Whirlwind Tour of Indigenous People in Canada

Hi, and welcome back to Maple History, the Canadian History Podcast. Today, I have, as a guest, my husband again, Simon. Hi, everyone. Today, we're going to do a big overview of the Indigenous nations and peoples in what is now Canada. My biggest problem with this episode was, what do I leave out? But also, what do I put in so you can get an idea of who was here from wherever I go. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a counterclockwise tour where I start in the Arctic. I'm going to go around to northern BC, the coastal BC, and so on. And I'm going to frog jump over some of Ontario and parts of Quebec and head over to the east coast. And the reason for the frog jumping is I'm going to be doing a fairly in-depth look at the nations there before getting into the Europeans coming over. So I'm going to be looking at the Wendat and Haudenosaunee separately. Now, and I'd also like to start off just talking a little bit about the challenges and figuring out what names to use for Indigenous nations. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, it's really difficult. And it's difficult because the different nations use the name that they've always called themselves, but they also use the names that they were given because of expediency. They're used to it. It's just they like they want to. It's just because they're speaking multiple languages, right? So it's different languages. What I've learned is that there are exonyms, and these are the names that were given to people by someone else. So these are sometimes the names that enemies of a nation were given, and then they were adopted by Europeans, and that's why we know them. So a perfect example of that would be the Iroquois. So we all know that name that is one of the most famous names of Indigenous nations in the world, or at least in the Western world. But that name was given to the Iroquois by the Wendat and Ojibwe. Oh really? Oh really? Yeah. Oh. But they are, but the Iroquois are the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is made up of five nations, and then later six nations. Okay. So now, contemporary, we would, they're the six nations. Yes. Okay. Well, when we do what we always do, the corporate, like, you know, land recognition thing, they were talking at least like, you know, where I went where I am. So we talked with the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and it's, I did not know that, that Iroquois meant snake. Wow. Yeah. So some modern books will use the autonym. So the auto name is the Haudenosaunee. Okay. That's what they call themselves. But some don't, and there are different reasons for that. And I don't know at all the more, but you'll see in a lot of American history books, they don't use the auto names very often. Oh, okay. Well, they don't use modern history books. It's like Iroquois, Iroquois, like you're like, oh, okay. But in modern Canadian history books, they tend, some don't, but they tend to be, they tend to use the autonym. Interesting. Okay. Just like the Americans, they keep saying Indian. Yes. That's true. That's true. So we'll leave them there. So you'll find that usually history books written by indigenous scholars, they will use the autonym. That's pretty standard. But it gets really confusing when researching because I will try to my best to respect the nations, the nations, what they call themselves. But I'm going to mess it up there because of it's just going to happen. Yeah. I remember you showed me once, like, while you're researching, you showed me this table of like, how to identify everything. And I was like, oh my goodness, there's just so much. Although I mean, like, was it any more complicated than trying to identify like every country and sub region of Europe? No, but I mean, just so much, right? Like it's a massive, massive area of land. Right. And a couple other examples of names. So in a lot of, excuse me, a lot of older books, the people that live near James Bay and northern Manitoba were called the swampy Cree. But the name they call themselves is Omushka Goak and they speak in Algonquin language. And in northern British Columbia, there are the Wet-Souetan people. So you might have even heard that because they're in the news because they're land defenders. Yes, I've heard of them. They were called the carrier people. Carrier, okay. Why? Because they, they carried the ashes of their, like the, some of the women would carry the ashes of their deceased spouse. Oh, okay. I can earn type thing. Yeah. Like in some sort of vessel. Yeah, okay. Let's start the tour. So we will start with the Great White North. So the Arctic was the last region in North America to be settled for pretty obvious reasons because it was covered in ice for the longest. Yeah. So they couldn't get them. And people there were