Hello and welcome to episode 119 of Real Life Ghost Story.

How you do? Before we start this week's episode we have an official apology to make.

In the last couple of weeks I received messages from two listeners which I thought were important

to address and I've kind of learned that from doing this podcast that if one person messages you

then lots of other people are actually thinking it and to be honest when these two people messaged I

was absolutely mortified by the things that we had said. So I think it's really important as well

to say that the messages that these people sent us were really kind and thoughtful and gentle

but they did point out a couple of things that we have said which were problematic and the first

one was that in a much earlier episode we used a word to describe a Native American woman which

if you google it will tell you that it's incredibly offensive but we didn't google it and in our

own ignorance we use the word flippantly it is a slur and it's not a word that we will ever use

again and I am so embarrassed that it's out there and hopefully by the time this episode airs I

will have found it and removed it but it doesn't actually change the fact that we said it in the first

place and that thousands of people have heard of saying that so that's the first apology

and the second is that we used the term former native land in a recent episode and that phrase is

oxymoronic it's probably likely to be honest when I when I really thought about this that we've

used similar phrasing in other episodes too and when talking about native lands if you use the word

former it minimises the suffering of native people and we're really sorry for that so if you

listened to that and you thought well hang on a second that's not actually an appropriate phrase

to use then I'm sorry that we caused any offense and we do our best we do try our best to kind of

ensure that we're sensitive to different cultures and communities but we don't always get it right

and for that I am sorry and kick things off this week we need to thank our newest Patreon

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