Bonus Episode: Chess Murderers

[00:00:00.48] [Rooked theme music plays]
[00:00:05.72] [Jess] In honour of International Women's Day later this week, we wanted to bring you an episode all about misogyny in chess, because even though this podcast is technically about the Hans-Magnus Sinquefield scandal, cheating is not the only problem that chess is currently facing. And it needs to be talked about.
[00:00:23.58] [Ryan] But instead we're going to honour International Women's Day by not giving you that episode.
[00:00:29.35] [Jess] The reason is that the misogyny episode is probably the most important one in this entire series, so out of respect to the women in this story, we're delaying its release until next month so that we can take the time to get it right and include more women's voices.
[00:00:45.87] [Ryan] So first Tuesday in April we'll be back with that episode, for real this time.
[00:00:51.21] [Jess] But we know that you wait patiently all month for the next chapter in this story, and we didn't want to leave you completely high and dry.
[00:01:02.82] [Ryan] To tide you over, here's a special little bonus snack episode--
[00:01:07.47] [Apple crunches]
[00:01:08.92] --about chess...
[00:01:10.56] [Ominous, droning music plays] ..and...
[00:01:12.82] [Eerie stinger plays]
[00:01:14.48] [Pitched down, frightening voice] ..a murder most foul.
[00:01:17.84] [Normal voice] Well, murders most foul.
[00:01:20.64] [Eerie stinger plays]
[00:01:21.86] [Cheerful music plays] Normally, you have to be a Patreon subscriber to get this kind of juicy content, but because we're randomly taking a month-long hiatus smack dab in the middle of the season, you get this even without supporting us financially. Just a special thank you and sorry from us for supporting us with your time and ear holes.
[00:01:41.31] [Jess] That being said, this month's paid Patreon bonus is the narcissism and ADHD portions of the last episode on psychology that got cut for time. So if that appeals to you, or you just want to hear your name in the credits, then consider supporting us at patreon.com/rooked. We're not doing any ad rolls today because it's a bonus episode and it's short.
[00:02:02.22] [Music ends]
[00:02:03.02] [Ryan] But back to this freebie bonus. Be warned, this has very little to do with Hans or Magnus, but we're technically a true crime podcast, so screw it.
[00:02:13.99] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:02:14.25] We're going to talk about serial killers and matricidal maniacs instead.
[00:02:19.25] [Eerie stinger plays, echoes]
[00:02:22.07] And just to get ahead of this, we're obviously going to be tackling this with a sense of humour. We're not trying to be glib about the victims, because obviously no one deserves to be murdered by serial killers. But sometimes you have to laugh so you don't cry. You know?
[00:02:38.19] [Andy Davis, singing] You should laugh so you don't cry, laugh so you don't cry.
[00:02:43.67] [Folky guitar music plays]
[00:02:45.91] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:02:46.36] [Jess] With that in mind, we bring to you...
[00:02:49.60] [Pitched down, frightening voice] ..two stories of chess murderers.
[00:02:53.74] [The Murder by Esa Pekka Salonen
[00:02:55.86] plays]
[00:03:01.18] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:03:02.18] [Ryan] Alexander Pichushkin, a.k.a. The Chessboard Killer, was born April 9th, 1974. He's an Aries like you, Jess.
[00:03:10.76] [Jess] Those Aries do be spicy.
[00:03:12.80] [Ryan] I don't know if I would refer to murder as spicy.
[00:03:16.91] [Jess] It's not not spicy, though.
[00:03:18.44] [Jack Somack] Mamma Mia, that's a spicy meatball!
[00:03:22.52] [Jess] According to Wikipedia, Alexander Pichushkin started life as a sociable child. I don't really know what that means, but calling someone chatty makes me think he probably had ADHD. Anyway, he was pretty normal until one day when he was playing on a swing and fell off.
[00:03:39.23] [Music fades]
[00:03:39.53] When he sat up, the still-swinging swing smoked him in the forehead.
[00:03:44.42] [Ryan chuckles]
[00:03:44.93] [Ryan] The way you're describing this makes it seem like a Charlie Chaplin skit or something.
[00:03:49.25] [Charlie Chaplin's The Party plays]
[00:03:55.28] [Jess] Yeah, it does. It's a funny image.
