The topic is economic nationalism, the curse of economic nationalism, and part of it comes from my book on Hamilton, which I called Hamilton's Curse, and because it was part of it is a response to a book written by a pretty well-known business historian named John Steele Gordon. He wrote a book called Hamilton's Blessing, and because Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury Secretary, once said that a large public debt is a national blessing. His reasoning was very Machiavellian. There's a word for you. I look that up on Google, the Machiavellian, because his reasoning was that if the government issues a lot of debt, it's mostly the affluent people of the country who have the money to buy the government bonds, and therefore they will be tied to the government politically because they will be a permanent lobbying force for higher taxes to make sure there's enough money in the Treasury to pay off the principal and interest on their bonds. That was his chain of reasoning because when the Constitution was ratified, he threw a fit. He called it a frail and worthless fabric, and he spent the rest of his life trying to undermine the constitutional limits on government. When he was Treasury Secretary, he badgered George Washington by saying we need a government of more energy. He wanted government to be much bigger than what the Constitution allowed for, and this was part of his scheme. So anyway, that's just sort of why I came up with the title Hamilton's Curse. Even to this day, we still have people writing books saying, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's have a big government debt. Look up online, all you young students, the national debt clock. It's in Times Square in New York City, and it goes a thousand miles an hour, adding dollar after dollar after dollar, how much debt, and even says how much you owe today or how much a baby born tomorrow will owe already if the debt were ever to be paid off. But anyway, that's why the Curse of Economic Nationalism. Economic nationalism is essentially and always has been a euphemism or maybe a synonym for mercantilism, really, and Murray Rothbard defined mercantilism. This was the economic system that prevailed in much of Europe in the 1600s, 1700s, up into the 1800s, and Murray defined it as basically a system, a collection of policies that benefit producers at the expense of consumers and everyone else. That's basically mercantilism, and I'll get into more detail in a little bit. And so what I'm going to say for the rest of my time is part economics and part history. I don't want to bore the Europeans in the audience with too much American history. I know we have some European students, but it will be some of that. And I'm going to start off, again, with Murray Rothbard, a little snippet from his book, The Mystery of Banking, which I highly recommend everyone read if you haven't read it. And he remarks on an incredible phenomenon that the American colonists fought a revolution to secede from the British mercantilist system. The taxation without representation was their slogan, and they had been protesting King George III's mercantilist trade laws that discriminated against Americans. It was mercantilism, a set of policies set up to benefit politically connected British manufacturers at the expense of everybody else. And so they fought a revolution to secede against that system. But there was a group of Americans, very prominent Americans, wealthy Americans and influential Americans who wanted to keep that system, that they just fought an eight-year-long revolution to get away from, because they understood that if you're on the money collecting end of mercantilism, it's a good gig. If you're on the paying end, not true. It's not a good idea if you're on the paying end. But if you're on the money collecting end, it's a good thing. It's good to be the king, as Mel Brooks said in that movie, the history of the world, part 10 or whatever part that was. And when he portrayed the king of France, someone, one of his aides would come in and dump a big pallet of gold bars next to him. And his laugh line was, it's good to be the king. And that's how I view the Hamilton and the Federalists who were the originators of American mercantilism. And here's what Murray Rothbard says in The Mystery of Banking about this. Economic nationalism or mercantilism. He said their purpose, and they were led by Robert Morris, who was probably arguably the wealthiest man in America. He was basically a defense contractor during the revolution. And he was the big string puller behind Alexander Hamilton, the young Hamilton, who was still in his 20s at the time. He said their purpose was this, quote, I'm quoting Murray Rothbard, to reimpose in the new United States a system of mercantilism and big government similar to that in Great Britain, against which the colonists had rebelled. The object was to have a strong central government, particularly a strong president or king as chief executive. Imagine that they just fought a revolution against the king and they want a big influential part of the American political scene. Wanted a king, wanted to bring back a king as chief executive built up by high taxes and heavy public debt. The strong government was to impose high tariffs to subsidize domestic manufacturers, develop a big Navy to open up and subsidize foreign markets for American exports, and launch a massive system of internal public works. In short, the United States was to have a British system without Great Britain. Sounds a lot like the Trump administration and the Biden administration, doesn't it? If you look at these policies that they're talking about. And in mentioning, speaking of Trump, by the way, his very first speech after he was elected on economics, he went to Lexington, Kentucky, and paid homage to Henry Clay. Henry Clay, the congressman, was the political heir to Hamilton. And he picked up the mantle of this mercantilist system after Hamilton died. I don't know if you all remember the history of this. Hamilton was shot dead by Aaron Burr in a duel. And our old friend Gary North told me once that he started up an Aaron Burr society once. And they had ball caps. And the slogan on the back said, not soon enough was the slogan. He wasn't a fan of Hamilton. So that's where this started, at the beginning of America, economic nationalism, which is just basically a way of sneaking mercantilism into the economy. And Murray goes on to call Alexander Hamilton, Robert Morris' youthful disciple. His youthful disciple.  He was Morris who sent Hamilton into the Washington administration. And probably the most famous biography of Hamilton is the one by Ron Cherno. And this Broadway play called Hamilton is supposedly based on the book by Cherno. And Cherno himself, they gave him a small role in the play. And that play has made $650 million so far, just on Broadway, not everything else, all the merchandise and everything like that. It's a very, very popular thing. And Cherno writes about how at the end of the revolution, Hamilton is scheming to get a big job in the new George Washington administration after the revolution. And Robert Morris wants to put him in as his treasury secretary, the first treasury secretary. Morris was actually the first. They called it superintendent of finance. And he had the first job, but then he wanted his man, Hamilton in. And George Washington says to Hamilton, I didn't know you knew anything about finance. We never talked about it. But if Mr. Morris wants you to have the job, the job is yours. Ron Cherno wrote that in his book. So Hamilton didn't really know anything. Here's what Cherno says. He says, when he decided this is the job he wanted, because Robert Morris told him that's the job you want. And he said, since he didn't know anything about finance, he said Hamilton brushed up on money matters and had Colonel Timothy Pickering, who was George Washington's adjutant general in the revolution. He was also George Washington's secretary of state and secretary of war, senator from Massachusetts later on, sent him some primers that included tracks written by the English clergyman and polemicist Richard Price and his all-purpose crib notes, postal weights, universal dictionary of trade and commerce. So he read a dictionary. That was Hamilton's education and economics. He read a dictionary of words, definition of words, just enough. And he was a very brilliant lawyer.  