Episode 2.2- Before Canada Had a Name: From First Maps to First Moon Landing: Leif Erickson, the Avro Arrow, and the Space Race

What if history wasn’t just a series of dates, but a map of the human soul?

In this epic, cinematic journey through time and space, we trace the arc of exploration, ambition, and identity—spanning from Leif Erikson and the Vikings to JFK, the Space Race, the Avro Arrow, and Neil Armstrong landing on the moon. We hop from Étienne Brûlé to the Cold War to today, and all the way back to the traces and roots of our modern and ongoing reckoning with Canada’s evolving story.

We are living at an unbelievable point in human history. This “bridge” episode connects past and present through the powerful currents of continuity and change, progress and peril. 

As we sail the whitecaps of time toward the life of Samuel de Champlain in the next episode, we confront the earliest (known) colonial encounters, the scars and sparks of contact, and evolving forces within Dr. Marshal McLuhan's 'global village'. 

These historical and human forces directly shape us and our communities.

Important figures like Dr. Gabor Maté are also examined to better understand implications of our modern obsession with perfection and (un)originality, and how the anxieties of Western culture have disconnected us from a deeper, more rooted way of being. We explore how reunification of the bodymind through wonder, story, and personal connection can offer us a path forward.

Whether through Adam Shoalts-inspired wilderness trails, or Soviet rocket launches, this episode asks: What does it mean to belong to a land, a legacy, and a people still in formation?

This discussion is north of ordinary.

🧭 Topics Covered

Canadian History, early European exploration, Adam Shoalts, colonial contact with indigenous peoples, Chief Donnacona, indigenous ways of seeing and knowing, mapping and cartography, humanity, the human spirit, technology through time, critical perspectives, Cartier, Cabot, Brûlé, Champlain, JFK, Reagan, Iron Curtain, Berlin Wall, Cold War, Canada, USSR, Russia, United States, politics, Indigenous stories, ways of knowing, space race, Gabor Maté, mental health, resilience, perfectionism, colonial contact

Transcript

UNKNOWN: 0:00

Are we ready?

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Let's go. Welcome back to Canadian Grid, North of Ordinary. I'm your host, Jamie Jackson. This is episode two, Before Canada Had a Name. This is part two called The First Maps and Dreaming the Modern World into Being. In the last episode, we mentioned the name of some of the early European explorers, such as Christopher Columbus, John Cabot, and Jacques Cartier, as they stepped off their known version of the map and into the mist. The principal concept for the ongoing historical introduction to this podcast meaning my explicit motivation for undertaking and sharing this work is to encourage all of us to plug back into this country's amazing history we'll be heading back today in time where i can bring to life for you how we i mean you and me got here times of division require efforts at creating unity We share more in common than what divides us. Growing up, I was riveted by stories of Canadian history, including those of Old Muskoka, Bracebridge, and Lake of Bays, from whence much of my paternal lineage hailed. We had the Royal Mail ships, the Seguin, a history of loggers, Algonquin and Arrowhead Park, the Group of Seven. I was always dismayed hearing so many people and students say that Canadian history is boring. When I think of all the vivid stories I read or I've read, and about the lives that were dedicated to building this great nation, this country so many of us were so lucky to be born into, inherited based on our shared national ancestry, it is so incredibly jam-packed. It's full of so many heroic stories of diverse individuals and groups, both Indigenous and colonial, coming from all races, creeds, sexes, and walks of life. The past journey is our present journey. Jack White of the White Stripes nails it. Americans, what? Nothing better to do. Why don't you kick yourself out? You're an immigrant too. Who's using who? What should we do? Well, you can't be a pimp and a prostitute too. We'll be heading back today in time where I can bring to life for you how we, I mean you and me, got here. Times of division require efforts at creating unity. We share more in common than what divides us. United we stand, divided we fall. Gord Downie in the tragically hip, some little bones. Fingers and toes, fingers and toes, 40 things we share. 41 if you include the fact that we don't care. What Gord means is that we've all got 10 fingers, 10 toes, you've got 10 of each, and altogether we've got 40. Yet Downey ironically adds that the other thing we as humans share is that we don't care. 41 if you'd include the fact that we don't care. What do you think? Do you care? Do we as Canadians generally care? What do we care about? Ourselves? Our families? Our personal property? Our communities? How about strangers? What is a stranger? Is there such thing as a stranger when we're all human beings? If we know not where we existentially came from or where we go when we take our final bows? A favorite quote of mine, unattributed as far as I'm aware is, you're a ghost, driving a meat-covered skeleton made from stardust, riding a rock. Hurtling through space, fear nothing. Like Gord's lyrics from the hips song Gift Shop, which I've mentioned in an earlier episode, we get to feel small from high up above. But today I'm here to ask you and here on Canadian Grit and all of my listeners is, how often do we really break free from our daily routine? For some, the monotony or perhaps drudgery of it all when we look at headlines or social media. Perhaps there is no simple explanation for anything any of us do. Well, that's where Canadian Grit comes in, and it's what makes us north of ordinary. If you've liked the first couple episodes, why not double check that you've subscribed to the podcast to ensure timely download of new episodes and that you've left me a rating or feedback on the app you're currently using to listen to me. It means a lot and I'd love for our community to keep growing. The more voices we have, the more we can build and create something incredibly special. Here at Canadian Grit, we are investing in ourselves and our own communities and we have no need to go it alone. What can't humans do when we work together? When we realize our collective energy force and we put our collective efforts into a shared interest? For example, World War II saw the largest mobilization of goods and people in all of history. Car factories were turned into places of weaponry and arms development. Young children on the home front were involved in scrap metal and rubber campaigns, or helping their parents or people at home with war gardens to save food and to better allocate resources where the efforts were most necessary. Or how about John Fitzgerald Kennedy's moon speech on September 12th, 1962, promising to get to the moon by the end of the 1960s and demonstrate the profound capacities of the unified democratic spirit in the face of the encroaching, dubbed inferior, and often dehumanized communist boogeyman that was personified by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, aka the USSR, by American and Western politicians of the era. JFK and other incredibly powerful American politicians at the time, like Dulles, leveraged the public's most basic human emotions related mostly to pride and fear.