[00:03:57.11] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:03:57.53] But what's not so funny is that a child's brain is still a long way from being fully developed. And also when you're a child, your skull is a lot softer and less protective. Plus, the immediate area behind your forehead is your frontal lobe, which is where things like impulse control happen. Basically, an almost comical accident like this one could have potentially set Pichushkin on a completely different path-- a path that would lead him to become a cold-blooded killer.
[00:04:28.60] [Eerie electronic music plays]
[00:04:33.94] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:04:34.44] [Ryan] From the swing incident onward, Pichushkin's behaviour and attitude changed dramatically. He was bullied by his classmates for his social and emotional disabilities, often being called names. So his mother moved him to a school for disabled children, but his grandfather intervened and took Pichushkin to live with him instead, as he felt that Pichushkin's intellect was not being sufficiently encouraged. And this is when he began playing chess. Pichushkin is generally thought to have been a good player, but he doesn't have a rating, so there's not really any objective information backing that up.
[00:05:13.92] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:05:14.41] [Jess] By the time Pichushkin turned 18, three formative things had happened: his obsession with chess continued to grow, his grandfather passed away, leaving him emotionally devastated, and he started drinking heavily.
[00:05:28.87] [Man chugging water]
[00:05:36.50] [Exclaims in satisfaction]
[00:05:38.90] [Jess] And he developed another somehow less healthy coping mechanism: any time he was going to be alone around children , he would bring a video camera. This was so that he could record himself threatening the children with physical violence.
[00:05:57.02] [Music fades]
[00:05:57.47] In one video that was later made public, he records himself dangling a child upside down by their leg, saying, "You are in my power now. I'm going to drop you from the window and you'll fall 15 metres to your death."
[00:06:11.58] [Ryan] Not to psychologize, but I can totally see this as revenge for his childhood bullying. But, like, obviously, it's still really fucked up and not healthy.
[00:06:22.16] [Jess] I always say everyone needs therapy.
[00:06:25.20] [Ryan] Especially serial killers.
[00:06:27.36] [Andrea Savage as Denise in Step Brothers] So I thought we'd begin talking about your parents' divorce.
[00:06:30.86] [Will Ferrell as Brennan Huff] Okay.
[00:06:31.34] [Andrea Savage] How old were you when they got divorced?
[00:06:34.01] [Will Ferrell] 15.
[00:06:35.33] [Andrea Savage] It's a hard age.
[00:06:36.38] [Will Ferrell] Yes. Yeah.
[00:06:39.02] [Ryan] Pichushkin's hobbies at age 18 included sitting alone in his room and watching his child-threatening tapes, drinking copious amounts of vodka, and playing chess with other drunkards in the nearby Bitsa Park-- though apparently Pichushkin's chess was less affected by vodka than his opponents. But metaphorically killing his opponents over the chessboard wasn't enough for Pichushkin for very long.
[00:07:05.58] [Creepy wind-up music box plays]
[00:07:09.38] [Jess] On July 27, 1992, Pichushkin made a plan with his best friend and classmate, Mikhail Oditchuk, to kill 64 people-- one for every square on the chessboard. Pichushkin and Oditchuk met in Bitsa Park to discuss their plan, but Oditchuk told Pichushkin that he had cold feet and didn't want to go through with the murders.
[00:07:30.20] [Gloomy musis plays]
[00:07:30.56] Enraged, feeling like Oditchuk had teased him, and alone in a secluded corner of the park, Pichushkin strangled Oditchuk to death and threw his body into a sewer entrance. He was never found.
[00:07:47.98] [Music ends]
[00:07:48.43] If I murdered you for every time you teased me, you'd be dead.
[00:07:52.12] [Ryan] Like, dead a lot. A lot dead.
[00:07:54.67] [Jess] Yeah. This isn't very funny, but I just feel like I need to do something to dispel how terrible that is.
[00:08:00.88] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:08:01.09] [Ryan] Oditchuk was reported as missing, and Pichushkin was fingered--
[00:08:04.72] [Ryan laughs]
[00:08:06.19] [Jess, laughing] Sorry, do it again. Do it again but don't laugh when you say "fingered."
[00:08:10.12] [Ryan] Okay. Oditchuk was reported as missing and Pichushkin was fingered as the prime suspect since he was last seen with him. But with no real evidence or a body, Pichushkin was released.
