The Critical Compass Podcast - February 25, 2026


“I Am Indian #3780270401” – Leighton Grey Destroys Canada’s Biggest Lie


Episode Stats

Length

20 minutes

Words per Minute

132.13551

Word Count

2,699

Sentence Count

226

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

16


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 I am my Indian number 3780270401. That's the first thing. That's the
00:00:16.200 fundamental truth about me. Why is that important to you? Because the fundamental
00:00:22.020 truth about your country, Canada, is that it's a segregated society. Did you know
00:00:28.200 that? The oldest statute in Canada is the Indian Act of 1866. And it sets up a
00:00:36.840 subclass of human beings. And to the government, even though I look like I'm
00:00:42.360 trying to win a Marc Messier look-alike contest, to the government I'm an Indian.
00:00:47.760 Here's my card. There's my proof. That's who I am to our government in Ottawa. Why
00:00:55.480 is this important? Because that statute is at the core of our country. And it's part
00:01:05.080 of the sickness that's in our country. Because it sets up a statutory scheme for
00:01:11.500 the otherness of the Indian. And this is a fundamental truth about Canada that we
00:01:17.980 have to face. And the people in Ottawa, among all the other stuff they're up to,
00:01:23.020 they're not doing a very good job of managing this problem. But the Indian Act
00:01:28.420 and the dysfunctional, I think we can all agree, we're in a dysfunctional
00:01:31.840 relationship. Indians and Canada, right? But the question is why? It begs two
00:01:40.460 questions. Number one, why does the government want to have a segregated society?
00:01:46.620 That's question number one. But the other question that people don't ask enough is
00:01:52.080 why do the Indians want to keep this going? Because that's a fundamental truth
00:01:57.060 about our country. In fact, a lot of what's happened over history, our history, is the
00:02:02.500 government trying to reduce the number of Indians and Indians through, mostly through
00:02:07.800 litigation and government lobbying and guilt trips, trying to expand the number of
00:02:14.040 people who are Indians. That sounds really strange, doesn't it? Right? Why would you
00:02:20.500 want to be part of a segregated group? Well, I'm going to try to explain this for
00:02:25.900 you and go take you on a little bit of a journey to explain some fundamental truths
00:02:31.040 about why trying to answer those two questions. But I'm going to do it by
00:02:34.720 referring to a couple of dead German guys. So let's talk about this otherness, okay?
00:02:44.280 There was a philosopher, a theologian, the 20th century named Martin Buber. Many of
00:02:51.280 you won't know that name. He lived in Germany. He was Jewish. He lived through part of
00:02:59.020 the Hitler years. And then in 1938, he figured, okay, I should probably get out of this place,
00:03:06.020 which he did. And he got out and he lived in the United States and he taught at universities
00:03:13.340 until 1965. But he wrote a very important paper called the I-it, I-thou synthesis. And
00:03:23.740 what he said is that he talked about human relationships and also our relationship with
00:03:31.820 the transcendent, okay? So the I-it is, and those of you will identify with both of these
00:03:37.940 as I describe this, because in all of our relationships, we discover, we find ourselves
00:03:42.980 in situations like this. The I-it is where I'm in a relationship with somebody else, but
00:03:48.180 I don't see them as a subject. They are an object. They are a thing. They are a means
00:03:55.820 to my ends, right? And this is where we get into very dangerous ground. Because what we
00:04:04.260 do then, we start to dehumanize human beings. And this is where great, great atrocities can
00:04:11.180 happen. The most obvious example from the last century, if you think of the Nazis and the
00:04:15.460 Jews. The untermenschen, right? Again, subclass of human beings. And using the auspices of
00:04:24.320 law, they created that subclass. And then they were able to use the machinery of the state,
00:04:30.500 the oppressive power of the state, the monopoly on violence of the state to carry out that agenda.
