By Rhiannon Russell

Waubgeshig Rice pulls his van over and darts onto the street, video camera hoisted on his shoulder. Dressed in a CBC/Radio-Canada coat and heavy-duty boots, he’s covering the second national day of action for Idle No More, an indigenous rights movement. It’s a miserable day for a protest: below zero, snow swirling in thick, fluffy flakes, downtown streets a slushy lagoon. The wind pelts exposed bits of skin. But the protesters march, drum, and dance toward Parliament Hill, and Rice, an Ojibwa video journalist at CBC Ottawa, is in his element—despite the elements. Since moving here two years ago, he’s immersed himself in the city’s Aboriginal community, attending powwows and other events. As Rice keeps ahead of the pack, there is a call. “Is that Waub?” Later, another, more personal: “Hey, cousin!” He is familiar with the people and the issue. That afternoon, during a live hit outside Parliament for CBC News Network, anchor Asha Tomlinson changes direction from the standard questions to ask Rice: Does he think Idle No More can sustain itself?

When we trudge back to the newsroom, my boots and socks sopping wet, Rice tells me her question was unusual. As a reporter, he doesn’t give opinions on the news. Today was different, he thinks, because of his essay about Idle No More, posted to CBC.ca this morning. “Modern history is largely defined by the faces of the people who make it,” he wrote. “When we think of the Oka crisis of 1990, we all think of that one shot of the warrior and the soldier, which instilled pride in so many First Nations people across the country. That same potential is here. This time, there are thousands more people from all First Nations willing to put their faces on history.”

But Rice’s understanding of the story is unusual, too. Most stories about Idle No More have lacked depth, context, and analysis. Though the grassroots movement is complex, with no appointed leader and various mandates, that doesn’t excuse vague and misinformed coverage. By offering only a play-by-play of protests and blockades, reporters missed the point. A few, including Rice, proved that analytical, thorough coverage is possible. Idle No More demands a change from the political norm, and for Canadian journalists, the norm has long been poor coverage of indigenous people. Sure, you could argue journalists don’t cover any minority as well as they should, but as Mary Agnes Welch, the public policy reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, told me, natives are the founding people of Canada, and they’re marginalized more than any other group. “I think you could make an argument that we have a treaty obligation to First Nations, and also we have a Canadian obligation because so much of what they’re experiencing is, it’s un-Canadian, frankly.”

I kept my thumb on the Idle No More hashtag from the first national day of protest in December. For more than a month, I lived in an INM media bubble, scouring news websites, newspapers, blogs, and videos, and consuming as much coverage as humanly possible. Idle No More’s trajectory is one worth charting, if for no other reason than the movement started as a Twitter hashtag and grew to be one of the top stories of the year. But it’s also an opportunity to check on the state of Aboriginal coverage.

This is the log of my media diet since the movement became national news.

DECEMBER 10 > Let’s start with the “official” first day, although the #IdleNoMore hashtag first appeared in November, when a Cree woman in Alberta used it to promote an information session on Bill C-45, the federal government’s second omnibus budget bill. First Nations activists are concerned about its contents: changes to the Indian Act and Navigable Waters Protection Act.

Today, the hashtag became more than a call to action—it is action. We saw the first of dozens of protests in major Canadian cities and #IdleNoMore trended on Twitter as people shared photos and updates from rallies.

If this wasn’t enough of a hook, the next day, Theresa Spence, chief of the northern Ontario community of Attawapiskat, started a hunger strike to pressure Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Governor General David Johnston, and First Nations leaders into meeting to discuss treaty rights. Neither the protests nor the hunger strike received national mainstream coverage, save for articles on The Globe and Mail website  and The Huffington Post Canada. Even local coverage was patchy. Only Aboriginal Peoples Television Network covered the rallies all day, posting videos and stories to its Facebook and Twitter accounts and putting the events at the top of its nightly newscast.

Unimpressed, Aboriginal people took to Twitter to lament the void. “There is a media bias,” tweeted Wab Kinew, a former CBC journalist who’s now director of indigenous inclusion at the University of Winnipeg. “Any other group of people who brought out as many people in as many cities would have had wall-to-wall coverage.”