[00:08:22.03] [Jess] Pichushkin would apparently not think seriously of killing again until 1996, the year that Russia passed a moratorium on the death penalty. This apparently reinvigorated his interest in murder. It seems that Pichushkin's mindset shifted with the new knowledge that he could kill without being killed as a repercussion. A bit have your cake and eat it too of him.
[00:08:46.09] [Ryan] Yeah, very God complex, but we'll get to that part.
[00:08:49.99] [Gloomy music plays]
[00:08:50.32] [Jess] On May 17, 2001, Pichushkin was playing chess with 52-year-old Yevgeny Pronin in Bitsa Park.
[00:08:58.10] [Ryan] It was reported afterwards that Pronin had defeated Pichushkin by playing the Englund Gambit. Enough to drive anyone to murder, frankly. This information is not verified, so don't bother checking it.
[00:09:10.88] [Jess] Not verified as in you made it up?
[00:09:13.01] [Ryan] Yeah, for the joke, because the Englund Gambit just sucks.
[00:09:16.46] [Music fades]
[00:09:19.24] [Kermit the Frog] Hi, it's me, Kermit the Frog. Did somebody say crickets?
[00:09:24.09] [Jess] Cool. So after their game, Pichushkin tells Pronin that it's the anniversary of his dog's death, and asks if Pronin will accompany him to the dog's grave in a secluded section of the park to have a drink with him in honour of the dog's memory. You probably already know where this is going.
[00:09:42.30] [Ryan] Yeah, well, we already know this guy is a murderer. But I think if I was Pronin and didn't know that yet, it's horror movie rule number one to not go into the woods with a stranger-- even if he offers you vodka to toast his dead dog. Maybe even especially in that case.
[00:09:59.71] [Jess] But despite us all screaming at the screen for him not to go into the woods, Pronin goes into the woods with Pichushkin in Bitsa Park and shares a drink of vodka with him. Pichushkin then hits Pronin in the head with the vodka bottle, killing him. He throws his body into a nearby well.
[00:10:17.37] [Ryan] Over the next five years, Pichushkin would continue killing in much the same way: luring people into the woods with an offer of vodka and/or a walk, followed by hitting them in the head or pushing them into the sewers to drown. His victims were often older homeless people who frequented Bitsa Park, his chess opponents, and 10 of his neighbours who lived in the same four-building complex that he did.
[00:10:43.99] [Jess] It's wild to me that he could get away with killing 10 of his neighbours without police intervention. You would think that, like, after the second person was killed, there would have been some sort of investigation.
[00:10:58.57] [Ryan] I mean, it's also wild because he full-on was a serial killer. I don't want to get into the graphic details, but he had a calling card that he would sign his kills with. And, spoiler, it involved the vodka bottles. But we'll let you look up the gory details yourself if you're into that.
[00:11:17.98] [Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam] You're a very sick man. You know that, don't you?
[00:11:21.05] [Generic '80s dance music plays]
[00:11:21.46] [Ryan] I don't know why I'm thinking about this, but I'm kind of upset that the only proper burial in this whole story is the one for this murderer's imaginary dead dog.
[00:11:32.47] [Jess] Okay, that is a lot to unpack. Uhhh, I think we need to save that for later. We still have a whole murderer to get through.
[00:11:40.21] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:11:40.51] Anyway, eventually Pichushkin does get caught. In June 2006, he invites his co-worker Marina Moskalyova, to go on a walk. Moskalyova is suspicious of Pichushkin but decides to go anyways. She does leave a note for her son saying that she's with Pichushkin. And Pichushkin knows that she's left this note, but Pichushkin kills her anyway.
[00:12:05.08] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:12:05.38] [Ryan] When her body is discovered on June 14th, 2006, there's enough evidence, including surveillance footage of Moskalyova and Pichushkin together on the metro on the way to the park, to arrest Pichushkin. Not only does Pichushkin admit to killing Moskalyova, but he also takes police officers to the scenes of multiple other murders that he committed in Bitsa Park, reenacting and recounting them in great detail.
[00:12:31.99] [Jess] When asked why he did it, Pichushkin said it made him feel like God. Quote, "In all cases, I killed for only one reason. I killed in order to live, because when you kill, you want to live. For me, life without murder is like life without food for you. I felt like the father of all these people, since it was me who opened the door for them to another world," end quote.