He'll do something with it. He'll use it. Hamilton sent a marathon letter to Robert Morris that's set for the full-fledged system for shoring up American credit and creating a national bank, says Ron Cherno. And I read this letter. I have it. I cite it in a paper of mine. If anybody is interested in it, I'll give you the citation. And despite all these references that he said that he read, he basically said this, what we need to have is protectionist tariffs, a central bank, taxes on land, poll taxes, and a large public debt. That's it. That was in the letter. That's what he learned from all this, the total sum of Alexander Hamilton's economic education. That's what he got. Now, not too long ago, a couple of weeks ago, there was an article that I posted a blog on lourockwell.com about how the Biden administration is giving the Puerto Rican socialist, who's the director of this play on Broadway, $50 million. They've already made $650 million just from the play alone, not to mention all the merchandise and everything else, TV rights and all this. And they're giving them $50 million because during the lockdown, they couldn't have put the play on on Broadway because New York City was locked down. And so to compensate them for that, they're giving them $50 million of taxpayers' dollars. And so I blogged about it. And Lou liked it so much, he asked me to turn it into a short article. So it appeared as a blog and as an article. And the title I gave it was Corporate Welfare for a Play About the Founding Father of Corporate Welfare. So the establishment, the leftist establishment, loves Hamilton, the Founding Father of mercantilism, of fascism basically is a combination of business and government. And so I'm not going to tell you the whole story about how this all came into being. I'll tell you part of it. The corporate welfare part of the story is Hamilton and the federalists, they picked up the mantle from the British mercantilists who they learned from. And Hamilton, by the way, grew up in St. Croix in the Caribbean. And he supposedly never knew who his real father was. His mother gave birth to him without the father around. But then he worked as a clerk for some British slave owning plantation owners in the Caribbean. And they sent him to what is now Columbia University. And I suspect, I have no evidence of this at all, I suspect that one of the British slave owners was probably his father. Yes, he was a brilliant guy. But, jeez, they sent him to New York.  That's something a father would do. And so that's just a tidbit about Hamilton. And so he's beloved by the left and the right. When my book came out on Hamilton's Curse, my publisher Random House wrote such a good press release that the Morning Joe television show immediately sent a limo to my house to pick me up at 6 o'clock in the morning to put me on the TV show, the Morning Joe TV show, because it was right after the crash of 08. And they sent me down next to Pat Buchanan. And Pat, the first thing he says to me, he looks at me and he says, Alexander Hamilton is my hero. So here, they had me on. I wrote a whole book trashing Alexander Hamilton. And so it was pretty much a shouting match. They even brought in the three of them kind of yelled at me for a while and wouldn't let me talk. And that was enough. They brought some guy from New York in on a screen. They had him blabber away. So anyway, I think I just sat there and made some smart comment about Aaron Burr at the end of it because it was futile. That's the same thing. So the corporate welfare story, though, Hamilton championed that. They called it internal improvements. Today, they call it infrastructure spending, government subsidies. Jefferson was opposed to it. He didn't go along with it. When he was president, he said that you have to amend the Constitution first. James Madison, the father of the Constitution, when he was president, the very last thing he did in office was veto a spending bill that included some money for a road building. He said it's not one of the delegated powers. Therefore, the government cannot spend money. James Monroe, same thing. He vetoed it. So president after president vetoed it. And it was almost uniformly Southerners who vetoed these bills. Not 100%. There were Southern mercantilists, and there were Northern free traders in America, and Northern more libertarian oriented. But in the North, they were in the minority. In the South, they were the majority, as far as opposing all of this thing. So they didn't get any federal subsidies to speak of for corporations. Hamilton failed at that during his time. But then the states, the same political organizations, went after the states. And state after state adopted government subsidies for road building and canal building during the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s. And it turned out to be a total debacle. By the time you get to the Civil War era, there's a book on this by an author, an historian named Goodrich on internal improvements. They called it back in those days. And he says, by the time you get to the American Civil War 1860, every state in America had amended its constitution to prohibit government subsidies to corporations for anything. In Illinois, for example, Lincoln himself, when he was in the Illinois legislature, got the legislature to allocate $11 million for road and canal building. This was 1837, long before he ran for president or long before he didn't utter a single word about slavery for another 20 years after that. And so they spent all this money. Much of it was stolen, and not a single road was completed in the state of Illinois. So the people of Illinois were put in a debt for the next several decades to pay off that $11 million in 1837 dollars for there. And every other state did that, except for one exception. The only state that did not amend its constitution to prohibit this was Massachusetts before the Civil War era in the 1860s. So they did have some success there. And the closest they came to succeeding in adopting the system of protectionism, corporate welfare, and a national bank was in 1840. Henry Clay was in charge of the Whig Party in Congress, a very influential man, and they had the votes in Congress. And they finally elected a Whig president, Lou Rockwell's favorite president, William Henry Harrison, also my favorite president. Because William Henry Harrison was inaugurated and died a month later, and so he couldn't have done much damage. That's why he's our favorite president. And what happened was his vice president was John Tyler. Now, there's a libertarian who wrote a book called Recarving Rushmore. Ivan Eland is his name. Independent Institute published this book. And he ranks all the presidents. The history profession in America has all these rankings of American presidents that they come out with from time to time.  Lincoln, Roosevelt, Wilson, always at the top. Always at the top. Ivan Eland did the opposite. Which presidents did the best job at protecting life, liberty, and property? That's an odd thing to think of, isn't it, government to try to do? And he puts John Tyler number one. Okay, Lincoln, Roosevelt, they're all way down there at the bottom of his list. Why does he put John Tyler number one? Well, the Whigs apparently just had John Tyler as their vice president, because their campaign theme was Tippi Canoe and Tyler too. There was a, William Henry Harrison was the hero of the battle of Tippi Canoe, wherever that was. And so that was one thing. And Tyler too kind of rhymed with that. And so they, let's make him our vice president. But he turned out to be a Jeffersonian. And he vetoed everything. He vetoed a bank bill, he vetoed protectionist tariffs, he vetoed the internal improvement subsidies program. And so Clay and the Whigs threw a fit.  So he was a president for four years, but he didn't have a party affiliation. They kicked them out.  So that didn't succeed either, either. Protectionism, Hamilton and my short little article on lourockwell.com, I call Hamilton an economic ignoramus. Because the establishment says the opposite. They say, well, he was an economic genius who created the American economy. As though one man, he was like an early Klaus Schwab. They think they can push a button and there's the economy, reset the whole economy, push the reset button and we've got it. And they say things like that, but of course that's nonsense as far as that goes. But on protectionism, he read the pamphlets by British mercantilists and he called transportation costs useless labor. And he argued that anything that involves transportation costs should be banned. It should not be allowed to be imported into the United States. So if a man in England sells shoes and he wants to compete by shipping the shoes across the Atlantic Ocean and selling them in New England, shouldn't allow it, it should be outlawed to do that. He also argued that competition will cause higher prices because after all, competition costs businesses money. It costs money to compete. And when you spend that money to compete, maybe you pay for advertising, for example.  