00:04:38.960 So if I'm in an I-it relationship, I don't consider it a person. I don't consider their wants. I don't
00:04:45.300 consider their needs. Sort of like the way Alberta is in relationship to Ottawa, right? They don't care
00:04:52.100 about us, okay? They've got their own concerns. They've objectified us. And this is exactly the
00:04:58.420 situation that Indigenous peoples, Indian peoples, First Nations, if you want to call them that,
00:05:04.240 although that's a lie, are in relation to Ottawa. So that's the I-it. What Buber said,
00:05:11.460 though, is that what we need to be, is we need to be in relationship of I-thou. What is the I-thou?
00:05:17.940 The I-thou is where you regard other people as subjects, as ends in themselves, as sentient beings
00:05:25.980 with their own ideas, their own qualities, their own values, their own fundamental importance.
00:05:34.940 In Jewish philosophy and in Christianity, we call this the Imago Dei. We're made in the image of God,
00:05:41.100 and therefore we have inherent value. And this is what Buber was talking about. But even in a secular
00:05:48.200 sense, if you think about it, any type of productive, useful relationship, healthy relationship,
00:05:56.600 is going to involve that, right? You have to think about other people as ends in themselves,
00:06:02.920 as having the same value as you do, right? Christ phrased this in terms of loving your neighbour,
00:06:11.160 as yourself, right? That's the I-yet, the I-thou. What we need to get to, and the reason why I
00:06:17.880 mentioned Buber, is we need to get to a situation in Canada where we get out of the objectification
00:06:26.120 of other human beings, and we need to get back to a place where we're actually seeing other human
00:06:32.440 beings as having value. We respect people who disagree with us. Where we actually get to the
00:06:39.320 point where, heaven forbid, we love them. We love them more than power. We love them more than money.
00:06:50.120 We love them even more than our country, right? So, how does this apply to Indians?
00:06:57.880 I'll explain. But before I get to that part, I've got to talk about the other German guy.
00:07:04.200 He's dead too. In fact, he said that God was dead. His name was Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:07:11.720 He was wrong about that. Nietzsche's dead, God's alive, and he's here.
00:07:17.240 But, Nietzsche's a very interesting man. And he is an example of someone who actually
00:07:25.240 lived something that we hear a lot of, about how there's a fine line between genius and madness.
00:07:35.240 And Nietzsche was a brilliant man. He wrote some of the most profound things
00:07:40.920 in philosophy and touching on law. But he also, he battled drug addiction. He battled mental illness.
00:07:51.160 And sadly, he died far too early. But he left behind some incredible writings.
00:07:55.720 And one of them I'm going to share with you today applies very much to the indigenous peoples of Canada.
00:08:06.840 Who knows what a parable is? Okay? Yeah, if you've read the Bible, you know
00:08:11.720 Jesus was wont to talk in parables. The most famous one is probably the one about the prodigal son.
00:08:19.560 But Nietzsche wrote a parable. It was called the Parable of the Tarantula. The parable is like an
00:08:26.440 allegorical story. It speaks in metaphor. It tries to teach something using symbolic language.
00:08:32.520 So what's the Parable of the Tarantula?
00:08:34.440 Well, Nietzsche was talking about power. He was talking in terms of how human beings
00:08:43.880 use and destroy each other. Right? The powerful and the powerless. You see where I'm going with this?
00:08:52.280 So, the tarantula in the parable is essentially, for Nietzsche, and I think today, is what we would call
00:09:00.280 the political left. The liberals. The globalists. Right? The ones who want to destroy seven-eighths
00:09:08.200 of the Earth's population and think that's a good idea. Those guys. The Marks Carney crowd.
00:09:15.480 Yes, I said Marks Carney.
00:09:21.400 So, coming back to the parable. In the parable,
00:09:23.480 you know, if you think of that spider, that big, hairy, venomous, hungry spider,
00:09:32.600 that's the woke crowd. That's the people who want to control everything. They want to control our food