[00:12:56.29] [Ryan] On October 24th, 2007, Alexander Pichushkin was convicted on 49 counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. He requested 11 additional victims be added to his body count, to bring the death toll to 60, with three surviving victims-- just shy of his original goal of 64. He was sentenced to life in prison, with the first 15 years to be spent in solitary confinement.
[00:13:25.74] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:13:26.21] [Jess] Where is Pichushkin now? Still in prison. But we don't know much about his chess career, presumably because, yeah, he's spent most of that time in solitary confinement. But that is sort of unusual, because a lot of people's chess careers actually kind of get made in prison-- or, at least, that's the case for our next murderer, Claude Bloodgood.
[00:13:49.60] [Eerie stinger plays]
[00:13:53.25] [Sombre elctronic music plays]
[00:13:53.71] [Ryan] Fair Warning, it's difficult to talk about Claude Bloodgood with complete accuracy. Along with being a murderer, he was also a con man, so some of his claims may not be true.
[00:14:05.68] [Jess] What we do know is that Bloodgood was probably born in Norfolk, Virginia on July 14th, 1937-- though later in his life, Bloodgood claimed to be born in 1924 to German parents in Mexico. As you'll come to see, Bloodgood's deceitfulness was sort of his claim to fame, and the motivations behind his scams and lies weren't just for his own pleasure. But before all that, he started out as a regular old, run-of-the-mill, non-convict chess fan.
[00:14:38.02] [Ryan] In his early 20s, Bloodgood dedicated a significant portion of his life to chess. He was a tournament organizer and rating statistician for the Virginia State Chess Federation. Bloodgood at the time had a rating of 1956 Elo, which would have made him almost an Expert according to USCF rating titles. Definitely nothing to sneeze at.
[00:15:02.06] [Generic cartoon character sneezes]
[00:15:03.22] [Mellow electronic music plays]
[00:15:03.60] [Jess] So where is the drama? Well, Bloodgood would spend a majority of the '60s in and out of prison. In 1962, Bloodgood and his accomplice, John Newman, would rob the Stuckey's Pecan Shoppe in Delaware. This caper would earn them 55 bucks worth of cigarettes and food.
[00:15:23.61] [Ryan] It sounds like a Tarantino movie or something.
[00:15:25.58] [Bridget Fonda as Melanie in Jackie Brown] Jesus, but if you two aren't the biggest pair of fuckups I've ever met in my entire life. How did you ever Rob a bank? Hey, when you robbed banks, did you have to look for your car then, too? No wonder you went to jail.
[00:15:40.07] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:15:40.34] [Jess] The pair would go on to rob a couple more gas stations with other really cool names like Stuckey's until their arrests. Bloodgood would be sentenced to five years. He would be paroled in 1964 until 1966, when it was reversed because he left Virginia without getting permission. So back to prison again until '67.
[00:16:01.22] [Ryan] When he gets out in '67, he forges his mother's signature on a couple checks. Bloodgood's mother, Margaret Bloodgood, testifies against him in trial, even though Bloodgood threatened to kill her if she did. He's convicted and goes back to prison for another year.
[00:16:22.62] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:16:23.13] [Jess] Unfortunately for Margaret, Bloodgood was, in this instance, a man of his word. Because nine days after being released from prison in 1969, he would brutally bludgeon his mother to death at her own home. Her body was later found rolled up in a rug on Route 30 in New Kent County.
[00:16:43.08] [Ryan] A warrant would immediately go out for Bloodgood's arrest, as he was the obvious number one suspect, having threatened her pretty publicly prior to her murder. A few months later, on January 31st, 1970, Bloodgood was picked up by police in New York, but as a suspect for the stabbing murder of Patricia Dee Holtz. It would later be found that Bloodgood had no connection to this murder. So he's brought back to Virginia to stand trial for murdering his mother.
[00:17:16.05] [Music fades]
[00:17:16.54] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:17:17.02] [Jess] Bloodgood is tried for the murder of his mother on June 20th, 1970. From the events of the trial, we get a much clearer picture of the kind of man Bloodgood was. Apparently, he cursed throughout the trial and threatened the lawyers, witnesses, and even the judge. He spat in his own lawyer's face. He just made a complete mockery of the legal system and showed no decorum at all.