And that was his reasoning. And that was sort of the total sum of John Kenneth Galbraith's economics. Also, he was a big critic of advertising during his whole career, that's what he was known for. So he had all these oddball, goofy ideas and Abraham Lincoln adopted the exact same arguments. His speeches on protectionism were pure Hamiltonian. He was, I called him the political son of Alexander Hamilton. And so we finally got all this. After all the vetoes by Madison and Monroe and other presidents, Andrew Jackson of some of this, we finally got protectionist tariffs during the American Civil War. 1857 was sort of the high watermark in America free trade in the 19th century. The average tariff rate was only 15%. But by the time the war was over, it was about 60%. And it remained there until the income tax came in in 1913. So that was not just a war tariff. It was the policy of the Republican Party. They finally got protectionism that they wanted. Murray Rothbard also writes very favorably in his history of money in banking in America about the Jacksonians. And every time I write something on the web about Jackson and he did some good things and some bad things.  Well, yes, when he was a general, he was a military general and they tried to eradicate the Seminoles from the state of Florida for what is now the state of Florida. Yes, yeah, so he did some bad things. But you don't have to agree with everything Andrew Jackson ever did in order to praise him for the good things. He'd condemn him for this sort of stuff and praise him for the say that it was a good thing. He did other things. The best good thing that he did was he vetoed the rechartering of the Bank of the United States. And this was Hamilton did succeed in convincing George Washington to adopt a national bank, the Bank of the United States. It had a 20 year charter and it was modeled after the Bank of England. And here's what Hamilton said about this. Oh, Murray actually said that the central bank was the keystone of the whole thing. And here's what Hamilton himself said about his banks. Great Britain is indebted for the immense efforts she has been able to make in so many illustrious and successful wars because of the existence of the Bank of England. So yay. We have a bank that can expand the money supplies and make it cheaper to get into, to be an imperialist in Europe. And he spoke about imperial glory. He said, the tendency of a national bank is to increase public and private credit and the former gives power to the state for the protection of its rights and interests. Okay, exactly. That's exactly why the Jeffersonians opposed them. They didn't want something to aggrandize the state, but Hamilton did and that's why the Pat Buchanan's of the world, you know, the conservative, the right wing status like Pat Buchanan, as well as the left wing status worship Hamilton so much, he's one of them. And he was a brilliant guy and which is why Jefferson feared him so much. He knew he had these devious plots in mind and he was brilliant and that's a dangerous combination. That's a good recipe for a tyrant, as far as that is concerned. So Andrew Jackson vetoed the rechartering. The bank was not rechartered after the first 20 years, but then the War of 1812 came and that was used as an excuse to monetize the debt from the war to bring back the bank in 1817, January of 1817 and then it was up for a rechartering again and it was Jackson who vetoed it. And this is one of my favorite political speeches, American political speeches, is Andrew Jackson's veto of the bank and I can't resist reading that you're just part of it. It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Do you imagine a American president saying something like that today? Although I will say Trump's first and all girl address was great when he was sitting there. He had George W. Bush sitting there and Clinton was there and he was just ripping them all a new one as he's saying and goes and they were all making eyes at each other. I remember watching this on TV that Bush and Clinton were all rolling their eyes at each other over this but he was saying things like the Washington establishment has made itself enormously rich at the expense of you and the people and oh my God, that's speaking the truth. Distinctions in society, this is Jackson. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents of education or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions and government but every man is equally entitled to protection by law but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages, artificial distinctions to grant titles, gratuities and exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves have a right to complain the injustice of their government. So he was saying that this bank, this is what this bank was doing. It was creating exclusive privileges for the rich politically connected and therefore he vetoed it. And when I wrote this, when I included this in my book, I went out and I gathered some history books because I wanted to see, well, what does the American history profession say about this, you know, if you were to go to college and you take a history, American history course and you read about this, what are they saying? And the books that I found were sort of universal condemnation of Andrew Jackson for saying this, saying these things, you know, if you're, if you have any libertarian leanings, you would think, well, this is fabulous. This is a great statement but the American history profession, the books I saw were uniformly really nasty critiques of all this. Okay. And so on the issue of protectionism, you know, as I said, by the time you get to 1857, there was no bank. We had free trade, basically, tariff rate was 15%. No federal corporate welfare to speak of. And the states had all outlined state-funded welfare, well, outlawed it all except for Massachusetts in the United States. And so, but that all radically changed very quickly. Like I said, the Lincoln administration adopted 60% tariffs and kept them in place for 60 years. And also the first big massive corporate welfare boondoggle came into being with the government subsidies of the Transcontinental Railroads. They created two government subsidized railroads, the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific. And Lincoln, by the way, one of the stories about Lincoln was that in 1857, long before he ran for president, he was a wealthy railroad lawyer. He was the general counsel for the Illinois Central for a while. He represented all the big railroads in the Midwest. He was offered the job of general counsel of the New York Central Railroad. He traveled around the Midwest in a private rail car, courtesy of the Illinois Central with an entourage of executives from the corporation, which at the time was probably the biggest corporation in America, the Illinois Central Railroad. And that's who it was. And he invested in land in Council Bluffs, Iowa and at the time of all the places Council Bluffs, Iowa. And when he became president, the first thing, one of the first things he did was, the war was on. I mean, the Confederate Army was massing in Manassas, Virginia. And he calls Congress back. Congress was out of session. He calls Congress back in June, right before this big, first big battle was about to occur. And the purpose of calling them back was to get the ball rolling on the Pacific Railroad Bill. That's the purpose, which they did. And the Pacific Railroad Bill gave the president the exclusive right to determine the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, where they were gonna start building Transcontinental Railroad. Anybody know where Abe Lincoln chose? I'm gonna take a guess, where he chose to start building the railroad. Council Bluffs, Iowa, what a coincidence. He just happened to, it was still known as a language called Lincoln's Hill now in Council Bluffs, Iowa. So he must have made a fortune in real estate speculation by doing that. That was, talk about insider trading. That was a real political insider trading. So that happened, and if you wanna read an interesting story in my book, How Capitalism Saved America, I'll tell the whole story of how James J. Hill seemed to, and his business partners, he created the Great Northern Railroad that built a Transcontinental without any government subsidies, even land grants. They paid the Indians for rights away with cattle or whatever they could trade for in the planes, whereas the government subsidized railroads, if they ran into the Indians, they would call in the army to kill all the Indians. And in fact, General Sherman himself, after the Civil War was over, was put in charge of the Indian Wars for 25 years from 1865 to 1890. And the purpose was to just eradicate the planes Indians from the Great Plains to make way for the railroads. That's, those were Sherman's exact words to make way for the railroads, and they did. They ended up killing some 45 or 50,000 Indians, and the rest were put into concentration camps called reservations in the West, but it was a form of corporate welfare. It