called TUNIT about four or 5,000 years ago. So they hunted with bows and arrows and harpoons. And what's quite interesting is that when they left or disappeared, who really knows, they were replaced with the Dorset people who lived in the Arctic from about 2,800 to 1,000 years ago, 2,800 to 1,000 years ago. And they didn't hunt bows and arrows. Wait, how did we know their name? They got replaced. We call them that. Oh, okay. Okay. That's that. Yeah. That's right. I interrupted the bows and arrows. No, no, that's fine. So they so yeah, that's about 3,000 to 2,000 years ago. And so what I said, they I mentioned, they didn't hunt with bows and arrows, which so they lost that technology somehow. But the Dorset people didn't have bows and arrows, but they did have kayaks and Umiaks that they used to hunt whales on open water. So they still have the harpoon and they had other tools. Okay. Yeah, they're hunting whales. So that's different. So they're the TUNIT people weren't hunting whale. Yeah. Could you imagine hunting a whale in a kayak? Well, I can't imagine being in a kayak in the Arctic Ocean now. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, that's true. And so the traditional Inuit culture, which like these are known as the Tule people. They're originally from Alaska and goes an arrow. We're back in the game by now. And these would also be some of the people that Vikings are more accurately the Norse met who tried settling on lanceo meadows in Newfoundland. So something that the Tule people brought, they brought from Alaska. They brought pottery to this area, but it didn't stick around very long because it was very poorly fired thick and crumbly. It's very difficult to get a hot fire going with hardly any wood or none. Yeah. And archaeologists have a very snarky name for this pottery. They call it Tule Crudware. Crudware. I love those little like no offense to the Tule people, but they make shit pottery like this. So get a kill, will it, won't you? Like that's funny. So hunting in general made remain consistent for centuries. The techniques and tools, they may have changed over time. They hunted whales, seals, muskox, even polar bears, which is as brave as you can possibly be. Because of the region they lived in, they lived on mostly animals with little to no fresh plants. Food was eaten mostly raw, but occasionally cooked in soapstone pots over fires of moss or blubber lamps. So that would have been the fuel they had because they don't have wood. They would use oils. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So there was a strict food taboo that you should never mix land and sea products. So you would never cook seal or caribou together. Interesting. Yeah, as part of their ethos, like their spirituality. They would also store food and purposely let it decay. And I'm going to quote you from the book, The First Peoples in Canada here to give you an example of this technique, a quote. Okay. To prepare one particular savory meal, a whole seal skin complete with a blubber layer with stuffed with small sea birds and left under rocks until the contents had turned the consistency of cheese, end quote. Isn't there like similar techniques to fish in the Nordic countries? Yeah, it's tender. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They let it, they let the tinned fish like rot in the can and then it's bulging. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, but didn't they have like, I thought even before that they like buried fish or something like that. Probably. Yeah, it's, I mean, a lot of those northern like the indigenous people in the Arctic, they have a lot of similarities like the, like people in Greenland and the people of Alaska, kind of this, you're kind of on the same techniques and traditions. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, that is not, that's, that's, I'm going to. It's not for you. No, I know. I know. I would give it a go. I totally would. I hold 100% have a bite. I'm kind of, I'm kind of nose blind though. So like, I don't know if you could be nose blind to that. Yeah, I know. That's a lot of it. That's a lot of it. Too far, man. I'm pretty ambitious with my food. I'm like, I'll give it a go. Yeah. But could you eat rotten bird, the consistency of fish or cheese? Cheese. Well, if I knew, so I would, like if I saw other people like having it and not getting all sick and stuff like that, yeah, yeah, give it a go. Okay. I mean, it's dinky bean from Japan. That's very different though. It is very different. It's just fermented. Yeah. That's very different. Yeah. I don't know if it's still done now is I love, they do have a lot of traditional foods like like eating raw food, eating raw blubber and meat. Like it's very common. Like that's traditional food. That's kind of like comfort food or, yeah, anyway, people. Okay. So