00:09:37.960 supply. They want to take away healthy foods and medicines, like Mr. Buckley talks about. They want
00:09:45.000 to take away our freedom. They want to take away our access to information. They want to take away our
00:09:49.560 human agency. They want to take away our lives. They want to kill us. Dead. Dead, dead, dead. That's
00:09:57.880 what they want. That's what the tarantula is. It's a killer. It's a predator. It's a spider.
00:10:07.160 Captures victims and sucks the life out of them. Leaving dross and dust. That's the spider. That's the
00:10:16.840 killer. And where does the Indian stand up to this? Well, the Indian sees the glitter of the web
00:10:25.480 and he wanders in there and he thinks, oh, this looks okay. And the spider, what does the spider say?
00:10:32.040 Nietzsche says the spider comes to the victims, his victims, and says, come to me. I offer you
00:10:39.560 equality. I offer you vengeance. You're a victim. You're not my victim. You're their victim.
00:10:53.560 I will offer you. I have power. I have agency. You have none. You need me. You join up with me.
00:11:00.840 Come into my web. I'll save you. I will give you retribution. I will give you equality. I will give
00:11:11.560 you reparations. You will have power, but only through me. And then the victim is in the web.
00:11:21.960 And what happens to, you all know this. What happens next? Tarantula comes, consumes the victim.
00:11:35.720 Why? What does the spider want? What do they want? Money? No. They already have money. What are these
00:11:45.720 guys after? You all know. Tell me. Control and power. Yes. That's what the spider wants. The spider
00:11:53.080 wants to grow bigger and fatter and hairier. And the more it consumes, the hungrier it eats. And the web
00:12:00.360 grows. And the web is that control. So how does this work? Well, do you all remember BLM? Yeah,
00:12:10.600 we found out BLM was actually big luxury mansions. But the tarantula used those people, didn't they?
00:12:21.160 And now BLM's a joke. Remember George Floyd? They erected statues of him.
00:12:28.680 But what do people think about him now? He's used up. He's eaten, consumed.
00:12:34.440 And what about the transgender cult? Remember that? It's already sinking into our history, isn't it? Right?
00:12:45.720 The left used them too. A small fraction of society seemed to control everything. I mean,
00:12:53.000 we had a man in the Olympics beating up women and we gave him a gold medal.
00:12:58.920 That's a tarantula at work. Right? But the problem is, if there's going to be a spider,
00:13:10.840 there has to be victims. And that's where the Indians are. And too many of them don't realize it.
00:13:17.800 So I'm going to bring this down to the kind of street level. Show you how this works.
00:13:22.360 Right now in Alberta, there's an Indian chief of his band who have filed a lawsuit against the
00:13:31.160 Government of Canada because they want to block the referendum that you people were signing up for
00:13:36.840 today. Now this sounds bizarre, doesn't it?
00:13:40.520 Imagine if 40,000 of the richest people in Ottawa, imagine if the Ottawa Government,
00:13:55.480 the Government of Canada filed that suit. What would you say then? Then your reaction is different,
00:14:01.880 right? See how the tarantula works? You know how many, you know how many Indian people are going to use
00:14:10.200 that word? It's not, it's not like the N word yet, but I'm an Indian, so I'm going to exercise license
00:14:17.640 here. How many Indian people do you think are living on reserve in Alberta today? Take a guess.
00:14:26.520 Someone says 100,000. Higher or lower? Lower. It's less than 42,000 people.
00:14:35.080 The province of Alberta, the population just crested 5 million and less than 42,000 people
00:14:46.200 want to tell us that we can't have a referendum on independence. What does that sound like?
00:14:51.880 It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But you see, it's not the tarantula telling us that,
00:14:58.440 it's the victim. It's the tarantula's emissary. And so we don't see it, we don't complain. And where do
00:15:06.760 we focus our vilification? Where do we focus our anger? Who do we blame? Oh, those greedy Indians.
00:15:15.160 They've always got their hands out. They always want more. We blame the fly and the web. We don't even