was just a veiled form of corporate welfare for the railroad corporations, which were the financial lifeblood of the Republican Party at the time. Should sound familiar to today. You know, some things never changed, do they? So that took into place, you know, the biggest scandal in American political history up to that point, the Credite-Mabillier scandal, took place, and I don't have a board here, but the roots, it's kind of comical to see the roots. James J. Hill, you know, he's a private entrepreneur, privately funded entrepreneur, so he had to find the shortest, quickest route to the West Coast, which he did. He hired some engineers who discovered the Mariahs Pass through the Rockies, which had been discovered by Lewis and Clark in 1803, and no one had ever found it after that, and his engineers found it, and it cut 100 miles off his route, which was, you know, gold back in those days. You know, it was worth a lot of money, whereas if you were to look at a map of the government subsidized railroads, it looks like a bowl of spaghetti, because every member of Congress would say, if you want my vote for more subsidies, you have to run a line over to my town of 500 people over here, and then over there, and over there. So if you look at the, there is a map online of the Union Pacific line, and it's all over the place.  I don't know, that's possible. So that happened. My students used to always laugh, get a big billy laugh out of that, because I would put it on a screen, because I put the map of the Great Northern, you know, it's like a straight line across the Rocky Mountains, and then the Union Pacific is the big bowl of spaghetti. And it's kind of ridiculous, okay. Now, and so economic, that's why, this is all why I call the economic nationalism a curse. The Hamiltonians have basically won the argument. It took a long time. They didn't have any success at all to speak of until the Civil War, and that sort of waxed and waned. But if you look at today, you know, one of the first things President George W. Bush did was to impose steel on tariffs. Trump did the same thing. The Democrats are historically protectionists because of the unions, as far as that goes. Trump was, like I said, his first economic speech was in Lexicon, Kentucky, to pay homage to another founding father of mercantilism and economic nationalism, Henry Clay. He was in favor of the same things, protectionism, corporate welfare, various subsidies to corporations, and internal improvements, you know, member Trump proposed a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending, and Biden is doing the same thing. So this is a system that we've adopted economic nationalism, which is really 21st century mercantilism. It's no different than any of that. And so that's my story for today. And then we have some time for a Q&A, if you have questions about this. Comments, anything? You can applaud if you want to. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. He was kind of... Thank you. Yes, sir. What do you think of Michael Mallis' argument that Hamilton was a good founding father because of his monarchist tendencies and monarchism is a Confederate and his head instructor in democracy? Michael Mallis praises Hamilton because he was a monarchist. Yeah, I had a quote here from, let's see if I can read you a quote, from Hamilton himself. Yeah, here's what Hamilton said. This is a quote from Hamilton. I was among the first who were convinced that an administration by single men was essential to the proper management of the affairs of this country. So he did advocate a permanent president. Yeah, I'm not sure why that would be a good idea. You know, if you ever read the law by Friedrich Bastia, I recommend everybody read it. If you haven't read the law, read the law by Friedrich Bastia. And he makes the point that he's criticizing socialism and he says, well, you can have socialism with a dictator or you can have socialism with a democracy. If a Congress votes for some law that is uniform and everyone is compelled to obey that law, that's law for socialism, how is that different than if a king decrees the same law?  And you can have a monarchy that's not. Now, the Hans Hoppe has written a whole book, The Democracy of the God that Failed, making the case that the incentive system in democracy inevitably evolves into socialism and all these bad things. And whereas at least the king owns the property and he's not apt to destroy his own property or the monarchy of Michael Malus makes that argument. Yeah, he does. Yeah, but then if you look at history, there are a lot of examples of kings destroying things. Joseph Stalin was probably the richest man in America in the world during his time because he essentially owned all of Russia. He was the owner of Russia and he was not a very productive guy as far as that is concerned, as far as being a king. And so, yeah, king can be another word for dictator. And so it depends on what kind of culture you have and what kind of beliefs people have. Some of the Middle Eastern kings are not too awful compared to Chuck Schumer, let's say, or something like that. One of my students, I'm mentioning Chuck Schumer, one of my students who came to Mises Yu years ago was in the Marine Corps before he even went to college and he ended his career in the Marines as a sniper instructor. And our friend, the late Ralph Raco once said to him, his name was Ken, he said, Ken, could you pick out Chuck Schumer out of a crowd? This is a Marine Corps sniper, he's asking that anyway, so that's my answer to your question. You can have a bad king and a good king, so it's not set in stone. But Hamilton overall was a disaster. He invented the legal argument for implied powers of the Constitution during his debate with Jefferson over the constitutionality of National Bank. He was the first one to lay out the legal argument for how to go about perverting the commerce clause of the Constitution as Judge Napolitano talked about the other night. And so that's what I meant when I said that he spent the rest of his life after the Constitution was ratified, trying to undermine the Constitution by providing this. And one of his followers was John Marshall. He was the Chief Justice for 36 years and some of John Marshall's decisions were almost verbatim from Hamilton's speeches on how to pervert and destroy the true meaning of the commerce clause of the Constitution for exile, almost word for word. He was slavishly devoted to the ideology of Hamilton. He was the leader of his party, the sort of the federalist wing of American politics.  And that was Hamilton. And he's called Hamilton, the Rousseau of the Right. So if you're a fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophical father of communism, then maybe you should ask Michael Malice if he's also a fan of Rousseau because Hamilton was the Rousseau of the Right philosophically. Let's see, how about in the back? Yeah. You said that the Bank of the United States was modeled after the Bank of England. Is there any evidence that the Bank of the United States essentially was a continuation of the Bank of England? Oh, I don't think so. I've never went across it. I mean, these people, you know, Morris and these people, they were Americans. They knew it was a good scheme and they wanted it to be their scheme. And I don't know why they would hand it over to some British bankers and let them pocket the profits from their scheme. They wanted to pocket the profits from their scheme. They wanted British-style mercantiles and run by Americans, by them. And so there are all these theories out there about all kinds of theories about British bankers being sort of puppet masters of Robert Morris, but I've never seen any evidence of that. And I get emails all the time, especially when I used to work at a Catholic university, accusing me of being a tool of the Pope, just like Jefferson Davis was when he, when I write about Lincoln, because he sent his children to Catholic schools. So therefore, somehow this theory is out there that it was really the Pope who orchestrated the Civil War because the Catholic Church wanted to take over America. And then there's this other theory that the British bankers really orchestrated all of this and when it was them, they wanted to take over America. But they lost the revolution. If they're so powerful, why didn't they win the revolution than the British bankers? The man in the way back had his hand up first, I think, in the background. One of my heroes is Aaron Burr, he's the first creation of the best day of the new life. On that topic, do you have any taste on the treason trial of Aaron Burr and that un-fueled nexthose scandal? Do you know what was going on with that, or? I've never really booked up too much on Aaron Burr. There's a woman who writes blogs a lot for lurockwell.com, Becky Akers, who wrote a book on Aaron