women married young and spent a great deal of their time making and repairing clothes. So these would all be hides and furs and stuff, of course. Yeah. And the shoes in particular would be needing repair. Often they would get wet and stiff and then they would chew them to soften them up. Okay. So the harsh conditions when hunting was poor led to a very dark side of the Inuit culture, darker even than the seal cheese situation. So infanticide and the abandonment of elderly was sometimes necessary to keep the population low and mobile for survival. This is reflected, I know, but I. Yeah. I get it, but it's like tough. It's a hard hard life, right? Yeah. So this is reflected in one of the Inuit's foundational myths. I'm going to read you the story of Sedna as told in the inside Labrador magazine. So once upon a time when the world was new, humans and dogs were created to populate the land. Together they spread across the north. One woman, the daughter of a hunter, spurned the advances of men who came courting her. Instead, she married a dog. Her father was ashamed of her and put her in his Umiak, an open skin boat. When they got far out to sea, he threw her overboard, planning to be rid of her once and for all. The daughter seized hold of the boat, hoping to save herself. Angered at this, the father cut off her fingers with his knife. The woman, known as Sedna, sank to the bottom of the ocean, but she did not die. And instead, the spirit of the sea, providing life to all sea animals. Her thumb became the walrus, her first finger the seal, and her middle finger the polar bear. She lives there to this day in a sod house at the ocean spot. That's a harsh myth. Wow. Okay. That's where the animals come from. Yeah. And there are other versions of the story where she bears a man who was cruel to her and her father came to rescue her. They hit bad weather and the father decided to dump her overboard to save himself. Personally, I like the version where she married the dog. So that's a very brief overview of the Inuit and their predecessors in the Arctic. I know I missed a lot and I will get back to them at some point to give more of their story. I'm going to be a broker market about that because this is the whole thing. This is the world. Like a little surface dusting of what's going on. So now to the Western sub-artic. This is getting into the Northwest territory, the Yukwan, northern Alberta, and the inland part of northern British Columbia. Did you say Yukwan? Sorry. Okay. Very broadly, this is the area that's home to the Denny people, historically known as Athopascan and the Chippewaian, the Wetsowetten, lingit, and Cree peoples. There are a lot of tribes and nations within this area with different life ways. So I'm only giving just a nibble of information here. So very broadly, people hunted large animals like caribou and other smaller animals like deer. They fished and they trapped. And as far as you got further west, the nations that lived near the large rivers with huge salmon runs incorporated that into their diet, which gave them a much more stable food source. So I'm going to move, I'm going to scoot right past that. So now we're into the Northwest coast and you can probably picture in your mind a little of those who these nations are. These are the people that you can use a shorthand by saying they are the people of salmon and cedar. This is not to oversimplify their culture at all, but to reflect on the power of those resources and how they made the coastal nations populous and thriving from millennia. So they lived in villages like in the winter typically in cedar homes. So they weren't living in teepees or wigwams. They were building cedar homes and they used huge carved can you, a news to hunt and fish in the ocean. And they're known for their beautiful artwork. So if you think of the west coast, you think of the totem poles and the basket and you can probably picture in your mind the west coast, the breeze and the damp. Yeah. Well, that's like I imagine without all of that access to food and the temperate climate and all that sort of stuff, it allows for opportunity for things like beautiful art and like craftsmanship and all of that. And yeah, cedar long lasting, naturally water repellent wood and it doesn't rot really easily. Insect repellent, yeah, all that sort of stuff. Because they were so much more stable and had their food sources were so much more stable. They were more hierarchical. So this is where you'd think of the chiefs and you would have their reslays and then there'd be kind of, I don't want to use the word peasant, but kind of like the middling people and then kind of an upper class. Okay. So they made their clothing at a woven cedar bark, which I found very interesting, but that's because the perpetual damp in the region made hide clothing gross. Oh, yeah, it