Instead, a monkey in a Toronto Ikea dominated headlines. “‘Tens of thousands of Native people turned out for a coordinated, national….Oh, look, a monkey’—the Media,” tweeted one person. Another wrote: “The media isn’t interested in well-behaved native peoples.”

Meanwhile, I had a job interview at a major daily newspaper. In the hours before, I kept an eye on its website for INM coverage. Nothing surfaced. When I pitched a story about the movement in the interview, one editor said it sounded like something they’d assign to a freelancer.

DECEMBER 18 > Idle No More finally made CBC’s The National tonight with a story on how Spence’s hunger strike is “part of a wider movement.” It’s thorough—Adrienne Arsenault also reported on the protests, the crucial social media component, and the controversial legislation. She concluded with a reference to the second wave of rallies planned for December 21: “If the turnout is what they suggest it will be and hope it will be, then it’s possible that this might just be the beginning of something.”

Back when I first talked to Rice, in October, before INM, he foreshadowed the movement by crediting social media as a way for Aboriginal people to unify. “A lot of younger people are a lot more aware, and they’re able to share their stories to a greater degree, and maybe influence other news organizations and bring some issues to light from a grassroots level,” Rice said. He recalls seeing tweets in INM’s early days about how the movement didn’t need the mainstream media to spread its message. “Well, you kind of do,” he said, adding that Twitter runs the risk of being an echo chamber.

If you want widespread attention, you need the mainstream media, and in the following week, Idle No More started earning more space in local newspapers and broadcasts, thanks to regional protests. Still, Duncan McCue, an Ojibwa reporter for The National and journalism professor at the University of British Columbia, said reporters mistook the groundswell for isolated gatherings. “That there was something national going on. Didn’t get it. Perhaps didn’t care. Perhaps were heading on holidays. All three of those things combined, and unfortunately, there wasn’t as much coverage as there could have been.”

DECEMBER 21 > Today, I travelled to Ottawa for the largest rally yet. Protesters met on Victoria Island—traditional Algonquin land and Spence’s home during her hunger strike—before marching to Parliament Hill. On the plane, I made the mistake of telling my seatmate, a pompous businessman, where I was headed. He hadn’t heard of Idle No More, and for the remainder of the flight—only an hour, phew—he ranted about “those corrupt Indian chiefs who steal money from the government.” That, he said, is what he sees in the media.

So far, there has been little reportage from First Nations communities. The problems on many reserves—poverty, unemployment, substance abuse, suicide, and violence—have been covered before, but with INM, everything is on the table (unlike, say, Attawapiskat, where housing and poverty were the issues, and Oka or Ipperwash, which were about land). Of course, coverage of squalor on reserves can perpetuate the stereotype of the poor, lazy native if journalists don’t balance those drastic, yet important, stories with more positive ones.

Over the Christmas break, Idle No More thrived with rallies, blockades, and solidarity hunger strikes, but so did the stereotypes. Journalists covered these events as they always had—with photos and videos of natives adorned with feathers and buckskin, dancing, chanting, and pounding drums. Though this is undeniably a facet of Aboriginal culture, most reporters didn’t dig below the surface of the image or sound bite. “Journalists just love this stuff,” theOttawa Citizen’s Terry Glavin later wrote. “It means you don’t actually have to do any work.”

JANUARY 7 > Early January was a whirlwind. A judge ordered the Ontario Provincial Police to remove protesters blocking railway tracks near Sarnia. Harper agreed to meet with First Nations leaders, including Spence. Just three days later, an audit commissioned by Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada leaked to CBC. The Deloitte audit investigated Attawapiskat finances between 2005 and 2011, finding that 81 percent of examined transactions had inadequate documentation; 60 percent had none. The Globe headline—“Attawapiskat Audit Raises Questions About Millions in Spending”—was typical. But the audit also showed accounting practices had improved after Spence became chief in 2010, so APTN reporter Kenneth Jackson tweeted: “My lede would have been: Serious financial problems on Attawapiskat but improved under Chief Theresa Spence audit indicates.”