SPEAKER_02: 6:00

But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone.

SPEAKER_00: 6:30

And in true capitalist fashion, they capitalized on economic ideas that they paraded around as the political end of the world. The emotions, the collective power and energy, and the amount of ultimately human goodwill and sacrifices made on behalf of Americans and Canadians to achieve our current dominant reality that exists in Canada and the West is therefore found in more recent roots that we can all continue to see today when we turn on the news of Ukraine and Russia or the Middle East, Palestine, Israel, the Congo, the list, well, it keeps going. Many of these current issues that continue to confront us today, well, they stem and really continue to bloom in 2025 in the form of the nuclear threat found in unresolved Cold War politics of mutually assured destruction. It's the idea that America and the West had somehow won something, what Fukuyama called the end of history at the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90s. The idea that democracy had won, and without this duplicitous and competitive nature of communism versus democracy, that history had come to its ultimate moment. However, 35 years later, I would argue that that sounds naive. Especially when we consider in 2002, 2003, soon after 9-11, that Russia wanted to join NATO. And then over the last 30 years since this, quote, fall of the Iron Curtain, and one of the most famous speeches given by Ronald Reagan occurred on my birthday.

SPEAKER_03: 8:11

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down And

SPEAKER_00: 8:44

in the ensuing fall of the Iron Curtain and the USSR, he was then celebrating in the face of the world's second most powerful nuclear superpower without realizing the results of an impending dot-com and digital tech boom at the end of the 20th century while there's just too many variables in reality to say that history happens linearly or in some sort of chronological or sensical fashion. With this kind of historical knowledge or critical analysis of history, we might come to understand the power of everyday people like you and me when they start to learn or to take notice of the unbelievable potential power associated with collective movement and acting together. Taking steps toward meaningful human change and dignity, going back to such monumental speeches as JFK's 1962 moon speech, well, here at Canadian Grit, our Canadian identity is tied directly to the fact that we can create a better future by choosing it for ourselves now, not waiting until tomorrow. On July 20th, 1969, Neil Armstrong took...

SPEAKER_04: 9:55

One

SPEAKER_00: 9:55

small step for man, one...

SPEAKER_04: 9:56

Mr.