would. Yeah, it just would not work. Because you couldn't, I don't think you could waterproof it easily. Like we know we have normal, like now we have chemical waterproofing things and that's what it's stuff. Yeah. Well, I'm sure they could, I'm sure they waterproofed like the other places that do hide click because it rained and snowed and whatnot. So it'd have to be, but it would just, it's their damp. Like you wouldn't, you wouldn't be able to cure them, the hide the same way. Okay. Yeah. That's true. And it would just be always damp. Yeah, that wouldn't feel nice. No, the side in these nations were much more structured as well as being divided into groups or they call them anthropologists call them moieties. So they're sorry, call them what moieties. Oh, M O I E T I E S. I did hear you right. I just didn't believe you. Yeah. Well, there would be like the clans. Okay. Like so they would be the Raven Clan or the evil clan, sorry, Eagle Clan in the Haida nation. That's right. Did you say the archeologists made came up with that term? Yeah, that's like a not archeologist, like anthropologists. Okay. Like that's a, it's an anthropological, anthropological term. Okay. It's just like a standard term. Yeah. It's not like this isn't, this isn't specific to the height of people. Gotcha. That's an important part of the nation's functions in this region are potlaches. So these were ceremonial gift giving and wealth redistribution that happened often and for like basically any reason. So we held for birth of a child, a wedding, a death, a new chief was being installed, guests, like anything. So and these would be typically held in winter when everyone would be together in the winter villages because they'd have to be out where like the river runs, right? Like for the salmon runs and stuff. Yeah, it's amazing that humanity has been doing that for an extremely, like obviously an extremely long period of time. Yeah. And across all seemingly all cultures that I'm aware of anyways. Yeah. That's really cool. So to give you a sense of the nations in this area, I know I'm going to miss some. Keep in mind. So there's the Haida, the Shimshin, Nuchelnuth, Nuxok, Qua Qua Qua Qua Qua and Salish nations. All right, I'm going to move down into the interior now. So there is blending because it's like the rivers are running through it, right? So we're still in British Columbia and we're moving into the interior Salish people or the plateau region. Oh, sorry. These are, I got the indigenous, I looked them up and I have them written down phonetically from a source I had from the British Columbia government site. And it's still hard. So you're saying now the names are getting hard? I thought they were hard before. No. Okay. All right. Incla, incla, kapma, N-L-A-A, possibly P-A-M-U-X. Okay. Yeah. That's I'm not going to try. I'm not going to try again. Incla, kapma, that's better. All right. And the Stattleum, people lived in the Fraser and Thompson rivers areas and relied on salmon as a major part of their diet. It's a much drier region, so clothing made of hide was typical. And lower status people were salmon skin footwear. I wouldn't like that one either. Oh. I'm sure they had a system to tamp down ubittisness because I would want different footwear. Yeah. That's me. Salmon skin. They had a lot of it to be fair. Yeah, that's true. They would have a lot of it. I'm just like thinking how fast you would run through that. I know. Very delicate. Yeah. Maybe they layered it. Yeah, maybe something. So anyways, there would be a mix of influences in the plateau people. So you'd have a salmon runs in some areas. And then you'd also they also had potlatch and the art was sometimes similar, but in areas where salmon was not common, you would see more influence from the Plains nations. So more hunting and of the fish and things like that. They would have celebrated their polar ceremonies and other spiritual summaries in the winter, similar to coastal people. In the summer, they were on the move hunting to Naksa people had many similarities to Plains people and their dress and military societies. This makes a lot of sense because they were enemies of the Blackfoot. So Blackfoot are one of the Plains people. And so they would have fought each other frequently and just been a lot of contact. So moving eastwards again, we are on the Plains with the Sixth Sitka people, Prii, Dakota, Assiniboine and Ojibwe people. I'm sure I didn't get every nation on this list. It's not exhaustive. So for many of the nations in particular the Sixth Sitka or Blackfoot nation, the time on the Plains is split into the dog days and horse days. Because of movies or just the general idea of Plains indigenous people, it had never crossed my mind that there was a time when they didn't have horses, but they didn't get horses until the Spanish came and they did horrible things. So that was kind of like, oh, yeah. Okay. So they became so integral that we just kind of always assumed they were there, but they weren't. So before horses, dogs were used as pack animals and they would hitch the dogs up to something called a travoix, which is obviously a French word. So it's a different word in their respective languages, which is an A-frame bound together and items are placed on it and dragged. Okay. I remember seeing pictures of those, but I always saw them either a person was dragging them or maybe a horse. Yeah. Some other nations do use people, women actually. