pilot project which we're proposing is in many respects meant to act as a laboratory during which and in which we can examine what we think will be the benefits of this out-of-court discovery process. And we'll be able to statistically measure and assess and evaluate the successes of the program and hopefully provide empirical data that will allow everybody including defense counsel to better evaluate whether this particular proposal needs to be further refined or perhaps revisited.

AMT: As you know, many defense lawyers are in vigorous opposition to this idea. They argue that the preliminaries are a safeguard for the defendants. How do you respond to that?

GLENN JOYAL: We're very attentive to those concerns and there's no chief justice, no judge anywhere in this country who doesn't want to be as attentive to those concerns, to those safeguards as you've put it, Anna Maria, as we can. But we have to be rigorous about this. The preliminary inquiry is a form, is a regime if you will, that's existed for a long time. Much has happened. Since the landmark decision of Stinchcombe in the early nineties, defense counsel and accused persons properly have access to all of the disclosure, all of the information to which they are entitled. And if they don't have it, court orders make sure they have it. As well, each court has now put in place case management hearings, pretrial hearings, focus hearings, that allow defense counsel to narrow the issues with Crown counsel to ensure that all of the necessary preparation and foundational information is provided. It's important when you're answering the concern that you raise—and it's a good and important question—to remember that the Supreme Court of Canada in paragraph 140 of the now infamous case Jordan, invites courts, invites governments to revisit and re-examine old practices, procedures and rules which perhaps currently inhibit or stymie the efficacy and speed with which the accused persons have a right to be tried. They also specifically—Anna Maria, this is critical—they also specifically invite courts and government officials to re-examine the viability, the relevance and utility of the preliminary inquiry. From my experience, the Supreme Court of Canada doesn't waste ink. When they speak in written form, their words are usually measured. That along with the fact that it's been well-established that the preliminary inquiry does not represent the constitutional right, I think is an important reference point for this debate. That doesn't mean we can be casual and that doesn't mean we can't work with defense counsel to ensure that we try to safeguard their accused rights as much as possible. But we have to be rigorous in ensuring that we're not talking in a way that suggests to the people of Canada that by eliminating the preliminary inquiry, we're in some ways compromising a constitutional right. It’s not consistent with the Supreme Court has set in Jordan and it certainly isn't consistent with the pronouncements in past cases.

AMT: And as chief justice, how have you seen these long delays and now these judicial stays affect the people going through your courtroom?

GLENN JOYAL: The fundamental responsibility of any chief justice, apart from obviously running his or her court in an effective way that addresses the issue of access to justice, is to do so in a way that maintains the public confidence and maintains the legitimacy of what it is that surrounds the rule of law. People want outcomes. People want cases adjudicated on their merits. When a case is stayed or when a case can't proceed on its merits because of delay, there’s a significant blow to the public confidence in the system of justice that we have. So apart from the individual and tragic effect on a family or on a victim or on witnesses who wanted to testify, there is a broader societal issue that really impacts upon the public confidence and to the extent that we as judges enjoy judicial independence—and we do and are very jealous of it—we also recognize that the judicial independence is a concept and is a constitutional principle that depends upon ensuring that we enjoy the public confidence. So if we can't provide a judicial service where access to justice is guaranteed and where people are not tried within a reasonable period of time and where in the absence of that, charges don't get adjudicated on their merits, we risk. We risk losing the confidence of the public. So this is not just about any one individual accused. It's not just about accused generally, defense counsel or even all participants in a trial—witnesses, complainants or otherwise. It's about something as foundational as the public confidence in our system.

AMT: Okay. Well, Chief Justice Joyal, thank you for our time today. Thanks for the explanation.

GLENN JOYAL: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Chief Justice Glenn Joyal. He sits on the Court of Queen's Bench in Manitoba and he joined us from our Winnipeg studio.

[Music: Bridge]

AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One and Sirius XM. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti.

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Vital Indigenous voices missing in debate over Canada's grasslands, says Cree hunter

Guests: Philip Brass

SOUNDCLIP

You know this is our old growth prairie. It's as important as any other old growth you know on the planet. Temperate grasslands are the most endangered, least protected ecosystems on the planet right now. They've been here for eight thousand years here on the Canadian plains. Here in Saskatchewan, we used to have 190,000 square kilometres of native grassland 150 years ago. Today we have roughly 33,000 square kilometres. So 80 per cent of it's gone.

AMT: Well, that's naturalist Trevor Herriot speaking on our show last Tuesday with a call to action to protect Canada's grasslands. Canada's ecologically rich grasslands stretch from southern Alberta across Saskatchewan to Manitoba. But a lack of federal protection has some worried that the delicate ecosystem is in danger of eroding. Philip Brass shares those concerns. He’s Cree and Saulteaux, a hunter and community coordinator. And after that segment aired, he wrote to us with his worry that vital Indigenous voices are being ignored in the debate over grassland management. Philip Brass joins us from our Regina studio. Hello.

PHILIP BRASS: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: Why are these grasslands so important to First Nations communities?

PHILIP BRASS: Well, when we refer to natural native prairie, I mean in treaty four and treaty six territory here in Saskatchewan, I mean it's these natural ecosystems that form the foundation of our Indigenous culture. Our languages were emergent from these landscapes. Our linguistic references and metaphors are all rooted in these environments. And they still to this day provide a source for us to access crown lands where we can hunt, we can gather medicines, which really are the core of Indigenous culture. And I think that by losing these, there's real life consequences that are reflected in our health. If we cannot maintain a traditional diet going forward, in some of our communities you know things like the diabetes epidemic just continues to grow and there's always been so much focus on the residential school victims and that, which is huge and so many other urgent issues. But I think while all that noise and distraction is happening, you know lands like these are shuffled off and liquidated and it's a deplorable tragedy.

