I realized society was against me at a very young age. Probably around five years old. I watched people treat my mother like dirt. We were out of food over the weekend and so had to go see the Indian agent on Monday to ask for some assistance. He made my mother wait for three hours before he finally gave her an order. When I saw him doing that to her, I said to myself, "When I grow up, no bastard like you is ever going to do that to me." That's been part of my life ever since.

When I started going to the Indian Day School on the reserve, we were taught that we came from an inferior civilization and culture and that we should strive to adopt white ways if we wanted to succeed in the world. So, the first time I ever came into contact with blatant racism, it was by a teacher - a Catholic nun, actually. The school was staffed by a religious order - the Sisters of Charity - and a priest was the principal.

It made me feel very inferior. When I was a child in the 1940s, we used to go down and watch cowboy and Indian movies, and of course we'd cheer on the "good guys" - the cowboys. That's what happens to you when you're taught that you come from savages.

But if you want to know about real savages, there is a man named John Martin Crawford [3] who preyed upon First Nations women. What upset me terribly was that at the same time he was on trial for the murder of four Cree women, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka were on trial for murdering two white girls. Bernardo and Homolka did commit a reprehensible crime, no doubt about it, but here you have this other serial killer being tried, and because his victims were four Cree women, the media paid very little attention, and no one knows his name. Even though this man tortured, raped and murdered these women, people took little notice. It showed me how a society looks upon this kind of thing.

The judge in Crawford's trial, when he handed down his verdict, stated that Crawford "knew what he was doing." In 1981, I believe it was, he was caught for raping a white woman and got 10 years for it. When he was paroled, he came out and started raping 'other' women, in this case Cree women. He picked Cree women, because he knew society wouldn't care.

I really have a lot of problems with the fact Canadian society claims not to be racist, when in actual fact, it's very racist. It's systemic racism that comes from the colonial past. Propaganda invented by colonial officials depicted the Mi'Kmaq and other First Nations peoples as being barbarians and savages. They depicted us as having no feelings of humanity, and they demonized us as a people. To this day, it's still in the subconscious of a great many white people.

The media is indifferent too because they're controlled by white society. One of First Nations people's biggest problems is that we haven't got the billionaires owning news empires. Our side of the story has really never been presented to the public in any meaningful way. I wrote a book called We Were Not The Savages [4], and that was the first time the Mi'Kmaq side of the story was ever told. It was received very well. There are probably 25,000 copies of it now and several universities use it as course material, which is very satisfying. I also have an extensive website [5]of how history actually unfolded.

In Texas a few weeks ago, there was a trial in which three white young men picked up a mentally slow black man, took him to a party and beat him unconscious. Finally, they left him on the side of the road where red ants practically ate him alive. He did survive and recover to the extent that he's mobile again, but he'll be in a home for the rest of his days. The three young white man got slapped on the wrist, and society in Texas wasn't outraged about this happening. That's par for the course - When you see our people being subjected to abuse, racism and discrimination, there's not much of a reaction. The news media doesn't run with it and spread it far and wide.

There have been a few exceptions; Donald Marshall [6] caught the imagination of the world's press. In Europe and Asia it was front page news, and that's why it became such a big news item in Canada. In 1971 Donald Marshall Jr. was charged, tried and convicted for a murder he didn't commit. He was guilty of only one thing: being a Mi'kmaq.

I suspect the Robert Pickton trial is receiving so much attention because there were a substantial number of white women murdered. That's why this story is such a hot news item. If the victims were only First Nations, I don't think it would have gotten the same attention, and Pickton may enjoy the same degree of anonymity as John Martin Crawford.

If I owned the news media, was white and was a person of conscience, I would begin to learn the true history of this country and spread the truth. It's reprehensible that in Nova Scotia, we have a junior high school named after Governor Edward Cornwallis. There's also a street named after him and a park named after him. There's a statue of him and he's treated like a hero. That man issued a proclamation in 1749 for scalps of Mi'Kmaq men, women and children. He stated quite explicitly in his records that he meant to exterminate them in the peninsula of Nova Scotia, yet he's still recognized as a hero. When I'm giving lectures, I tell people in this province that until the day arrives that the statue is taken down, the park is renamed and the junior high school is renamed, I will not recognize Nova Scotia as a racially equal society. You don't idolize a barbarian.

The simple fact is we do not know our own histories. We have feelings of inferiority, we're not comfortable in modern North American society and we get pushed to the wayside. I can relate stories of my own employment where I was made to feel like dirt by people that owned business establishments where I worked.

Our people have to regain our pride. We need to begin to reject the federal government's paternalism, and begin to ask ourselves the question: How are we going to re-establish our communities as economically viable entities, as they were prior to the European invasion. Once we answer that question, then we're on the way to recovery.

I've heard stories about our women being picked up raped by jail officials and policemen. Nothing ever come of it. These people walk away without any kind of penalty. As a people, we don't trust the justice system. We may be more trustful now than we were 10 or 15 years ago, but there's still a vast sense of mistrust against the establishment.

We've got to remove the fear of retribution from the dominant society. When I wrote We Were Not The Savages [7] for instance, several people from the Mi'Kmaq community came up to me and asked me why I was rocking the boat. I stated to them and I'll state to anybody that it's time to rock it hard. We need to bring the skeletons out of the Caucasian's closet and broadcast them.

When the French first arrived, they got along quite well with the Mi'Kmaq. There were intermarriages and such. There was no war. But then the English came along, who presumed to be superior to the Mi'Kmaq and treated us like inferior people, went to war with us, took all our land, dispossessed us, and robbed us of everything, including sometimes, our lives. None of this was publicized prior to my book. The history is the same across Canada. If you look at any First Nations history, you'll find that the people were treated abysmally. These stories haven't been told yet.

One Cree woman wrote a history of one of the Cree First Nations, and it was sent to me to critique. I got through a couple chapters and I could have sworn a Caucasian wrote it. So, I sent it back to the publisher and said, "No, this is not what we're looking for." I went to her and told her if she was going to write a book, she needed to write it with Cree eyes. I don't know if she ever did or not, but know her book never got published.

It's time to rediscover ourselves and rediscover the fact that we are as intelligent as anyone on the face of God's good earth. There's nothing wrong with our intellect. It may be a bit rusty from being victims of condescending paternalism, but if we awaken that and proceed with the goal of being independent people and be masters in our own house, then we're on our way. We can recover; we can re-establish our pride and dignity. I was taught to be ashamed to be a Mi'Kmaq. I put a lot of research into my book and found out that we should be among the proudest people on the face of the earth. They were able to survive what they were up against. So far, it's been the hunter's side of the story being told. I am now telling the lion's story, and it's changing a lot of minds.