Burr. And she sort of, she defends Aaron Burr. So if you're not familiar with Becky Akers book on Aaron Burr, you should look it up if you're interested in this. But I suspect that he was scapegoated. Anybody who challenges Alexander Hamilton to a duel must be a good guy in my book. So yes, ma'am, the lady in the back. High-speed rail? Yeah. Well, the whole history of government railroads is pretty bleak, isn't it? Amtrak has never made a penny in profit. And so you could call it high-speed rail. It sounds high-tech and futuristic, but it's still gonna be run by government and government bureaucrats if it's a government program. So it's in the, and so in government, you don't have the free market feedback mechanism that rewards with profits, efficient behavior, and penalizes with losses, bad behavior. In fact, it's just the opposite. In any, in every government program, I used to call this De Lorenzo's first law of government. Failure is success. The worst you do at teaching the kids in school, the more money we give the public schools. The worse poverty becomes, the more money we give the poverty bureaucracy. And on and on and on. So the worse you do, the more money you get. It's just the opposite of the market. And the whole history of railroads in America has been like that, has been corrupt because people always spend other people's money less carefully than they spend their own money, don't they? And so you could call it high-speed rail, but we don't, we already have some of these. And it will be determined by politics, where the routes go and every aspect of planning is not determined by the economic bottom line, which is to say pleasing consumers. It'll be determined by political influences. And who knows where that will lead to? It's saying, we know it won't lead to efficiency, for that's sure. So there is no such thing, you know, the argument that the governments always make about efficiency as well, we're gonna make government more business-like. We're gonna hire some retired CEO to run the high-speed train or something like that. But then that begs the argument. If you think being business-like is such a good idea, why not privatize it and let a real business operate? You know, why are you playing business? It's kind of like the market socialists during Misi's time who wanted to play capitalism, who thought they could play capitalism. It didn't really work out too well for the Russians, did it? It didn't really succeed. So maybe one more question and our time is up. How about you? You had his hand up for about four since I came into the room, I think. Yeah. So I just wanna ask, for context first, is have you read the Poison's book, The Ethics of Money Production? Yeah, yeah. So my question is more about, in that book, he argued that low interest rates tend to lead to higher time preference behavior, which in turn also leads to the kind of state leadership and the state becoming a bigger part of people's lives and supporting bigger government policies. Would you say that that concept was probably Hamilton's main motivation for supporting the bank, saying as he constantly wanted to undermine that constitution? I don't think Hamilton was anywhere near that sophisticated in his economic understanding. As I said, he was an economic ignoramus. It really is remarkable that the historians will tell you that it was Jefferson who was the economic dummy and it was Hamilton. Jefferson translated the physiocrats into English. He translated the French physiocrats into English. If you walk into Monticello tomorrow, Thomas Jefferson's home, right by the front door, there's a big marble bust of Turgo whose name is on the wall over there. One of his names, the French Finance Minister. And so it's right over there somewhere, as I remember seeing it, he's pointing at it. Yeah, it's right in front of me, right there, ARJ Turgo. And so it was Jefferson who was very well-schooled in economics of his day, including Adam Smith. And it was Hamilton who was the big dummy. He read mercantilist pamphlets written by publicists for British slave plantation traders. And it said things like transportation cost is useless labor, the depths of his income. So I don't think, I don't think so. He just wanted government to be bigger and more activist. He disavowed Adam Smith's invisible hand theorem. He denigrated it, he sneered at it because he thought the economy had to be micromanaged by smart lawyers like himself. That's my opinion of Hamilton. That's the extent of why he was such a busy body. And that's why, and he was also a very Machiavellian. You know, when he nationalized the national debt, the debt for the war had been put up by the states. The states incurred all the war debt. In some states like Virginia had almost paid off all their debt from the war. Other states like Massachusetts had not paid hardly anything. And Hamilton orchestrated the nationalization of the war debt. And he let all the insiders in Congress know that these bonds that were selling for between two and 10% of par value would be purchased by the government at 100% par value. And so all the insiders, Congressman Robert Morris himself, Alexander Hamilton himself, went all over the country buying up all these bonds from war veterans at 2%, 5% of par value, and then cashed them in at 100% a few months later because for the students, you have to understand this is before the internet. So, you know, information didn't flow as quickly as it did now. And Robert Morris is said to have made the equivalent of I think it was $8 million in the deal. And Hamilton himself became rich also with this deal. And that's one of the reasons why Jefferson despised him so much. He called it, he was in favor of consolidation, meaning highly centralized state bottomed on corruption, based on corruption. And that's also why Hamilton wanted a central bank. He wanted a central bank to be able to use to buy political votes in the future because he understood this was a one-time deal. They're getting all these members of Congress, making them rich with the nationalization of the debt was a one-time deal, but they were going to retire and die. And so if you want to keep this engine of the statism going, you need a more permanent engine of statism and that would be the bank. And that was Hamilton's reasoning for being such a champion of the bank. I don't think he understood interest rates or economics at all. Time is up. Time is up.


Hello, it's been nearly a year since we entered the COVID-19 pandemic and life looks so different for all of us. How we work, how we play, go to schools, shop and how we socialize has changed dramatically. For several months we've gone through a roller coaster of emotions and efforts to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe and for the most part we've persevered and we've prevailed. The question now is how do we honor our efforts of this past year? How do we pay homage to what we've endured? And how do we recognize our tenacity? Something that I have noticed throughout this time is how compelled we have been to share our experiences with one another, how we are staying safe and social distancing, our outdoor adventures, checking in on families and neighbors and supporting small businesses. All these things and more have defined this moment for us. So I began thinking, what do these experiences look like in pictures? If we could capture single moments, what story would they tell about Pennsylvania in 2020? And that is why we are asking you to help create a photographic portrait of Pennsylvania during the COVID-19 pandemic. We're introducing a statewide digital exhibit, one lens sharing our common views, so that all the citizens of the Commonwealth can describe their lives during this time. The moments when you've admired the work of others, those quiet moments where you gathered your own strength, and the moments when your community came together for a common cause. We want to share it all. We encourage you to show us your heroes, the helpers in this time. Show us where you saw joy and compassion, kindness and hope. Show us how you were navigating this year where fear and illness overwhelm us still. All of these aspects carry their own significance, but they are also part of a fuller history and these images will write that history of the Commonwealth as it fights this virus. These images will document life as we see it in Pennsylvania during this extraordinary moment, rather than waiting for observers who stand apart from our experiences to write our history for us. It is important that we use this opportunity to tell our own history in our own way. And by recognizing the many facets of the pandemic, we are honoring the strength and the resilience it took Pennsylvania to get here. Thank you.