[00:17:43.12] [Ryan] It would also come out at this time that Bloodgood was a drug addict and mentally unstable. Not one but two psychiatrists testified he was a sociopath who was a danger to society. The jury found him guilty, and Bloodgood was sentenced to the electric chair.
[00:18:02.14] [Electric chair buzzing]
[00:18:06.85] [Warm piano music plays]
[00:18:07.33] It's no surprise to me that Bloodgood had such a love for the game of chess. He was a master manipulator. I say that because while on Death Row, Bloodgood somehow managed to elude his execution date six times. That is, until June of 1972, when the US Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional, which meant that instead of the chair, Bloodgood would have his death sentence commuted to life in prison.
[00:18:38.20] [Jess] With all that extra time on his hands, Bloodgood would basically spend the remainder of his years in prison playing chess. That's why we're including him in the chess murderer bonus episode.
[00:18:49.47] [Playful music plays]
[00:18:49.90] While on Death Row, he played over 2000 correspondence games through the mail after learning that the prison paid for all the postage stamps, which is just hilarious. Take that, prison industrial complex. His stamp privileges would be revoked when his sentence was commuted, but by that point, he was so popular in the chess world that it didn't really matter that he didn't have free stamps anymore. Bloodgood was even still allowed to organize chess tournaments outside of the prison, which is mind blowing, but in his own words, nothing was off limits if you knew how to, quote, "play the prison bureaucracy."
[00:19:26.93] [Ryan] But the scheming wouldn't stop there. During his stay at the Powhatan Correctional Centre, Bloodgood also organized chess tournaments with his fellow inmates. He was even able to obtain United States Chess Federation memberships for them, most of whom Bloodgood taught the game to. These were all mostly inexperienced players.
[00:19:48.68] [Jess] What's so controversial about this? Seems on the surface that Bloodgood is offering the inmates an outlet, teaching them all about the wonderful things chess has to offer. But that is not what he was doing at all. It's alleged that Bloodgood would manipulate the ratings to inflate his own. Remember, he was a ratings statistician for the Virginia State Chess Federation. He had an intimate knowledge of how the rating system worked.
[00:20:14.83] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:20:15.17] [Ryan] Supposedly, he arranged for players who were new to the game to play against other higher-rated inmates. Bloodgood convinced these inmates to lose to the new player. Because of the way the rating system was set up, the new player would then have a hugely inflated rating but would not actually be any good at chess. In comes Bloodgood. He plays the new player, and after winning easily, Bloodgood substantially inflates his own rating-- so much so that by 1997, he had a rating of 2759, which at the time would make him the second highest-rated player in all of the United States.
[00:20:57.56] [Jess] Bloodgood would deny these accusations of scheming to inflate his rating. He even went as far as claiming that he wrote to the USCF to warn them of the closed pool ratings inflation, as inmates were not allowed to play in chess tournaments outside of the prison and were therefore flying under the radar of the governing body by only playing amongst themselves. Though just to rewind a little bit--
[00:21:22.18] [Tape rewinding]
[00:21:23.03] --in 1974, Bloodgood and one other prisoner were granted furlough to play in a chess tournament outside the prison.
[00:21:30.41] [Ryan] There's not a whole lot of information on this, but story goes that Bloodgood and fellow inmate Lewis Capleaner were accompanied by a single guard to the guard's house in Richmond prior to the tournament. Instead of preparing for their games, the inmates overtook the guard, stole his guns, and took off for New York. It's almost like that was their plan all along and the tournament was just a cover.
[00:21:58.55] [Rowan Atkinson as Edmund Blackadder] I've got to plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.
[00:22:02.84] [Melodic saxophone music plays]
[00:22:03.20] [Ryan] They were found a couple days later and returned to the prison. This prompted Bloodgood's former defence attorney to sue the Commonwealth of Virginia because he thought it was dumb to allow a murderer back into the community to play chess, which is fair.
[00:22:20.09] [Jess] You know it's bad when your former attorney is like, "Hey, don't let that guy out. He deserves to be in prison. He spat on me and he murdered his mom."
[00:22:28.98] [Ryan] Bloodgood would spend the remainder of his days playing chess in prison until he died of lung cancer on August 4th, 2001. At one point, he would qualify for the US Chess Championship based solely on how high his rating was. This tournament determines the country's best player. When USCF got word of this, they immediately began an investigation and ultimately changed their rating system to disallow rating inflation and manipulation, such as what was happening in the Powhatan Correctional Centre.
