By Donald Morton, Editor-in-Chief
On November 13, 2025, Marcie Webster, the Shabot Obaadjiwan First Nation's Indigenous Community Outreach Coordinator, set a medicine-wheel chart as her Facebook profile picture. I have the chart in front of me. It is a circle cut into four quarters, and each quarter is a kind of person: "White Skinned People" at the top, "Yellow Skinned People" on the right, "Red Skinned People" at the bottom and "Black Skinned People" on the left.
Then each colour is handed a nature to go with it. The white quarter is the north, winter, midnight, death and the intellect. Red is given the south, summer, birth and the soul, while the black quarter takes the west, autumn, maturity and the body. Yellow, out in the east, gets dawn, spring and the emotions.
The chart carries the watermark of Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. It comes from a blog post by Bob Joseph, dated May 24, 2020, which says the article was originally published in 2014. The skin colours appear nowhere in the words of the post. They are only on the picture, and the picture is the part she put on her profile and displayed proudly as her profile picture.
A sweeping generalization is exactly what the picture is. If I, a white man, said that a Jamaican man, an African man and a Sri Lankan man are all black people, I would be called a racist before I finished the sentence, and I would deserve it for folding whole cultures into one colour. This chart does that to every human being on earth, and then tells each colour what it is for.
I have made this argument before, and not about anyone's medicine wheel. On October 12 this paper ran my column under the headline that there is no larger white society. Inside the box marked white are the Irish, the Scottish, Ukrainians, Swedes, Spaniards and Australians, among others, in a country where Statistics Canada counted more than 450 ethnic or cultural origins in the 2021 census. "They share a colour. They do not share a history, and none of them signed a treaty." The box marked Indigenous "holds hundreds of First Nations, plus Inuit and Métis, who are not one people and have never claimed to be." "Every box is a lump." This chart is four boxes with a watermark. The rule does not change because the lumps are painted in sacred colours.
This is not my religion. Canada is a country with freedom of religion: people can practise what they want, and they are protected from having someone else's religion forced on them. This chart is objectively racist, whatever the intent: it generalizes cultures into colour, and it does it to everyone. Sorting people by the colour of their skin and assigning each colour a nature is a racial classification. Presenting it as a teaching, with sweetgrass and cedar among the labels, does not change what it does. Anyone who takes it at its word is being taught to look at a neighbour and see a colour. I was taught my whole life to see past colour and appreciate culture. It might be progress in your eyes, but in mine it is regress.
The scheme also has a familiar look. In the eighteenth century the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae, divided humanity into four varieties by continent and skin colour, one each for the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. The four quarters of this chart resemble that European race science closely. In the pages we read, no Algonquin teaching gives each skin colour its own nature, as this chart does.
That leaves the chart caught on two horns. If the four skin colours are a real teaching, then it is a teaching that sorts humanity by skin colour, and in my view everything I said above stands. If it is invented, then the Nation's outreach coordinator has put a modern invention on her public profile, under a title that carries the Nation's name. The screenshot I hold has no caption saying where the chart comes from, and I think readers are entitled to ask.