SPEAKER_00: 10:18

Armstrong often stated very plainly that he said that was one small step for a man. And one giant leap for mankind, although the audio is muddled and it is often quoted as one small step for man. And again, it makes more sense when we say a man. But ultimately what the importance of including this, one of the most famous quotes in history is that the man who did it stated very concretely, expressly that this wasn't just for America. He stated it. It's for mankind, for all of people. Yet the US and maybe even the West in their bid to overthrow communism and to show their dominance maybe in taking or decided to take all of the credit and maybe if we critically think maybe we continue to do so JFK said they wanted the moon not because America had to but because America was choosing to. In no unclear way, JFK and the Americans mobilized and took credit for the entire efforts of the human journey up till 1969. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon with Buzz Aldrin, America took credit for thousands of years of human history, human struggle, resilience, devastating plagues, disease, colonialism, and never-ending wars, it seems, that led to where we are today. We are a colonial nation. The current reality of North America demonstrates quite clearly that we are a history of war and struggle and that also, if we dig farther back, that the mathematics we have, these sorts of things go back to the ancient Greeks, the Middle East, China. They include developments of rocket technologies that were created through horrendous World War II warfare and whose technological developments started in Nazi Germany and yet was absorbed by the American population as so many of the Jewish physicists fled Germany in the earlier days of the war, seeking refuge and ultimately staying in America. They became vital to a space project that really had nothing to do with their own roots or ethnicity. And many of the future National Aeronautics and Space Administration, aka NASA, which is a US government agency responsible for space exploration, research, and technology, was established in 1958. And I find the more I analyze these types of things from a historical perspective, I find it ironic that they call it the National Space Administration. much like the National Hockey League or National Football or Basketball League. Yet so many NASA engineers, like many of the players in these National American Athletic Leagues, actually come or hail from different countries from around the world, especially Canada. Another vital country that was pivotal to the space race, but often uncredited for their central contributions to NASA and the quote, U.S.''s moon victory, was Canada. To this day, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's name continues to be slagged or brought down by the infamous 1958 cancellation of the Avro Aero, one of Canada's greatest technological achievements, which was ultimately rendered needless due to intercontinental ballistic missiles that could be blasted into the atmosphere as opposed to carried on a Russian bomber over Canadian airspace. The Canadian government stated under Diefenbaker that it couldn't sustain the costs associated with the Avro Aero program and its groundbreaking Iroquois engines never even got to be tested with the delta wing design of the Canadian Arrow. It broke so many boundaries yet never came to fruition in its true sense. The Arrow will be the focus of another episode, yet what matters for this story today is how so many of the engineers and employees working for the homegrown Avro company here in Canada ultimately suffered a sad end. It represents a classic case of brain drain of Canadian talent to the US and a bigger market, with many Canadian engineers and specialized technicians going to work for NASA in the United States in the 1960s during the space race. For today's episode, you might be asking why this divergence into the 20th century and the American space race. It's Canadian grit. He said it was Canadian, right? Well, yeah, but Canada, we're also human. And so are our counterparts to the south. We took everything we inherited, which was everything taken from civilizations of the past immemorial, all the way back to the Egyptians. What did you and I build? Can we explain how the internal combustion engine works or the massive airliners we just walk onto like it's so normal? And how we believe it wasn't just only over a hundred years ago that the first flight was taken by the Wright brothers in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And that for thousands of years, people could only dream of flying like a bird. And now we do it in pressurized cigar tubes that go over a thousand kilometers an hour, 40,000 feet into the air. The atmosphere... You know, we can go back and look at Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of what is sort of attributed as the first idea, at least written down, of a helicopter. Where's the amazement and wonder at what we've inherited? Do we perhaps act like it was we who invented it or made it? That, my friends, is the colonial mindset, and we've been born into it. We've received the entire history and best, most interesting heirlooms of each civilization that came before us. We are all of them. We can't be separated, nor should we wish to be. This is the journey of humanity. This should give us solace. It gives us places to find others who have struggled, yet who have shown unreal grit in overcoming hardships and human resilience. To this day, people quote JFK for asking the American people to consider not what their country could do for them, but what they could do for their country. He would often ask Americans the powerful and reflective questions, if not now, when? If not us, who? Although we love to romanticize this, it should also be noted that actually JFK did not invent this quote or this adage. Yet the phrase, if not now, when, was originally used by a man named Rabbi Hillel, a Jewish sage who lived in the first century B.C., before Christ or before the Common Era, meaning that he was saying this nearly 3,000 years before JFK was ever even imagined. So what else has been recycled? When you really start to look through history, the answer is everything. Hell, even Bill Shakespeare was accused of plagiarism by a contemporary playwright and critic named Robert Greene, and that's Greene with an E, and people probably called him Bob. Uh, and so in his pamphlet, A Grotesworth of Wit, Greene called Shakespeare an upstart crow, quote, who was beautifying himself with others' feathers, implying he was more than willing to take credit for other people's work. Yet, Although Green made his accusation within a specific instance of criticism, it's rather important to understand the context of writing within the Elizabethan era. Many plays were based on existing stories or previous plays. Again, all the way back to Greek tragedies, Oedipus, Oedipus, it's all there. And it wasn't uncommon for playwrights then, or even now... to adapt or borrow elements from other sources. Anybody ever heard of Jesus Christ Superstar? The Phantom of the Opera? Shakespeare was a skilled and innovative playwright who did not just simply copy or plagiarize the works of others. Haven't you ever heard a song that sounds exactly like another song or read a story that's exactly like another story? It's everywhere. The power of our minds and imaginations is so incredible. It allows us to stare at words on the page of a novel. And we basically trip out in our minds, potentially for hours on end if we so choose. We have a most powerful gift and tormentor. It's our minds. Yet we can learn to master our minds, to learn that our mind is a problem solver that evolved with us to keep us motivated as hunter-gatherers, more tribal beings, to keep us searching and alive. Our minds push our species forward to this very moment. Our minds aren't just for you and me or for people we know and love. This mind is for the species of humanity as a whole. It's the reason we're here. It's the reason for the explorers we're going to discuss today. So that's why Canadian Grit is starting with some gritty histories from our past. I want to take you there to put you in the settings for you to hear some sounds that may echo the reality of perhaps what took place. And although the sounds I've