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So life more or less revolved around the bison hunt. The hunt had been important for thousands of years, but around 2000 years ago, there was a change in how they hunted. Instead of small bands of hunters stalking animals, large groups coordinated their efforts and included new rituals with their hunts. So an important part of this change involves an oral narrative called the Lost Boys. This is a very short version, but it is the story. A bunch of guys, they've got some vampires. That's a funny one. Okay. Yeah. That's what's from, right? There's the other land. Yeah. Sorry. Nope. Sorry. So a group of boys who wanted clothes made of bison calves, but they were denied the this by their people. So they were angry at this injustice and together they left and went to the sky country and there they became the Pleiades, also known as M45 to astronomers and every year the Pleiades disappear from the night sky at springtime, which is the signal for people to leave their winter camps and return to the large groups for the bison hunt. So in the story, the boys leave the night sky to remind people of their lack of generosity. Okay. I thought that was such a cool story. I don't know what the Pleiades are though. What are those? It's a constellation. And it leaves? Yes. Like it does it dip down or other horizon? I don't know if I don't know. You enter that one. You got the physical thing. Yeah. Anyways, it leaves the night sky. The Lost Boys bugger off. Yeah. Okay. I don't know what happened to the stars. That's for another show. Yeah. All right. So now we're going into the Eastern Woodlands. And there is more of a blending of cultures as you get go east with the Plains Korean and the Blackberry. They're evidence of that. When the fur trade began in the 16th and 17th century centuries, these people were intermediaries between the Algonquin people in the northern Ontario and Quebec and the other Plains people to the west because they were right in the middle and they shared similar aspects of both cultures. The Algonquin people occupied a great swath of territory in northeastern North America, except for the areas around the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. That's where the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Wendat Confederacy had control. The main indigenous language groups that are in the eastern Woodlands and eastern subartic are the Ojibwe. So people there, they are very broadly, there is Ojibwe and Ojibwe, Bree and Innu. And there is a lot of Innu, not Inuit. Those are different. Yeah. Innu, the French called them Montenier. Okay. I don't remember that. But anyways, they're the Innu. And there's a lot of fluidity between these regions for hunting and trade. The Cree and a lot of the northern groups like the Innu stayed in much smaller family groups in the winter because of hunting practices. And they would meet up for summer for ceremonies and trade and basically spending time together. Were the Innu more northern or is it just a similar name? It's just a similar name. They're not connected at all. Okay. I don't know why they're all that. I'm sure it's because of in their individual language, it makes more sense. Yeah. It must sound different. In English speaking, I stopped halfway saying Innu it. Yeah. The Innu and the northern Cree people, they were more independent minded. Whereas Anishinaabe, those include Ojibwe, Ottawa and a bunch of other people. They were more communally oriented and they were more southern. Okay. So Anishinaabe people are known for their spirituality. They believe that every living thing and pretty much the whole natural world had a spirit called Manateu. This is common among indigenous people as well. And they have a lot of stories of supernatural creatures such as the Wendigo. The Wendigo was a giant monster that craved human flesh and is thought to have been created when a human had a mental breakdown during times of great privation and started wanting to commit acts of cannibalism. So they would build a person if they started. But it's that story really makes sense because in the winter, if hunting is bad and like you're starving, that's no piles up the slight. I mean, while this