00:15:23.640 look at the big, fat, ugly, hairy spider. And in the end, in the end, the Indian is the one who gets
00:15:35.240 his blood sucked. He's the one who's turned to dust by the spider. So we don't see how this works.
00:15:43.800 I'm going to leave you with, end off with a couple of anecdotes that illustrate this point.
00:15:53.480 There's a man named Leslie Watini, a very wise Indian man. And I want to tell you a little bit about him.
00:16:03.800 He was born in 1928 in a one-room log cabin on a reserve in Saskatchewan, just like my great-grandfather
00:16:14.440 was. And he endured a childhood of poverty and hardship. His education was his release and he
00:16:21.640 went on to become the first Aboriginal to practice law in Western Canada. He also served as the inaugural
00:16:27.720 president of the National Indian Council in 1961. He came to prominence with his controversial 1971 book
00:16:38.120 called Ruffled Feathers. You should check this book out. And he argued for the end to the Canadian Indian
00:16:49.080 Reserve System, which he believed trapped his people in poverty and despair. He wanted to get out of the
00:16:55.480 web. He wanted to get out of the tarantula's clutches. He dreamed of a Canada where Indigenous
00:17:01.000 people live side by side, like all other Canadians, in an I-thou relationship, not an I-it relationship,
00:17:10.040 and ended the same rights and benefits. Such an argument for true racial equality put him at odds
00:17:16.120 with the liberal elite of Canada's native community, who still believe in a segregated race-based
00:17:23.080 relationship between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada. And for telling the truth to power,
00:17:28.280 Watney was ostracized from the native political community and banned from his own reserve.
00:17:35.160 He died in 2015 and adding insult to injury, his daughter is a prophet at the University of Manitoba
00:17:42.920 who has rejected everything her father fought for. Wanda Watney, I'll name her.
00:17:48.440 Wanda Watney. She says that her father was wrong. He was delusional. So that's one side. The Indians
00:18:00.120 want to keep this going. Now here's the, I'll end off with the other side. Our Prime Minister, Mark Carney.
00:18:07.000 When the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples attacked the legacy of residential schools,
00:18:13.480 Mark Carney's father, who was a central figure in the operation of residential schools in this country,
00:18:22.040 he penned a sharp critique. He pointed out that the schools were not jails, despite frequent claims
00:18:27.720 that students were there against their will. In fact, parents had to sign an application form to
00:18:33.400 enroll their children in residential school. And he bristled at the lack of context in the report.
00:18:39.400 And he's right. You should read it. He noted that schools performed a key social welfare function
00:18:45.400 in caring for six dying, abandoned and orphaned children. My grandmother was raised in Indian
00:18:51.720 residential school, and I would not have had a snowball's chance in hell of getting an education,
00:18:58.200 let alone being a lawyer and having the privilege of standing here today, if she had not gone to
00:19:03.640 residential school. But in the midst of the last federal election campaign, Mark Carney, who's been in
00:19:15.480 the hallowed halls of Harvard and Oxford and sips tea in Davos, he rejected all of his father's views.
00:19:23.560 His father spent a lifetime in the residential school, but Mark Carney knows better. He says,
00:19:29.000 I love my father, but I don't share those views. He says it's denialism and complicity. So what have
00:19:37.800 I told you? I've told you there's a lot of problems. But to quote the late or the great Fred Flintstone
00:19:45.000 to his neighbor, weirdly gruesome, no one is half the battle. So we know the problem. So I just want to
00:19:53.560 finish off with this thought, and that is one that I think is more inspiring. And this is from Augustin of
00:20:04.200 Hippo, who said, the truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it. Let it loose and it will defend
00:20:12.360 itself. I hope I've loosed some upon you today. Thank you very much.
00:20:23.560 Thank you very much.