AMT: You talk about treaty four and six lands. Just give me the shorthand on that. Just remind us what that means.

PHILIP BRASS: Well, treaty four and treaty six were resigned in 1874 and 1876. That opened the door for settlement of essentially— treaty four makes up the southern third of Saskatchewan. Treaty six is a swath across the centre of Saskatchewan. They both go into Manitoba and Alberta on either side. Of course these treaty territories are older than the province but are disregarded. They're disregarded by the province.

AMT: Okay. There were treaty rights. What did they allow? Hunting and they allowed continued use of these lands. Correct?

PHILIP BRASS: Well, of course. The right to hunt and gather is an inherent treaty right. It's not something granted by colonial governments. It's something that we retained in treaty. So we have that right to retain and use our traditional life practices. And you know if we were to bring in something like the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples as well, nation states have an obligation to assure that those environments are accessible for Indigenous peoples to continue that way of life.

AMT: So how does the transferring of these lands away from federal control over to provincial control and maybe the selling of these lands, how does that then affect all of this?

PHILIP BRASS: What provincial governments aren't accountable to First Nations people. First nations under federal jurisdiction, these were federal lands, and by devolving them to the province, I mean it's an easy to skirt around any sort of consultation with Indigenous peoples.

AMT: And there wasn't consultation is what you’re saying.

PHILIP BRASS: You know I'm not too sure exactly how much contact there was. And it's unfortunate. You know I was reaching out to chiefs in our territories trying to get some movement on us. But it's understandable that you know many of our leadership, they are so bogged down with so many issues of the day, of poverty, of education. There's so many battles being fought that something like this seems to get left to the side and it's really unfortunate for the grassroots Indigenous peoples here in our territories who don't have a voice.

AMT: Because you're making the point that this is integral to the issues of human rights and poverty and all of that. They're all interconnected.

PHILIP BRASS: Well, it all stems from that. It all stems from dispossession from the land and you know in this rhetoric of reconciliation, once we go down that rabbit hole it always leads eventually to land and our access to it. Myself in my own work as a community wellness coordinator, I work with youth in my community and the crisis is identity as Indigenous people living in an industrial age. And when I take young boys out on the land, I mean that's a resource that saves lives and losing it is going to have some very brutal consequences going forward for generations to come.

AMT: So if this continues the way it's happening now, you will lose access.

PHILIP BRASS: Well, we've already had limited access to these lands. I mean settler interest is above always taking precedent and cattle have always taken precedent. I mean I understand that cattle are a part of that maintaining a healthy ecosystem now that the bison are gone. You know but this is a case—I was thinking about it as I was coming in this morning—I mean Canadians often allow themselves to not take responsibility for the injustices of the past. But these tragedies continue to happen. The genocide of Indigenous peoples continues to happen in so many small little ways that contribute and you know if we were to think, I mean we lost the bison you know 140 years ago and everybody stood by. You know? And people today would say well, you know what would we have done? You know? That or they say I didn't do it, you know. That was them. That was our ancestors, not us. But here we have it again. Now we are losing our last bits of native prairie that are actually vital to the survival of Indigenous culture here on the plains and people are still standing idly by. So I would like to see Canadians you know also demand that our governments honour these treaties that they signed and honour the people that have suffered under colonial rule here in this country for much too long.

AMT: You're making the point though that your own Indigenous leadership is not doing enough on this. Why is that?

PHILIP BRASS: Well first, they're overwhelmed. The crises—I mean we have teen suicides. We have you know 80 to 90 per cent unemployment on our First Nation communities in treaty four, treaty six. Their hands are full and I mean of course colonialism, I mean it's taken its effect. It's been effective. It has changed the values of many of our own people and we're living in an industrial age and because we've been dispossessed from these lands for so many years, so many have lost that way of life. Those of us who still maintain it are a minority but an important one.

AMT: So what do you want to see happen next?

PHILIP BRASS: I would like to see Canadians as a whole, anybody who takes a truth and reconciliation seriously, to pressure the federal and provincial governments to hold these lands in perpetuity and to make sure that Indigenous peoples are a part of the management equation going forward. We must have access to these places. I mean right now in our schools, I mean we're developing land-based education curriculum which is fabulous. And it's what we desperately need. Language-based education. But if that land is not there in five to 10, 15 years from now, we have nowhere to lead our children to.

AMT: Philip, we have to leave it there but thank you for your thoughts today.

PHILIP BREASS: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Philip Ross is a Cree and Saulteaux and community coordinator from the Peepeekasis First Nation. He joined us from our Regina studio. That is our program for today. Stay with Radio One for q with Tom Power. Earlier today, we were talking about Hermann Rorschach’s inkblot test and its role in upending the field of psychiatry. His test has made its mark in comedy as well. We're going to leave you with a classic on that front. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Today Mr. Razza, I would like to conduct a Rorschach test to help us get to the bottom of your condition. You are familiar with a Rorschach test?

VOICE 2: No. I've never heard of it.

VOICE 1: Well, it is a series of cards with some ink blot like images on them. I want you to examine each card as I hold it up and tell me exactly what is your first impression of that image.

VOICE 2: Okay. That there is a naked man and woman making love in Central Park. Yeah.

[Sound: Page flipping]

VOICE 1: This one?

VOICE 2: Yeah. That's a naked man and woman making love in a boat. Yeah.

[Sound: Page flipping]

VOICE 1: And this one?

VOICE 2: See now that, that’s a naked man and woman making love on the back of a camel.

VOICE 1: Thank you, Mr. Razza. Well, I think you have a serious preoccupation with sex.

VOICE 2: Hello, Doc. You're the one with the dirty pictures. Sheesh.

[Music: Ending theme]

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February 27, 2017 full episode transcript

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