recorded to add depth to each podcast do not physically reverberate the sound waves of the past, but how you and I live and think about the world, how it was built, colonized, explored, developed, all of our systems of education law morality business ethics and even our social codes have been inherited and passed down through this lineage and it creates our individual and shared realities quite plainly it's the social contract that rousseau discussed people are born free but everywhere we are in chains and these are social chains what chains are holding us moored that's the question of the day Even if we are aware or not of our individual and shared realities and how we're affected or conditioned by them, a great metaphor that I discovered through Dr. Gabor Maté's The Myth of Normal is one that he mentions from David Foster Wallace's video that you can find on YouTube by just typing David Foster Wallace fish metaphor. And I mentioned this also in episode one. I'll paraphrase Wallace's metaphor. Two young fish are swimming on their way to work when they encounter an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish, he acknowledges the two younger fish and says, morning fellas, how's the water today? He continues to swim past and then one of the younger fish looks to his pal and says, what the hell is water? You see, when a fisherman pulls a fish out of the water, the fish's reality must forever be altered, no? It's like us when we travel. It's culture shock. It's what I felt in Tanzania or Morocco that forever changed me as I was pulled out of the waters of Muskoka and Bracebridge in Ontario in Canada where I was raised. It's the same basic thing that we experienced during a sleepover at a childhood friend's place. We even admire how their parents were so different from our own. They get to stay up late, or their parents were maybe more free or more strict in ways that our own parents weren't. And we sort of marveled at that. When I was on the Serengeti, we admired that zebras have stripes and leopards have spots. We went all the way around the world to see them, yet... It left me wondering why we don't gaze and wonder at how humans are the same and that skin color and ethnicity ultimately are factors of climate and geography. And that, for example, race and skin pigmentation is a result of various climate conditions where certain people have developed darker levels of melanin that darkens their skin and keeps them safer from UV rays, which are more heavily concentrated towards the equator. What a miracle. You see, we love different breeds of dogs, but why not different types of people so much? It goes back to our tribal instincts. My own life experiences, my upbringing and privileges associated with it were fostered in a home that cherished a hard work ethic, and it is in this podcast that I begin to share more of my knowledge, both theoretical and experiential, so that more people may perhaps begin to share my passion for people, history, and Canada, and to see that One day, maybe, people will look back on us and judge, just like we do to those of the past. Let's go easier on the past. It'll help us go easier on ourselves in the here and now, and to realize that people of the past, due to the same brain wiring as we still have, did not biologically have more toughness or grit than you or I, and that the only thing that brings about our abilities is challenge and change. It's like building muscles in our brain, except the heavy weights are in our own mind. When confronted with war or hardship and no choices, then people must arise or be erased. Just like the animals on the Serengeti, it's live or die, plain and simple. In Canada in 2025, I would imagine most people would agree that we get a lot more choices than the majority of people in a majority of places in other parts of the world. And I know it. I've had the privilege of traveling and teaching around the world. And I've had such revolutionary culture shocks that my own world has been forever changed. I've been pulled out of the water by the fishermen. So today in part two of episode two, Please allow me to become the fisherman. So go ahead, take a bite at the lure. I promise I'm only here for catch and release. It's called exposure therapy. A little bit at a time. But imagine the fish being pulled out of the water and then sent back. It's Plato's allegory of the cave. You are a fish. And I am a fish. And what if you got abducted by aliens tonight in your sleep and then got sent back? Would you share what happened with friends and family? And risk ending up like all of the people who get laughed at in the documentaries we watch, or at least I watch? The same ones who say they only share their alien abduction stories because they so purely disbelieve such things could happen before their own experience? Would any other fish believe the other fish? That there was a man who ripped him out of the water by his lip on a hook and took his picture? Now that's perspective. So let's get going. Sorry for the delay there. I like to talk and I guess that's why I started a podcast. Well, to be honest, I had to wait while they gassed up our sailboat. So let's let loose the ropes. Today we continue to hop between eras in time while I continue to take you on a most powerful journey through our innate human resilience in the face of adversity. I've got the flux capacitor fluxing, yet today it's built into the mast of an old ship as opposed to the DeLorean. What with copyright, etc. So, as diverse Canadians launching out into the seas of the current unknown, we set our tack and direction toward a unified vision for our diverse and pluralistic democracy, surging upon the digital waves of interconnectivity that Dr. Marshall McLuhan prophesied in the 1960s when he discussed and introduced the term of the global village. In the last episode, we asked... What drives someone to risk it all for a dream, for a story, for something not yet seen? Before Champlain, before Cabot, before Columbus, before Canada had a name. This episode is about the first maps, but more than that, it's about what they represent. The courage to imagine a way forward where none yet seems to exist. These stories are not just ancient echoes, they're guideposts for us now. They remind us that we come from people who, despite impossible odds, knelt in the sand and sketched a way to survive. They sang maps into existence. They painted the stars before they had names. Maybe today you're facing something in your life that feels just as overwhelming, so let me ask you. What obstacles are you facing right now? Have you ever had to move forward despite fear with no clear path? Let me know in our Facebook community. I'd love to hear from you and how you made it through. Because today's episode, it's not just about explorers of the past. It's also about the explorers we still are. As Dr. Hans Selye once wrote, originality is not the ability to find something new. It is the power to see something familiar in a new way. So today, let us look again. Let us listen again. And let us sail into our past. Not to retreat into nostalgia, but to draw strength from the ones who dared to dream our modern world into being. Thank you for joining me. We are mates in this matchbox-sized ship, and we're drifting on the dark seas of modern life. We have to stay true and steady. We have to set our sights on the horizon. There is no other option but to hope we arrive and to act to get there. We don't know what monsters wait beneath the surface, but we've left the harbor. There's no turning back. So cling to the rails, my friends. You may not have noticed, but I've just taken you a thousand years back. Cresting a white-capped wave, a heady wind at your back, pushing you toward newfound lands. What waits? Be on the edge of the known map. Let loose the ropes. Wave to the crowds. Kiss a few babies. Think Titanic, but not Titanic. Think a thousand-year-old wooden boat in a single sail. for in a toothless 10th century grin to hide your fear. Be a hero, they said. Sail to the edge of the world, they said. But inside, the kraken of self-doubt slithers up your spine. You're an imposter. But it's okay, so am I. We all are. Does my brave face betray the terror in my heart? Do the onlookers see what I'm really thinking? Stay home. Stay safe. The sail, it's already tight. Like I