winter, we know how high the snow has piled and we're just down here in southern Ontario and it's up to our waist. So another magnificent creature was the Thunderbird who created thunder from its wings and lightning from its eyes. It's awesome. Okay. My favorite is the trickster or some prefer the term elder brother and he's we say Kjak. He's a transformer or so he can train. He can change from different to different animals or a trickster. So common among many people from the Plains in Alberta all the way east. So this story that I'm going to tell you does not really give a broad overarching picture of the spirituality of the people of the region. What it does do is show you what simply great stories are in their story kind of library cannon in this in this their oral tradition. You can derive a lesson from the story, but I doubt it was the main reason for its popularity. It comes from an Oumush Keigo, a swampy crea, scrawlr, Lewis Bird, via the historian Carolyn Budrochney. We say Kjak was tricking geese by offering to show them his bag of stories. He didn't want to leave them roasting unattended, so he left his bum in charge of the people walk. Okay. His bum. All right. Surprisingly, this was not an effective guard and some humans stole the geese. When he woke up, he was so upset by this theft that he beats his bum. His bum takes revenge for this beating by farting at me. He's the Kjak Christ hunt. Dying. That's a great story. There's a lot of lagers to it. Yeah, he's out there trying to shoot a deer. Let's set a ripper. Your take's off. But punching is punching his butt. I just can't help but think of the children. Like on a winter's night, during these, which is a storytelling time, they would tell their elder, tell that story, tell that story. His kids are the same as they've always been. That would be an absolute favorite. Yeah. Yeah, I was dying laughing when I read that. Oh, it's fantastic. Love that. Maybe we should start telling that whenever we go camping to our kids. When you go camping with our kids and I stay home? Yes. That's true. All right. So we're going to skip over the Woodlands area where the Haudenosaunee and Wendat people live. Like I said, I'm going to be talking about that soon. So now we have the Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, P.E.I. and Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, where the Beotuk people and Mi'kma people live in Newfoundland most of the year on the coast, living off the sea before going into the interior for the fall and winter to hunt. They used birch bark canoes to travel and notably smeared red ochre on themselves. They loved the red ochre. How do you make red ochre? What is that? Is it berries or something? I think it's a root. Yeah. And then they would use like make a grease paint. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. It would stay on really well. Probably bug repellent as well, right? Because you'd have to figure some way out the bugs off you. Yeah. That makes sense. This is actually the origin of the term red Indian. Oh, root? Because there were some of the first people that the Europeans saw and they were just covered in ochre. Oh. Huh. The indigenous people aren't red. No. Like, yeah, it does make sense. But if they're painted, yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then just duck. They're unimaginative. Yeah. So anyways, so there was an annual ochre ritual in the spring where people and objects would be coated in ochre. So they would smear themselves and their canoes. So ochre was clearly very important. And I surmise that the ceremony being held in the spring would be in support of successful hunting and fishing. Now, it's really hard to determine how many bay attack lived in Newfoundland before European contact. Some estimates were very high, thousands and thousands. But there's no evidence to support the figure. The most realistic estimates by archaeologists are between 500 to 1000 bay attack. Oh, that's not that bad. That's not a lot. Wow. That's like, it's smaller than a little tiny town I grew up in. Yeah. Wow. As for how society was structured, they would have had hunting groups that come together in larger bands in summer with a male chief. So that hunting bands would be similar to the other places. You know, we like couple families that stay together because it's not very useful to have a huge group hunting in this type of environment because they're not hunting herds. Yeah. Like on the plains. Yeah, make too much noise. Yeah, you're in the woods. Yeah. So a common thread for leadership in indigenous nations is less focused on hereditary and more focused on charisma and strong communication skills and usually hunting expertise was valued. So the bay attack housing was a little different from other people in the region, particularly like the Migmaw, the