The story reinforced the stereotype of the fat-cat chief with money-lined pockets. On The Huffington Post Canada, journalist Yoni Goldstein argued that reserve “hellholes” are the fault of leaders such as Spence. “How is it possible that native leaders have managed to squander…millions of dollars federal and provincial governments keep handing over, year after year?” he wrote. These commentaries undermined the quality of discussion. In a letter to Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley Echo, John Logan wrote that Spence’s position as a symbol for Aboriginal people was a “sham.” Spence attended a residential school as a child, but the scathing critiques lacked this context. In fact, she is a credible symbol: she knows the history of Aboriginal people because she’s lived it. The Telegram in St. John’s was the only news outlet I found to mention this.

Never mind that Spence wasn’t even tied to Idle No More. Her fast just happened to coincide with INM’s kickoff—something many reporters confused. For instance, at the Assembly of First Nations presser in Ottawa on January 10, David Akin, Sun Media’s national bureau chief, asked AFN chief Shawn Atleo if it was acceptable that Attawapiskat police kicked out a reporter. “The Attawapiskat angle was so much more tabloid-friendly than history,” wrote Michael Harris on iPolitics. “It was character assassination by dull razor blade.”

In the days leading up to the meeting with Prime Minister Harper, journalists capitalized on so-called cracks in INM’s armour, as some provincial chiefs opted out of the meeting for fear it would amount to no more than a photo op. A Globe headline sounded ominous: “Idle No More Protests Beyond Control of Chiefs.”

The possibility of violence was a popular topic. In the National Post, Kent Roach and David Schneiderman, University of Toronto law professors, arguedthat police were right to be cautious about the protesters. Because, you know, those violent natives. And in the Globe, John Ibbitson patted the government on the back: “Thus far, the Conservatives have gotten the big things right, by ignoring peaceful demonstrations and engaging with the responsible leadership in order to marginalize extremists. But that is exactly the moment at which events can spiral out of control: Oka; the Dudley George shooting. Then no one can predict what will happen.”

In the same vein, John Ivison wrote in the Post: “Despite the posters proclaiming ‘zero tolerance to all forms of violence,’ the guys barring the gate did not look they’d [sic] be dogmatic about the principle. ‘Friend or foe?’ growled one to a native girl who was looking to gain access.” As if growling signals imminent bloodshed.

JANUARY 14 > Small-town Manitoba weekly the Morris Mirror caused an uproar with an editorial claiming Aboriginal people were acting like terrorists. “Indians/Natives want it all but corruption and laziness prevent some of them from working for it,” wrote editor Reed Turcotte beside an editorial cartoon of a native person making smoke signals, with this caption: “Before they were partially wiped out by white men’s diseases, the Canadian Indian had a highly evolved society built around the world’s first cell phone.” Media outlets across Canada ran this story. The Mirror later ran an apology, but maintained “we stand by the fact that the Natives must work to get out of their situation.”

And in a Cowichan News Leader op-ed, Patrick Hrushowy, president of the Cowichan Valley constituency association of the B.C. Liberal Party, wrote of provincial chiefs issuing “thundering calls for ‘warriors’ to prepare to take the fight to the streets. All of this scares me…I pass someone on the street and wonder if this is one of the ‘warriors’ who wants to put my livelihood at risk to achieve his or her demands.”

Meanwhile, APTN reported on a Sun News poll asking readers to describe Spence in one word to win a prize: “Some of the words used included: fat, oink, garbage, chief two-chins and hippo. Others couldn’t stick to just one word. One wrote, ‘Stop sucking Lysol.’” This type of discourse prompted Idle No More supporters to protest outside Sun offices in three cities. At a Toronto INM rally, I watched a man accost a Sun News cameraperson, throw his hand in front of the lens, and lecture him about the network’s “agenda.”

On social media, things were even more heated. Manitoba’s Thompson Citizen shut down its Facebook page due to an onslaught of anti-native comments. And a tweet from Ivison a few weeks earlier—“It seems there are certain native leaders intent on conflict; who want hapless Theresa Spence to become a martyr. God forbid that happens”—sicced the attack dogs. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, a professor at the University of Victoria, called Ivison a “racist prick” and threatened to kick his “immigrant ass” back to Scotland if he disrespected Spence again.