said, there's no turning back. Four to twelve weeks at sea, one way, if we're lucky. With me. Someone you've just met, but somehow hopefully feels familiar. You're an adventurer, too. And together, what have we got to lose? Beyond the dark fog are the myths. The monsters. The unknown. But those stories, they've been created by so many people who have never actually been there. Today, we begin a history bigger than our imagination. You're my first mate and your presence, it makes me so damn grateful. You've stepped onto the deck of the Canadian Friendship. Welcome aboard me mateys. I'll be the captain and you can run the charts. That's a Rush reference. Closer to the heart. Let's set sail. As we step off the jetty and into the vast unknown, we are headed into a time before names, before nations, before Canada became a word on a map. We've heard stories of old world courage and the raw chaos of sailing blind into the abyss. Leave your idea of who you are behind. Try to leave our social biases and conditioned responses out of it, and try to experience and wonder what was going on in the deep oceans of our human past. Put on your best five-year-old mindset and look at the world anew as I take you back with me on this journey of Canadian grit, and as I show you why you are north of ordinary. We're here together, in this moment. How wild is that? And maybe, just maybe, with such an open, good-willed perspective of kindness and empathy for our past heritage, we might realize we're still doing the same thing. We're exactly as hopeful, scared, anxious, lost, or found as those in our past, and each in our own new way. We too are navigating an unfamiliar sea these days. Nobody's ever sailed into 2025 before as far as I'm aware. It's a world of a hybrid reality between our physical and digital selves here and in the cloud. We are flooded by salty white caps, swells and whirlpools of endless and mostly needless information. We're on this existential drift. We're afloat. Is anybody out there? Don't worry, pal. I've got your life preserver right here. Nobody's getting a Pepsi for free. When we leverage our minds to imagine life in the past, we unlock an ability to imagine how life was simpler. But in so many ways, it was so much more gritty and difficult. We've got so many assets, and we're carrying forward Colonel John McCrae's torch. It is ours to hold it high and to light our own present Canadian Reformation with curiosity. We don't know exactly where we're headed, but nobody in the past did either. That's a comfort we in the present almost... arrogantly throw on to their hard-earned wisdom that we inherited, what will future generations laugh at us about? That we couldn't cure cancer? That we ignored the mental health crisis plaguing our current society and schools? We can't answer everything, nor should we try to do anything but work on our own mindsets toward what we morally feel is better. Know this, you're already a bored and committed. That's good. We were just there in the past, and we know it needed a lot of work. I'm here to tell these stories to remind you, me, us, that boldness lives in our bones. Maybe we're born with it, or maybe it's Maybelline. The boldness we've inherited comes from wayfinders, storytellers, and those who braved the edge of the world in search of meaning. What does it mean to map the world? Who gets to draw lines? What gets left off the page? Because before Champlain colonization and borders, they were dreamers. They sailed through the fog, guided only by stars, song, and the pulse of possibility. We follow in their wake and trace not just geography, but imagination. If today's story moves you, stirs up questions, or even your wild imagination, why not share your thoughts in our community group on Facebook, or get friends and family to join our adventures on Instagram at CanadianGripMedia. We're building this thing together, one story at a time. Long before kings laid claim to continents, before explorers plotted their routes in smoky halls, the first maps were traced by calloused hands into the dust. Tens of thousands of years ago, ancient hunter-gatherers knelt by their fires and carved their world into the sand, a bend in the river, a stand of birch, a patch of flint in the hills, a map not just of geography but of survival, of life and death. These earliest maps were as fleeting as the morning mist, A single rain, a gust of wind, and they were gone. But what they mapped lived on inside the mind. Memory was the compass. Story was the guide. And over time, some of these early maps found more lasting forms. In the caves of Lascaux in France, 16,500 years ago, which I was lucky enough to visit with my exchange student's family in 2003, we can find ancient hands that painted not hunting grounds but the stars. A glittering map of the Pleiades cluster in the Summer Triangle, charting the heavens long before writing was ever even imagined. Thousands of kilometers away in ancient Spain, similar star maps were etched into cave walls. Humans, it seems, have always dreamed not just across the land but upward into the vastness of the night sky these first maps were acts of hope hope for finding game finding shelter finding the way home but they were also acts of rebellion refusing to be lost in an endless terrifying world drawing a path leaving a mark claiming a place in the great mystery of existence As civilizations rose, the maps grew more sophisticated and more political. In ancient Mesopotamia 5,000 years ago, clay tablets recorded plots of land, rivers sketched between hills, names etched beside fields, ownership, power. For the first time, maps were more than survival tools. They became weapons, markers of wealth, dominion, and empire. In Egypt, the invention of papyrus allowed maps to travel, rolled up under arms, taken into deserts and across seas. The Turin papyrus map, drawn around 1150 BCE, shows roads to distant quarries and hidden gold mines. A map not just of where to go, but what to take. Every culture the Greeks the Romans, the Chinese, the Maya, the Haida. They made maps, some drawn in ink, some in memory, some in the weave of oral stories passed from elder to youth around smoky fires. Wherever humans went, they mapped to understand, to survive, to dream. A map at its heart is a declaration. I am here. I see this. I remember. The long ships cut through cold black water. their dragon-headed prows rising and falling with the swell of the North Atlantic. Behind them, the fjords of Greenland. Before them, fog-shrouded cliffs, strange winds, and the raw edge of an unimagined continent. It was around the year 1000 AD, Anno Domini, when Leif Erikson, Leif the Lucky, son of Erik the Red, stepped ashore on the coastline of what we now call Newfoundland. He and his crew had crossed an ocean and opened ships with no compass, no sextant, and no garrison, There was no guarantee they'd ever return. They were searching for timber, but they found something else. A new world. A place of wild grapes, towering forests, and animals they'd never seen before. The sagas called it Vinland. The Vikings did not stay long. A few years, maybe a decade. They built sod longhouses, repaired boats, and hunted on the land. But they weren't alone. Skirmishes with local peoples, likely ancestors of the Beotuk, drove the Norse back across the sea. The settlement ended up abandoned. The dream of Vinland faded into saga, speculation, and myths. For centuries, this myth was dismissed, a type of northern Atlantis. And it wasn't until the 1960s when two unlikely explorers, a married couple from Norway, came to Canada's Great Northern Peninsula chasing whispers in the wind. Helge Ingstad was a trapper, a sailor, and a historian. His wife, Anna Stein, was a professional archaeologist. Together, they searched the rugged coastlines of Newfoundland- asking local fishermen if they'd ever seen strange ridges in the grass. Most laughed, but then came George Decker, a quiet man who really knew the land. He led them directly to L'Anse aux Meadows, a windswept patch of earth where rectangular mounds barely rose from the soil. The Ingstad stood in the cold and they knew. These were not natural formations. These were ruins. And began the excavation. Year after year, they unearthed the past. Iron nails, a blacksmith's forge, Jasper fire starters from Greenland, Norse tools, Norse