Thinking about Gani Gani Cik we have about 13 programs that we run out of the organization and so we run programs that are focused on employment and training or education and training, mentorship and health and wellness. And so we have programs that focus, one of our programs called Restoring the Sacred works with youth who are coming from their First Nation community to go to school here in the city because they don't have high schools in their communities. And we know that those youth are at risk of being exploited and recruited for gangs. And so Restoring the Sacred works with volunteer peer mentors where we connect them one on one with mentorship. And we deliver that program three days a week so that they have a safe place to go. Families are scared to send their kids here because they're going missing and getting murdered. And so this is a safe place that kids can come to. They help them academically get finished that grade level that they're here to do and connect them with a tutor if they need to. They have connections with the employment or the education counselors in the communities our staff do. And they have connections with the school counselors here for the schools that each of those students are going to. And they make connections with the host home. So sometimes those students come here and live with strangers. So it can be very scary and difficult for a kid who might be from a very small community to come to the city. So that's Restoring the Sacred. Excuse me. We also have a program called Root Connections which is a program working with justice involved girls who are coming out of this system. And we connect them with staff mentors. And those mentors work on if they want to go to school, if they want to take a training program, life skills, housing, whatever needs those young women have, our mentors work with them. And the work that we do is working with our relatives.  We've had some of our staff whose participants were pregnant and having a baby and folding them in the middle of the night to say, I'm in labor and the and the staff get up and go to the hospital to be with them to have that baby because they have nobody else in their life. So it is about working with our relatives here are the people that we love and and doing what we can to help meet their needs. That's Root Connections. We also have a program called Kastase Amal which works with boys who are 12 and under. So they might be pre-justice involved and maybe, you know, vandalism and those kinds of things. And we have staff mentors who work with them one-on-one sort of for behavior modifications and finding them alternative resources. We've had, we've had some of our participants do horse therapy where they've gone out and made connections with a couple that runs a ranch that does that work. And they connect with whoever their circle of care is, the mentors connect with them. So whether it's the social worker, the parents, the therapist, whoever's connected with that child supports, we do that. And it's 12 and under because under 12 years old you cannot be formally legally charged. And so we want to work with our youth before it comes to that. So that one's Kastase Amal meaning our eldest brother. And then we also have a program called My Team which is the Manitoba youth education and training mentorship. And that works with kids who are exiting CFS care. So between the ages of 16 and 21 they can be in the program. And it helps prepare them for living independently because we know mostly when you come out of the CFS system you are given a warm handshake and a good luck with the rest of your life. So this program really works with you to try to prepare them for what that looks like. And statistically we know that that youth who come out of care are the ones who are seeing overrepresented in gangs in the justice system. When the, when they did the homelessness pointing count not long ago a majority, I think it was, I don't want to misquote their percentages but I think it was 75% of those they engaged that night on the street indicated that they had been at some point in their life connected to CFS. And so we know that that the youth are not prepared when they come out of CFS. We hear from lots of our youth that I don't want welfare, I don't want social assistance, I don't want anything, I just want to live on my own and I don't want anything. I want a job and I want to have my own place, that's what I want. That's what they want before they leave. The reality is those things are not, there is nothing out there for them to provide them with supports once they leave care. And typically it's 18 years old but there are youth who get extensions of services to the age of 21 that might get some additional supports before that but after that they are completely cut off from any supports that they had. So it is a sort of eye-opener for these youth to understand how alone they are and how they are left with nothing. So we do a lot of work on trying to prepare them for, excuse me, going to school or get a training program, housing as well for these youth, life skills for the youth, and again meeting their needs wherever they're at. Sometimes we've had youth who've exited our program and we still stay connected with them.  So these are our relatives, these are our kids, our family and so they'll still come here and have coffee and connect with us organizationally. Sometimes we are able to move kids from one program into another so that their supports continue. So that's the my team program. We have another program called Wakotuin, which is a Strengthening Families Program. That program works with the whole family and whoever that family is to that, to that youth. So there's a target, the target group is the youth, but the program model itself is a family model. So if you're living with grandma or you're living with your auntie or you're living with a foster parent, whoever that might be, we ask all the supports to come in. So we deliver, it's a model that we are evaluating. So we have a partnership with the University of Winnipeg and we deliver it at four different sites. So we've partnered with Spence Neighborhood Association, Ndinoa and the Balal Center and then Gani Gani Cik. And we all deliver the program at our individual sites and target our individual youth and families. And that program has a best practice model that's based out of, I believe it's Seattle that we were able to get that model from. And it works with staff mentors, so paraprofessionals in the program, rather than sort of psychologists or medical professionals. And they do home visits and it has a curriculum that they deliver. And there's a close fidelity to that curriculum. So we can do some adaptations and we've done a lot of cultural adaptations to ensure that we're embedding culture in that work. But we've seen lots of success with families in that program as well. And it provides families with tools on how to communicate, how to problem solve as families, and how to set parameters and goals for a family. So even if they take a few of those tools away, we've heard from families that they've had some, they've had success in using the tools that they've gotten from that program. So that's our Wacotun program. We also have education and training programs which I talked about. One is our business administrative assistant program. And the other one is the executive assistant. And so we are accredited through MIT for those programs. And it's a two-year program. So you can take the first year and get a certificate, which is the business administrative assistant. And then the second year, which is the executive assistant and advanced certificate. And that program has also practicum placement for six weeks that we send them out into the community. And we have probably built 150 employer relationships that we've developed over the years to give our students opportunities, to various opportunities, to do their practicum. The other education and training program we have is called Honoring Gifts, which is a pre-employment program working with single Indigenous mothers who may have never worked before or not had really sustainable employment. And it also embeds the essential, workplace essential skills and literacy learning in that program as well. And it also has practicum placements. And we've seen lots of success with our practicum placements. Lots of our participants in both programs will be offered employment after doing their practicum placement. So we've heard from our partners that our students are even more prepared for the second year than their own students when they're delivering it at their site. And they believe that it's because it's a community-based delivery, which we can then provide greater supports to our participants. And the work that we do with our students isn't just about the education and training, there is also the real-life challenges that students face, including housing, including domestic relationships, including childcare, all of that, just even mental health needs that our students might have. And so we have a employment development and life skills coach on staff who is specifically for the education and training programs that provide that additional supports to our students so that some days when they walk through the door and they want to quit, we have somebody there that can say what's happening and let's work through that. But the instructors also are a big part of providing additional supports where it's needed.  