[00:23:02.07] [Jess] While in prison, Bloodgood would pen three books, one of them titled The Prisoner's Gambit, which Magnus himself actually played in 2021 against former World Champion Vishy Anand. Magnus walloped him in 21 moves. Thanks for making an appearance, Magnus.
[00:23:19.24] [Music fades]
[00:23:19.74] It should also be noted that, while in prison, Bloodgood would claim that Margaret was his stepmother, not his birth mother.
[00:23:26.79] [Ominous, droning music plays]
[00:23:27.15] You might be asking yourself, why? Why would he lie about his mother not being his mother? Also, I don't know if you clocked it at the beginning of this story, but he also lied about being 13 years older. Why would you lie to make yourself older?
[00:23:43.25] [Chuckles]
[00:23:43.59] Especially when you're already middle aged?
[00:23:45.99] [Ryan] As far as we can tell, the reason he lied is because he would just do anything to try to escape prison. Bloodgood claimed his real parents were from Germany or from Mexico, and he asked on a couple of occasions to be extradited to those countries, which like the chess tournament, could have given him the opportunity to escape.
[00:24:06.18] [Rooked outro music plays]
[00:24:06.60] He claimed he was a victim of mistaken identity. He claimed to be a German spy. He claimed to have played chess with Humphrey Bogart. He claimed a lot of things, none of which he could verify. His whole life he just lived as an enigma, weaving an ever-growing web of lies.
[00:24:29.88] [Jess] We'll never know how good Bloodgood actually was at chess. Clearly, his rating doesn't really tell the whole story here. But it's fascinating that Bloodgood was even able to scheme his way to the very top of chess all the way from the confines of prison. It just goes to show that he was always looking for ways to manipulate, to elude. He was known for playing aggressive, gambit-style chess. He wanted the fast, unsavoury wins. Simply put, he lived his life the same on and off the chessboard: he was always looking for the easy way out, always trying to outsmart his opponent.
[00:25:11.62] [Mellow electronic music plays]
[00:25:13.02] [Ryan] On the next episode of Rooked, we're back with a real episode, and it will be on misogyny in chess. We have some great new guests who you haven't heard from yet and also some familiar voices-- all of whom help flesh out chess's most damaging and important issue, sexism. It's going to be a hard one to listen to, but the only way to make change is through difficult discussions.
[00:25:37.42] [Jess] Thank you to our King-level Patreon subscribers, Umaima Baig, Madelyn, Gord, and Mya Schmidt, Stefan Vezina, the Colorado Avalanche Institute of New Zealand, and Marie Edwards. Thank you also to friend of the pod Trisha Bernardo for giving us the idea for this episode.
[00:25:56.52] [Music fades]
[00:25:58.49] [Rooked outro plays]
[00:26:02.93] [Jess] Rooked: The Cheaters' Gambit is written and produced by me, Jess Schmidt.
[00:26:06.42] [Ryan] And by me, Ryan Webb.
[00:26:08.27] [Jess] Our amazing music is by the ever-talented Lorna Gilfedder.
[00:26:11.72] [Ryan] Our marketing is by media genius Bailey Simone Photography.
[00:26:15.44] [Jess] Our executive producers are Rooney and Indigo.
[00:26:17.70] [both] Speak!
[00:26:19.43] [Rooney and Indigo howling] This podcast is recorded on the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy, the land of the Siksika, the Kainai, the Piikani, as well as the Stoney Nakoda and Tsuut'ina Nations.
[00:26:33.23] [Ryan] We acknowledge that this territory is home to the Metis Nation of Alberta, Region 3 within the historical Northwest Metis homeland. In the spirit of respect, reciprocity, and truth, we honour and acknowledge all nations, Indigenous and non, who live, work, and play on this land and who honour and celebrate this territory.
[00:26:52.02] [Jess] This gathering place, and therefore this podcast, provides us with an opportunity to engage in and demonstrate reconciliation. The Government of Canada has not followed through on a number of the Calls to Action that have been suggested by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
[00:27:07.61] [Ryan] Do better, Canada!
[00:27:10.01] [Music fades]