architecture. the sagas had been right. This was the first confirmed European settlement in the Americas, nearly 500 years before Columbus, and yet the Norse did not remain. This upended history and it kind of shows what else is out there that we still don't know. The Norse left because the land was too harsh, the distances too great. They left with what they had and likely burned what was left behind them, ensuring no rival could ever use it. When the Vikings left, Vinland slipped back into the mist. Yet still, the land waited for the next wave of seekers, the next tide of ships, the next set of prying eyes staring west, hungry for the world and its possessions just beyond the horizon. The ocean is not just water. It is memory. It's movement. It is the barrier that both separates and summons. And for centuries, the ocean whispered to Europe's ragged shorelines like a ghost just out of reach. In the aftermath of the bubonic plague, also called the Black Death, in the middle of the 14th century, the 1300s, occurred the deadliest pandemic in human history. Europe was hollowed out. Approximately half or more of the continent's people gone. Cities collapsed into silence. Families had been erased. Fields went fallow and full of weeds. In the wake of grief and ruin, something stirred. It was a hunger of fire, a desire maybe to go beyond the known, to find fortune, purpose, or maybe salvation, and perhaps to forget what had been lost. This is the crucible that forged the Age of Discovery, not a clean march of progress, but a desperate and reckless lunge into the unknown. Driven by curiosity, greed, faith, and fame, the great seafaring powers emerged. Spain, Portugal, France, and a battered, fog-drenched island called England. The world they knew was small. Their maps were filled with dragons and the kraken and other octobeasts. Their ships were wooden coffins, crowded and fetid, at the mercy of every gale. And yet still they went. In 1492, Cristoforo Colombo, Christopher Columbus, convinced the Spanish crown that Asia could be reached by sailing west into oblivion. Against all sense, against older wisdom, he crossed the Atlantic and found islands unlike anything in his memory. He thought he'd reached India. He had not. Five years later, another Italian, Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot, or Jean Cabot, made his own gamble. Rejected by Portugal, rejected by Spain, Cabot turned to a kingdom still licking its wounds from civil war, England. And in Henry VII, he found an audience who listened and who gave Cabot a single ship. It was small, leaky, and under-provisioned, and it had a crew of 20 souls. In the spring of 1497, Cabot sailed into the wild Atlantic, For five weeks, his tiny ship battled waves as tall as houses. He had no idea what lay ahead. Only the conviction that something must. And then, land. A rocky coast. Dark woods. No cities. No silks. No spices and no gold. But fish. More fish than they had ever imagined. This was likely Newfoundland, and although Cabot thought he'd landed near China, he had, in fact, stepped into the future heart of a new world. He returned to England as a hero. The Great Admiral, they called him. He wore silk. Crowds followed him in the streets. The king was pleased, but wanted more. So Cabot, he tried again. In 1498, he sailed with five ships, and then he vanished. What became of John Cabot to this day remains a mystery. Some believe he died at sea. Others whisper he disappeared into quiet obscurity. But what matters is this. His voyage like a blade had cut a path across the ocean, and that path would soon be followed, not just by explorers, but by kings, by settlers, by soldiers, and by ships carrying flags. The old maps had ended in fog and monsters. Now, there were new shorelines, new rivers to trace, and new lands to name or misname. The next to come would be the French, men like Jacques Cartier, who would not just sail past the land, but also try to claim it. But the land, well, it had its own mind, its own voice, its own guardians, its own story. And the ocean? The Great Dark Frontier, well, it wasn't done testing those who dared to cross it. In the spring of 1534, a man named Jacques Cartier stood on the deck of a small French vessel, his eyes fixed westward across the grey churn of the Atlantic. Behind him lay the battered remnants of a medieval Europe, a continent scarred by plague, civil war, and religious strife. Before him loomed a continent as of yet unnamed, to their knowledge. A land of rivers without maps, people without kings, and languages he did not yet understand. Like so many explorers of his age, Cartier came chasing myths. A northwest passage to Asia. Cities paved with gold. A shortcut to the riches of the East. Instead, he found something far stranger. A river that ran inland, like an open wound carved through stone. A world that was teeming with life and stories, and... none of which he could read. Cartier sailed up the wide estuary of what he would name the Rivière du Canada, the River of Canada, though the word Canada was not of his invention. As his crew approached a palisaded village near present-day Quebec, La Ville de Québec, Quebec City, the people who met them, the Iroquoians of the St. Lawrence, used a word to describe their home, Penata. In their language, Kanada meant village or settlement, but Cao Tse, he misunderstood. He heard Canada and assumed it referred to the entire region. From that moment forward, Canada began appearing on maps across Europe, a cartographic misunderstanding that reshaped a continent and our entire history. This would not be the last time Europeans misheard, renamed, and redefined a place according to their own imaginations. The very names of some of Canada's most iconic cities and regions are living echoes of indigenous languages. The word Ottawa comes from the Anishinaabe word Odawa, which means to trade, and reflects the role of the Ottawa River as a major indigenous trade artery. The name Toronto derives from the Mohawk word to Coranto, meaning there are trees standing in the water, referencing wooden fishing weirs placed in Lake Simcoe. Before it became known as Montréal or Montreal, the area was home to a large, fortified village called Hochelaga, likely derived from an Iroquoian word meaning beaver dam or rapid waters. Cartier renamed the nearby mountain Mount Royal, or Mont-Royal, and over time, the name Montreal, or Mont-Royal, was born from that colonial renaming. The name Quebec comes from the Algonquian word quebec, meaning where the river narrows, referring to the pinch point in the St. Lawrence just below Statacona. These are not just place names, they are fragments of oral maps, carved into the land by generations of memory, trade, and survival. When Cartier arrived, the welcome from the Staticona people was cautious. Donacona, the village chief, greeted them with feasts and tobacco. Perhaps he saw opportunity in these strangers with metal blades and strange fabrics. Perhaps he saw danger. In his journal, Cartier wrote, Iron knives, beads, and European cloth were exchanged for furs and smoked fish. But the French were not here to trade. They were here to find passage to profit and dominion. Winter arrived like a siege. The river froze solid. The trees stood dead, bare. Cartier and his men, stranded near Statacona, built a crude fort on the ice-locked shore. But then came the sickness. Scurvy spread like wildfire. Gums turned black. Skin split open. Men collapsed where they stood, too weak to even lift a cup of water. By mid-winter, 25 men were dead, and nearly every other crewman lay sick, moaning in the snow-packed darkness. It was Domagaya, one of Donacona's sons, taken on a previous voyage to France, who showed them how to boil the bark and needles of the eastern white cedar into a tonic. Rich in vitamin C, it revived the crew. This moment, the sharing of indigenous botanical knowledge saved the expedition. Without it, the French would have vanished beneath the snow before their first map ever dried. And yet, in spring, when the river ice cracked and melted, Cartier repaid the kindness with betrayal. He lured Donnacona and nine others aboard his ship under the guise of diplomacy. Come aboard, me mateys. Then he bound them, and then he sailed away. Cartier wanted proof, living evidence of a new world, to parade before