The Beaver Indian tradition of marriage is that when you're a young person, young man or

young woman, you marry an elder and they have a huge amount to teach you.

And a young man who marries an elder woman, you know, she's too old to have children so

he's getting his skills as a hunter honed, you know, before he has kids to support kind of thing.

Do they have sexual relationships? Oh sure, definitely definitely.

Interesting. So...

It's a little sampled, uh, pigment music there by Deep Forest from their 1992 album Deep Forest.

Little controversial. There's some question as to whether or not they appropriately credited the

the people who were recorded. My understanding is they didn't actually record them. They were sampling

from the recordings of ethnomusicologists who had spent time in the Congo then known as Zaire

recording folks there. In any case, this is an anthropology heavy podcast so I thought I'd throw

in a little ethnomusicology for you. Today's guest is Tonya Mills who is a Harvard educated

anthropologist who did a lot of field work in rural Canada with the Beaver tribe. She'll describe

some of the very interesting insights she gained into herself and the world, the spirit world.

She's an expert in reincarnation among the the people that she studied there. So we talk a fair

bit about reincarnation, shamanism and a lot of her personal experiences moving between worlds

as an academic and someone who who lived with the Beaver people and for a substantial part of her

life-raised her children among them. So fascinating conversation. Today doing research for the book I'm

writing, I came across an interesting podcast and I thought I'd throw in a little excerpt

from the podcast. It's a guy named Johnny. Oh shit, what the hell is his name? Johnny Hughes, sorry,

spaced on his name there. Johnny Hughes, he wrote a book called The Invention of the T.P.,

which I've got around here somewhere. He's a fascinating story. I tell it a little bit in the book.

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