So we know that there are real challenges that students are having just to be in the program. And so it's critical that we treat people with respect and understand we're working with them where they're at. We don't judge our students.  We work through those challenges and try to figure out what's causing that and how we can remove those barriers for students. So those are our education and training programs. And then we have a second site because we are bursting at the seams here at Ghani Ghani Chikin. So we know we need to expand. And so we have a second site at the social enterprise building on Main Street and we deliver a couple of programs out of there. One of our programs that we recently actually moved back to the site because the the families wanted it is our heart medicine sorry medicine bear counseling and supports elder support services. And that program works with families of murdered and missing indigenous women and girls. And we know for a lot of our families there's lots of need for healing around around losing a family member in that way. And it's also really difficult to sort of understand why so many indigenous women and girls are going missing and being murdered. And they're unresolved and a lot of times not a priority. And so that's really difficult to work through as a human being to understand why are we seen almost as sort of disposable human beings. And so we do lots of work around healing and wellness in that program. We also have a program called Heart Medicine which works with women who've experienced sexualized violence and and do healing sessions with with those participants. We have our program called Mino Babatsuin which is working with ending HIV AIDS STPBI sort of epidemic right now in the indigenous community and we do lots of education around that in our community and we work with the community. We're one of the only indigenous organizations still doing work around HIV and AIDS. There's few that are doing that work and so it's really especially because Manitoba has the second highest rates of HIV and AIDS in Canada and so Saskatchewan being number one and we're very closely behind that and so there's lots of work that still needs to be done there. And especially because when we're thinking about First Nations community having access to testing and those kinds of things, we know what the barriers are and we need to do a lot more work around that and stigma and all of that. And then we have a program called White Wolf Speaking which works with reproductive justice for youth and and sort of sexual education and and so there's some training that goes on that they take out into the community when they do that. We've recently just received funding for another program around teen dating violence and so that one is just in its we've only been running started for for a month now just over a month so we're also going to be embedding that into into the community and we're also going to be working with First Nations communities up north to do work around that program as well. With every program every single program we run we embed Indigenous ways of being in our work. So all of our programs embed ceremony as an organization. We we do medicine picking together with our participants and we we bring in our our cultural our knowledge keep knowledge keepers or elders some people refer to them as and and embed as much Indigenous knowledge into our programming as we can. One of the things we know that our elders are telling us is that we need to bring our young people back to the fire and and we know that that if we want to change things that's really important work that we do. So when we think about because we talk sometimes about the the seven sacred teachings but there's really thousands of sacred teachings and so we try to access as many knowledge keepers and elders as we can to bring into our program so that we can get as much information on Indigenous ways of being and embedding that our staff have an opportunity to participate because we want our staff to be able to then teach and and do that work in the program and and so that's really critical in the work that we do is that we embed Indigenous ways of being in everything that we do here. I guess thinking about success we we have to think about it in in two ways. There's every program that you have you have a funder who then has reporting requirements and they almost have their own expected outcomes that they want to see happening as part of that funding stream so for example restoring the sacred the funding that we get really is about is about preventing sexual exploitation and so we need to do some measurement around success around that building knowledge and understanding around what that could look like what what what you know what that what recruiters might look like and preparing kids to understand that and so that would be a measurement of success a funder success to see that or in the education programs that their measurement tools sometimes doesn't doesn't really match the reality for students but their measurement tool is about around attendance and I understand a lot of it is because of funding if they're not there we we don't want to give the funding but but but grades can do really they can do really well with grades but that's not a measurement tool for funders in some way so sometimes it doesn't really match what what you would see as success we've had a once we had a woman come right from the streets doing you know sex work on the streets and and there's lots of you know discussion around language and safer ways to use language around women who've been exploited and and traffic to do sex work but we've had a woman leave the street and come right into the program and say I want to get my kids back so she took the honoring gifts program that would be a measurement of success but the funder measures success differently so we we we as an organization try to measure success based on the participants goals and what their what their needs are if we get housing for people if we have them enter a training program if somebody like we've had women who have come into the program who were on methadone and needed to leave the program to go have their methadone treatment and come back to the program and we've had some of our other participants tell us that that that was triggering for them and so we've we worked with the those students to move their treatment to the end of the day and they had no idea that they were even triggering some of the other students so that was a success in just how we can keep people in a program and make sure that everybody feels safe and is well and just finding ways to do things differently measuring success is really about the individuals goals and what that success looks like but of course then we still have to meet funder measurements of success as well I think thinking about Gany Ganychik and what would like Indigenous education in our organization is about it really is about having a culturally safe place for people to to have a learning experience and I know there's been a lot of discussion about what is cultural safety and and we've some mori nurses came up with the definition of what cultural safety is and so we've adapted that and adopted it and use it as our organization but also cultural safety is having a place where where people Indigenous people can come and learn about Indigenous ways of being learn about culture gain knowledge explore that if if that's what what what they wish because we have individuals Indigenous individuals who aren't interested and aren't there yet in in learning culture and understanding culture and part of that is just in community there's a lot of sort of Christianity Christianity embedded in community and so that's been the practice for communities but we want to give people a place that they can explore that and understand that in a safe way where it's where the learning is from knowledge keepers those who who can give us that knowledge and share that information with us a place where you can come and use medicines if you like we've had people who've worked here and then moved on to other employment and on their lunch breaks come here and do as much and go back to work because this is a place where they can do that so that's cultural safety that's a place where you can walk in and have people that look like you and understand