King Francis I. Donna Kona would die in France, far from his homeland and far from the flowing water that had shaped his people's life and story. The others never returned. Cartier's journals claimed they had remained in France, quote, living as lords, but the truth was simpler. They were never meant to survive. And yet, the name stuck. Canada, once a village, now a misnamed continent. This was the beginning of a pattern, words taken out of context, land taken without consent, lives taken without thought or concern. And all of it was recorded, carefully and confidently, on maps that had no idea what they were looking at. So when Cartier returned to France, not with silk or spices, but with something else, he had the illusion of a claim, a name that was misheard, a people that he misjudged. It would be a journey remembered, not for what it discovered, but more for what it set in motion. This was the true beginning of Canada, a land both found and betrayed at the same time. The blood-soaked maps, war, wilderness, and the making of Canada. When Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River, he did not open a path to easy riches. He opened a door to chaos. What followed was not an age of peace, but an age of collision, of empires and peoples, of old dreams crashing into ancient lands. Canada, before it was stitched into a country, was a battleground, and its earliest maps were not drawn with ink, but with blood. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the 15 and 1600s, this land was anything but empty. It was alive, and it was humming with the voices of powerful nations. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, known to the French as the Iroquois, spanned what is now southern Ontario and upstate New York. The Wendat Confederacy, whom the French called the Huron, lived around today's Georgian Bay in Simcoe County. The Anishinaabe peoples, Ojibwe, Odawa, and Algonquin, moved fluidly across the Great Lakes while the Mi'kmaq ruled the Atlantic coast. The Cree, Diné, and Inuit roamed the endless forests and tundras of the north. These were not isolated tribes. They were interconnected civilizations linked by a vast network of river highways, portage trails, and forest corridors that stretched thousands of kilometers in every direction. Movement was everything. Life depended on it. The rivers, they were highways. The forests, corridors. Canoes skimmed across lakes and rivers, carrying furs, tools, food, news, and stories. When rapids or waterfalls blocked the way, travelers abandoned the water and lifted their world onto their backs, crossing ancient trails on foot. These portages were brutal. The birch bark canoe, light as it was, became an unwieldy burden in the dense forests. Loads of furs or supplies, sometimes weighing over 100 pounds, were strapped onto backs, already bleeding from black flies and the biting edges of the undergrowth. Trails were slick with mud, tangled with roots, strewn with jagged rocks. To stumble was to risk a broken ankle. To fall behind was to risk your life. And yet still they went, day after day, river after river. because standing still meant death. The indigenous nations moved with the land because they understood it was not an obstacle, it was a partner. As one Anishinaabe elder later said, Their wayfinding was almost mythical. They followed the sun's shadows in winter. They listened to the voices of birds. They read moss on trees, the movement of wind over grass, even the angle of stars glinting through the night sky. Every portage, every bend of every river, each standing stone was a landmark, part of a living memory map, a map that did not need ink or paper, but only the five senses, the stories and the blood of those who had come before. Into this living network stumbled the French, including men like Etienne Brulé, who was barely out of boyhood and sent to live among the Wendat to learn their ways, and to open trade routes deeper into the interior. He was the first of the coureurs de bois, the runners of the woods, the wild and half-feral boys and young men who abandoned the rigid order of the colonial towns to survive among the rivers and forests. Brulé would later write, quote,"...I have gone where no Christian has gone before, without bread." without wine, guided only by stars and the spirit of the forest." Others followed. There were men who spoke half-forgotten dialects, wore buckskins, and could paddle a canoe 12 hours without rest. Their maps were drawn in memory or hastily sketched on pieces of birch bark or skin. They lived or died based on their own ability to adapt to a world that did not care whether or not they understood it. The rivers themselves could kill. Rapids like the Lachine Rapids near Montréal or the furious falls of Chaudrières near Ottawa could flip a canoe in an instant, smash men against rocks like broken dolls. One French trader wrote grimly of portaging past a roaring cataract, quote, Survival in those days wasn't a guarantee. It was a privilege. earned with every step. As the French established outposts at Quebec, Croix-Rivière, and Ville-Marie, now Montréal, they pulled themselves deeper into the web of indigenous alliances and rivalries. The Wendat aligned with the French. The Haudenosaunee, armed first by the Dutch and then by the English, sought to control the fur trade at any cost, and what followed was decades of bloodshed. The Beaver Wars raged from the early 1600s into the 1700s, and it tore the continent apart. Entire nations, like the Neutral, Shawnanton, were obliterated. Trade trails became battlefields. Villages once bustling with commerce and ceremony were reduced to smoldering ashes. Some scholars say these wars cost more indigenous lives than any other conflict in North America before the 1800s. And yet, even amid the slaughter, the river still ran, the birds still chirped, and the forest stood still as witness. French forts rose along the waterways. Fort Frontenac, near today's Kingston, Fort Niagara, along the mighty river, and Fort Detroit was beside an ancient Anishinaabe crossing. The word Détroit literally means straight, S-T-R-A-I-T in English. Every fort was a statement, a hammer blow against the living map. This land is ours now. But the land, it did not yield easily. And the people who had known it for generations, they did not vanish into the mist. Even today, if you drive Highway 401 from Kingston to Toronto, you are tracing the shoreline trails first walked by the Wendat and Mississaugas. When you cross the Ottawa River at Parliament Hill, you cross waters paddled by generations of Algonquin traders, warriors, and hunters. Every highway, every bridge, every modern town, they are layered upon the footsteps of those who came before. The land remembers. It remembers the first paddle strokes that broke its stillness. It remembers the battles, the prayers, the betrayals, and the fierce hope. It remembers the maps drawn in blood, memory, and dream. And if you listen, I mean really listen. Beneath the drone of the cars and the hum of cities, you can still hear the old maps. They whisper to us through the trees and the stones. Today, we walked through smoke and memory, across ancient maps and blood-soaked trails. We traced the first steps into Turtle Island by colonial explorers from Europe. We watched as the ink dried and as names were taken, changed, or even misunderstood. We bore witness to the cost of exploration, to the courage, to the cruelty, to the dreams drawn in bark, bone, and belief. In bringing you such stories, my goal here at Canadian Grit is to inspire learning about our shared past. I'm trying to spark an interest in all of us in what we've inherited, in Colonel John McRae's torch, which I referenced earlier in my first episode, when reciting in Flanders Fields and how I promised this spirit outside his childhood home in Guelph that I would sustain my patriotic love not just for the geographic surface of this place called Canada, but for its people. All of them. to let them know that so many gave so that we could get. What are we giving? When we look around the world, the tensions and human dramas related to rapid and massive technological shifts have led to a level of social disorientation not seen since World War II. Yet COVID and the dawn and advent of artificial intelligence, it's overwhelming. And it came on so