historian, Inguburg Marshall, used the term mamatite when describing the different types of housing the bay attack used. It was a type of wigwam, but it was more framed, like instead of on a call. What's the difference between a wigwam and a teepee? They used birch bark that of hides in wigwam. Yeah. Oh, and teepee for hides. Okay. I could be wrong, but from the like the regions is that the lanes people had the bison and they had tons of hides. Yeah. They had the herds and more people. And this is much smaller population. They didn't have the herds. It'd be hunting. Yeah. Like individual animals. Mm hmm. A deer or a caribou or. Yeah. So it was a type of wigwam and in wintertime it could be built up more. So some of them were square and some of them were like a hexagon. Okay. But they were really small and later observers. So when Europeans came and saw them in there, they noted that the bay attack slept sitting or tucked into a ball. Really? Yeah. These little wee things. Sure. If you don't know much about the bay attack, the one thing you may know about them is that they're considered extinct. Yeah. So as the population dwindled and life became extremely challenging, some bay attack may have found refuge with the Mi'kmaq. But way down the road, I will get into much more detail about the bay attack and what happened that led to this fate. So now on to the Mi'kmaq. Their historical land covers a huge amount of territory. It is all of PEI, Nova Scotia, part of New Brunswick, part of Newfoundland and some of the late St. Lawrence and also extended into areas of the United States. That's big. That's huge. It's really big, yeah. So a quick fire run through is they relied heavily on the sea for their diet. It was upwards of 90 percent. In the winter, they went inland and small hunting groups of a couple families, but returned to the coast for the summer where they lived in much larger groups. Typically they lived in birch wigwams, which would also be terrifying to travel in a birch bark canoe on the ocean. And they also had lakes and rivers and stuff, right? Because it also, it is New Brunswick. It's not like the Arctic. I've gone canoeing in pretty open water on the Great Lakes. And it could be a little terrifying. Yeah. Like you don't want to go all the way into the shoreline and cut across some things. You're out there in pretty open water. And it is just the wind. I can't even imagine the ocean. No. Brave, brave, brave. In the last episode, I might have said that in the origin story of the magma, that the land was created by the giver of life by a lightning bolt, I messed that up. I got confused. The giver of life sent a lightning bolt that created Gluscap, who is the intermediary between humans and the rest of the natural world. The Gluscap is a very important part of the stories that Mi'kmaq people tell about their whole world and how they interact with it. And I'm going to return back to these stories and magma people in later episodes. All right. So that's the whirlwind tour of some indigenous nations in Canada. I know some groups got a little bit more detail than others, but I'll get to all of it, or I'll try to. I can't get to everything because that's not possible. So at one point that I really want to leave in your mind is about the blurring of the idea, but the blurring of the edges between the different nations. And it's a quote from Carolyn Padrecci, Padrecci, the historian. So to quote, historians, categories of indigenous groups are certainly shaped by the primary sources and documents they use to construct their histories. But before that time, people's lives were primarily shaped by family relationships, sense of community, common languages and alliances. End quote. So that's kind of what I want people to have an idea of, that it's like, sure, we have the names and the names that they use for themselves, but they aren't hard lines. They're not hard borders. They aren't hard-cut ethnicities. There's a blending always between them. You can be welcomed into the community and become part of that people. Then you're a part of that people. That's kind of like the Canadian or from a city. Like different cities have different cultures of people that grew up in them. Of course, people move around. There's into intermarriage, there's travel and trade. Yeah, of course. That's kind of what I wanted to keep in mind. And I know I barely touched. The West Coast story, I really left a lot out, but I just need a lot more time to read about them before I can really speak on it with a little bit more detail. Some of the stuff I was getting from, it was from a textbook. Yeah. Some wasn't, but some was. So, yeah. So that's it for today. Thank you very much, Simon. And we probably have some laundry to fold. Yeah, but that was fun. I'm happy we did this. Awesome. All right. Thank you. Thanks. Bye. Bye.