who've you know we've had we try to hire people with lived experience so there's people who've experienced what you've experienced and and understand what that what that means and so and have a place where you're not judged and and and so that's really important in I think Indigenous education and really understanding that we hear from our students that it can be intimidating to go to a an institution that's huge and intimidating and scary there's not a lot of students that look like you there might be a student nobody speaks your language if that's if you come from a community where you have your language and so having a smaller connection to a community-based delivery has been one of the things that we've heard from students that's the reason that's one of the main reasons why I chose to go to Ghani Ghani Chik instead of to the institution that also offers the same program I think overall Indigenous education should embed embed Indigenous ways and knowledge in in their delivery there's so much value in in embedding land-based learning and and you know learning about medicines and learning about learning Indigenous ways while you're still working through Western curriculum there's real value in doing that there's a you if you can make the connection between what you're learning and what's Indigenous ways there's sort of a more natural desire to to to learn and I guess that could be really thinking about people's learning styles and different ways of of of incorporating learning in your teaching methodologies that focus on on on individuals on the individual learner I would love to see that youth wouldn't have to leave their communities to to go to school you know it's a human right to education and families are scared to send their children out of their community so we're hearing now that families are either picking up and moving so their youth can their children can go to high school or they don't go at all so if we're thinking about education in 10 years from now and we're not you know trying to resolve some of those some of those barriers then we're because I see Indigenous education as more Indigenous teachers Indigenous led institutions more Indigenous students in education and more traditional practices embedded in in in education that's that's what how I see Indigenous education but if we're not focusing on the on the barriers that we know exist now we're not going to get there we won't get there when I think about Indigenous education I think like when if you go to a I went to a conference a homelessness conference and we know that probably I think it's 80% of of people who are homeless are Indigenous so it's high and when we think about those of us who are doing work in the in homelessness there's there's probably 30% of Indigenous people doing work in that in that area so we want so we know that there's sort of a gap in in Indigenous trained trained Indigenous people coming out of the education systems whether it's post-secondary or formal education then more than we've seen before but not not enough to have us working with our people so I see more Indigenous people who are coming out of the education system trained and prepared to work with our people I think that's what I see for Indigenous education more Indigenous people being trained and employed there are a number of Indigenous organizations that exist right now but but not enough and we want to be able to do more for our community and not because our community is unhealthy or community is we are Indigenous community is a thriving beautiful community and all we're doing is providing some supports and resources for the pieces that they need in that moment and and so we want to be able to offer more programming and more services but when you're a small organization and I would say Gani Gani Chick is a smaller organization I mean we have probably about 45 employees here there is you want to you want to grow and expand and so a lot of times you think about there was a time where we didn't have say a human resource person and we had to try to figure out what are our needs around human resources and policy development and those kind of things so then you we were able to secure some funding to hire our human resource person and do some work around that but what about organizations that don't have access to those funding or they apply for the funding and they're not successful one of the things that I was thinking about a while ago and I know that um gosh I forgot the name spark I think will pair you up with professionals in in the community if you have a need so if there was an HR professional that and you didn't have an HR they'd pair you up um and which is wonderful but that's sort of short term supports you're getting and so there needs to be sort of a resource maybe that um Indigenous organizations can access for building capacity and um strengthening capacity because lots of organizations have the capacity they just don't have the people the people resources to to um or the or the all the knowledge so we might have the people but we might not have somebody who has all the knowledge in HR or somebody who has like we're growing as an organization right now and we have to think do we have enough operations structurally operations people so finance people administrative people leadership people are there enough of those and do we have the right people how do you sort of assess where you are as an organization and do some strategic planning around that if if you don't have the people on staff who have experience or skills in doing those kinds of things so I think if there was a resource you could uh organization you could call or a resource that you can engage in in doing some growth and building for Indigenous organizations I think that would be really helpful so just finding those gaps that you might have as an organization and being able to find a resource that'll help you feel those gaps um uh I can't think of anything else right now in terms of I mean there's so there's a lot of need and it always comes back to the funding and I think that you know that has to be said because Indigenous organizations are are are fund underfunded um and so it does come back to if you had the funding you could put the resources in or you could hire the consultants or you could do those kinds of things the other piece that I want to mention is that we um we call our relatives who who come here and and participate in our programs we call them participants or relatives we don't clientize our our family members that come here and so that's really important to us as well and organizationally we try not to um we try not to use hierarchies in our work and it's hard because you know you're you're an Indigenous organization that's required to use what these westernized approaches you know you have to have policies and procedure manuals you have to have a finance policy your funder wants to see an org chart those are all western um ways that you have to embed in Indigenous you have to be incorporated you have to have a business number that those are all really critical pieces but organizationally we try we try and it's it's difficult we try to decolonize in how we do our work like even when we have um staff difficulties we try to embed sharing circles or having a sweat lodge ceremony or something that'll help us come together as as staff but it's hard because you're bringing people who come from you know westernized workplaces and you're trying to do something new and and and it's it's sometimes difficult because it you'll you'll be able to use pieces of it and then somebody will say I want to I want to initiate this HR process so people still have the safety of sort of that legal employment piece to back back up back them you know to lean back on but um you do you try to do a lot of work in the beginning to sort of decolonize that in our work so as an organization we we we are committed to doing that um not always successfully we're trying to like marry two ways of doing something and and how make sure people feel safe in doing that and doing it in a good way but as an Indigenous organization it's intentional we are intentionally thinking about that all the time especially those who are sort of in the leadership positions we do that work together all the time to say what's the best way of resolving this or moving forward on this or doing that um you know we offer our staff tobacco to have a conversation about some difficulties two people might be having together and we use you know we we fan our staff and we do things that we try to embed Indigenous ways in even in our in our practices so we try not to have hierarchies where you know the boss said or those kinds of things um we all bring strength to to the organization so that's something else that as an Indigenous organization we're really intentionally trying to do that work