fast. For those of us who are old enough to remember the 20th century, doesn't it just feel like yesterday? Well, in the grand scheme of things, it is. The stories of Jacques Cartier and Leif Erikson seem impossible for us to imagine, so forever ago. But they're not. If you take away the stuff around them, what makes us relate to history relates to its individuals, those who took the time to observe, to explore, to look around, but most of all, to take note, to push the limits, but also to push the pen or to push others to demonstrate true grit, but most of all, to never quit. I was a poet and didn't even know it. Canada's history isn't boring. We have just generally chosen to neglect it, or we haven't been conditioned to love it. And we can't know what we don't know, what we call the Peter Effect. It goes against the modern, late-stage capitalism that Dr. Gabor Mate discusses as toxic to those of us living in the West and what he discusses as the myth of normal. It's also what Martin Wolf discusses in the crisis of democratic capitalism. And both... These works will occupy multiple discussions in future episodes. We've been acculturated and conditioned to fear growing old, of looking old. And thus we have come to place our elders and sickly or ill out of sight. Yet history, like what we've been learning today, would show us that this is probably a poor idea. If we were united in where we came from, it's my firm supposition that many of the current issues in Canada and abroad, in their own time, could be solved through human intermediation, by doing what's best for us and our planet. We can't eat money or take it with us. So I think we've got to overcome our colonial desire for more, ever more. For so long, I sought other Canadian history aficionados just like me, but realized that history and other studies in the humanities, also dubbed the arts, are needed more than ever. Stephen Hawking's last musings were that the best attempts at understanding our universal history would most likely be solved within the realm of philosophy and the humanities. In the past, we can find unity, but on the internet... Being served an algorithmic stew of our own concentrative biases and worldviews, we're losing focus of the fact that we are connected necessarily by the fact we exist in this time and space right now. And that this lineage, our heritage, has led to this fearful moment. Us. We're all just out here flying by the seat of our pants, top gunning it with, you know, mighty wings by cheap trick, blasting as our present anthem. With just a little luck, a little cold blue steel, I cut the night like a razor blade till I feel the way I want to feel. There's a raging fire in my heart tonight, growing higher and higher in my soul. The lyrics I include from so many songs that we all know and love, I mean, at least if you know Top Gun... It includes why I have and will spend so much time discussing history in relation to present popular culture. It's to help us figure out how to see ourselves and the world more critically. How much have we actually chosen for ourselves versus being conditioned by the consumer media, including how we form our own identity, what triggers us, what makes us phobic? When I welcome you aboard the sloshing ships of centuries past or into the private journals and reflections of historical moments to create unity. Unity for us as modern Canadians living in the present as a gift from the past and to maybe think more about the fact that we are inheritors of history and not the end of it as Francis Fukuyama mentioned. Perhaps we are in the midst of an existential crisis where we feel so connected online yet we are so physically alone. What I dubbed my hybrid reality theory. All of these stories lay the foundation for all of the mental health and community work that is at the heart of this Canadian Grit movement. It's not about making a brand or name, except for the brand of Canada and what that means for all of us. And now, the present moment right now, and now, and now, has never existed before. And now. How now, brown cow? So no. We won't find our true present identity in the past. That's not what I'm doing here, but I'm trying to show us what we share so that we can sit down with all groups of Canadians today to reshape and reform what Canada means in this new, globalized, and rapidly shrinking global village. We need to be unified. Unified doesn't mean we agree on every detail or outlook, but that we agree at the level of humanity and responsible Canadians like those who worked, fought, and built this nation before us. to take action now and to clean up our own backyard before we resort to online trolling, becoming keyboard warriors or basement dwellers who prefer to shout at people, taking action as opposed to helping out. We must realize that we can't stand when we're divided. If we can't share the cake, it could be taken or destroyed. Wouldn't we all rather get a sliver than nothing at all? Nobody said democracy was easy. In fact, Winston Churchill often spoke of how terribly hard democracy is. One of the worst of all political systems that had been tried, he said, except for all of the other ones. To take us out today, I want to bring to you the lyrics of Pink Floyd's Hey You from their epic 1970 album The Wall. Pink Floyd is one of my favorite bands ever, and in high school I was lucky enough to play in a rockin' unit with some really talented guys in a Pink Floyd cover band. Pink Floyd and my obsession with 60s and 70s music was related to the counterculture, the human foundation of it all. And it needs to come back. These rock and rollers may have seemed like nothing but dope-smoking hippies to the older war-going generations, but at least these singers knew their history. Hey you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old, can you feel me? Hey you, standing in the aisles, with itchy feet and fading smiles, can you feel me? Hey you, don't help them to bury the light, don't give in without a fight. Hey you, Out there on your own, sitting naked by the phone, would you touch me? Hey you, would you help me to carry the stone? Open your heart. I'm coming home. But it was only fantasy. The wall was too high, as you can see. No matter how he tried, he could not break free and the worms ate into his brain. Hey you, out there on the road, always doing what you're told, can you help me? Hey you, out there, beyond the wall, breaking bottles in the hall, can you help me? Hey you, don't tell me there's no hope at all. Together we stand, divided we fall. And now, we turn our eyes to our next chapter. Episode 3, Samuel de Champlain, The Birth of Canada's Modern Story. It's a story of a man not just content with getting there, but he was a man with vision. A man who believed not in passing through, but in planting roots. Samuel de Champlain didn't just explore, he settled. He imagined a new kind of place, one that was built to last and endures to this day. Champlain saw beyond maps and into the future. And whether we realize it or not, we are living in his vision. So join me next time as we dive into the legacy of Champlain, his ambition, his failures, his hope, and what it means even now to found something and to build something meant to endure. Until then, here's a question. When have you gone on a journey expecting nothing and found something greater than you could have imagined? Maybe it was a conversation, a relationship, a place, or even a version of yourself you didn't know was waiting. Let these questions guide you. And as you sit with them, remember this. Life isn't guaranteed, but change is. That's what history shows us. And those who cling the hardest are often the first to fall. But those who adapt, who stay curious, open-hearted, and brave, those are the ones who build and create. Just like the earliest explorers, we are still sailing, not toward new land this time, but toward something just as vast. A new way to live in peace in a deeply connected, post-modern, digitized world. Maps are still being drawn and redrawn. And you, yes, you, you're part of that. Please like, subscribe, and share this with someone who needs it. Come find us on Instagram and Facebook at Canadian Grit Media. This is Jamie Jackson. Thank you for your time, your attention, and your grit. Stay grounded, stay human, and as always, stay north of ordinary.