June 2014 Laughing, it’s a National radio special. […] The podcast Red Man Laughing, which is independent of CBC, is still going strong. That’s at www.redmanlaughing.com I’m starting a media network, that’s my next project. It’s going to start as a podcast network, then we’re going to branch out to a full-fledged media entity like Vice, doing documentaries etc. The business plan is being done right now. It’s to create a platform for our content. I think they’re waiting to hear from us. If we start doing these documentaries, if we start supporting our artists by bringing them across the country, if we start selling merchandise, if they say 75% of our population is under the age of 40 and we are more educated than ever, I have to wonder where that disposable income is going. We have to recognize that the system is broken […] It’s like a wild west all over again. Remember that cowboys and Indians shit where people were just planting flags all over the place going ‘this is where I live!’? That’s what we need to do on the internet and we have these young people that have nowhere to hang their hat right now -- writers, documentarians. The time to build [the portal] is now, by just looking at the contacts on my phone, the people I know, there’s so much talent out there and so many of the artists out there working are just struggling to pay rent that we’re not in a position to promote excellence right now. We’re just surviving. So I want to build a platform that supports all of this work and really gets us to the next level. […] A multi-platform focusing on
Indigenous Times music, fashion, that kind of thing, and not being exclusive about it.. like you don’t have to be some famous native that’s been on APTN. Celebrity culture doesn’t belong in our communities; for my podcast Red Man Laughing I’ll have anyone from a Pow Wow singer, to an academic, to an artist, and anywhere in between. All voices need to be represented, I had a guy that just raises dogs, and that’s his whole job and he told me like an hour and 20 minute story about dog sledding in the north -- it’s the most listened to episode of my podcast ever. It gets probably 400 downloads a week just on that story about this guy raising these dog sledding dogs and it’s all about his connection to the land, an incredible story about being lost in the dead of winter on the great Slave Lake in the North West Territories and he thinks he’s going to die and he prays for himself. All the stories that connect us back to the land which has given us our life. That’s what we’re all about as native people so we all have something to give, to add. and that’s why in the media company too the third pillar of that whole media company too is doing something that I’m calling legacy projects which is basically selling projects to communities in formation to go in there and do immersive storytelling, documentaries, language work, getting it all digitized on a website for them. As our elders pass.. back home my grandma was the third last language speaker on my reserve and she passed in 2007, and there is only 2 left and a bunch of people went into kind of panic mode and started relearning the language. There is a big movement for it and so many communities now are in
that exact same danger, that’s why that legacy project is important. [Podcasting] is my thing, I beat my chest real hard about this stuff, but we should all be podcasting, we should all be writing, there should be no shortage of material it should just be fucking everywhere. Our generation is the first generation that’s free, we do suffer from the intergenerational effect of residential school, I have come from a family of addicts, I have my own difficulties in my life and many of us are still in that cycle but we didn’t go to those schools, we can do better, like my kid, I don’t have to pass any of that shit onto them, I’m big enough, I can hold that, I won’t give that to them so I think we’re all in the same spot, I think we’re all struggling to figure things out. So comedy is a medicine right? I don’t know, I don’t buy it, cause in a sense, I think saying that really takes a lot away from us, you know “comedy is medicine”. We laugh to heal, healing is laughter and yeah that’s true but then so often when we say that, that’s where we stop talking, and I think that laughter is so much more especially for us as First Nations. Yes, there used to be a way of storytelling and humour was so important to it. Yeah, and laughter, the idea of the trickster -- Nanabush, Wesakechak, whatever you want to call him showed
7 up in these stories, to teach us something. If you go down to Arizona they have their healer they say is like their jokester -- their tricksters. And you go to any indigenous nation they all have it; so wait a minute, why does everybody have this central character? It’s because we didn’t scold our kids the way they did, we didn’t do it that way; we had a different way of teaching and healing. I think with laughter, you have the whole cliché of ‘you go to a ceremony or a funeral and there’s more laughter at a funeral than anywhere’ because yeah we are healing each other we are making ourselves feel better right? When you go to a real serious sweat or something, that pipe carrier is teasing, everyone’s laughing and so it’s deeper than just laughter is medicine.. It’s who we are […] even old round dance songs from what I’ve been told were all about like laughter, and it’s all in the language but it was all about laughter and yeah there are ceremonial songs too. In general we don’t separate science from our lives, we don’t call it biology or ecology or geology, we don’t call it these things, so yeah I think it’s a lot more complex than laughter is medicine and we’re lucky because that’s innately who we are, it’s in all of us. •
Red Man Laughing Ryan McMahon’s Podcast: www.redmanlaughing.com Twitter: @RMLpodcast