Several pundits seemed intent on discrediting INM and disparaging Aboriginal people. “While Chief Spence, and others, may long for ‘nation-to-nation discussions,’ there is I think a genuine question as to whether there’s enough of Aboriginal culture that has survived to even dream of that lofty status,” wrote Post columnist Christie Blatchford. “Smudging, drumming and the like do not a nation make.” The Globe’s Jeffrey Simpson ridiculed the desire for sovereignty: “But too many communities remain within the dream palace, hungering for a return to a more separate existence, even if the lands on which they sit are—and likely always will be-—of marginal economic value.” He didn’t mention that these communities were relegated to marginal land years ago so the government could harvest natural resources.

Barbara Kay, also of the Post, trivialized Spence’s fast, suggesting she was merely “detoxing” to lose weight (she was consuming fish broth, after all) and criticized her for a diet that probably includes “a lot of carbohydrates.” Spence’s hunger strike was media fodder for all its 44 days. First, it was just that—a “hunger strike.” Then, it became a “liquid diet” or “liquid fast,” though Spence was open about her consumption of water and fish broth early on. A story on Globalnews.ca before she ended her hunger strike read, “It is not known just how many calories Spence is ingesting, subsisting on fish broth and medicinal teas (a true hunger striker drinks only water).” The Post called her wise for drinking fish broth to preserve her strength, as though this were a sneaky tactic to fast without really fasting.

Fish broth actually has special significance. In a Huffington Post Canada editorial, Leanne Simpson wrote that her ancestors survived on fish broth during the winters because, once their land was colonized, it was their only sustenance. “It carries cultural meaning for Anishinaabeg,” she wrote. “It symbolizes hardship and sacrifice. It 
symbolizes the strength of our ancestors. It means 
survival.”

JANUARY 17 > Protests and blockades took over the roads today, and a Canadian Press and Postmedia story discussed these events: “Some groups spoke of their own land claims, others decried the federal government’s changes to environmental oversight. Still others spoke of the need to honour all First Nations treaties.” That the movement wasn’t monolithic was one of the major difficulties for journalists.

I can guess what you’re thinking: it’s easy for me, a 21-year-old student, to pick apart professionals. Really, though, I do see the abundant challenges. First of all, Idle No More is grassroots with no appointed leader, so reporters don’t know who has authority to speak about it. Second, although some complained journalists were slow to cover INM, the Post’s Tristin Hopper pointed out the wisdom of waiting to see if a movement has legs. “We can’t write about a hashtag. We’ll just look like clowns.” And journalists are often wary of covering hunger strikes for the same reason they are of suicides—fear of encouraging them.

INM also challenges the country’s colonial history and it’s impossible to provide that context in two minutes or 600 words, said McCue. Journalists attempted to cover this history with one line or a short paragraph, buried as the inverted pyramid model dictates. This perpetuated the idea that INM was disorganized and vague, even after organizers identified specifically what they were fighting for.

I also understand the news cycle and what Rice called the curse of daily news. “There’s not that much opportunity to really offer context,” he said. “You’re only skimming the surface.” I can see that all a tight deadline allows for is a recap of that day’s protest, and not a dissection of the issues. Also tricky: Canada is home to 50 or so First Nations and more than 600 native communities. As Peter Edwards, a Star reporter who covered Ipperwash in 1995, wrote in his book One Dead Indian, “It was all a confusing jumble for the media, who like things in tidy packages….” With millions of Aboriginal people across Canada, there are no “tidy packages,” which made it difficult for reporters to suss out the majority’s sentiments. But, as Hayden King, an Anishinaabe politics assistant professor at Ryerson University, wrote in the Globe, “Recent attempts to interpret the Idle No More movement has resulted in conclusions of sudden divisions, fracturing and ‘chiefs losing control.’” These divisions, though, are normal and have always existed, just as they do in Canadian politics.

INM was also tough because its message evolved. In the early days, supporters fought against Bill C-45, but gradually, their desires grew to include treaty rights, nation-to-nation discussion, and an improved relationship with the federal government. These issues aren’t easy to sum up in a couple of sentences.

Spence complicated things. When, throughout January, she waffled on her demands, it was undoubtedly confusing. Of course, reporting is difficult when you’re physically removed from the story: Spence supporters escorted Star reporter Joanna Smith from the Victoria Island enclosure and police kicked a Global News team out of Attawapiskat.
But journalists have long struggled with covering native issues. As the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal Peoples found in 1996: “Many Canadians know Aboriginal people only as noble environmentalists, angry warriors or pitiful victims. A full picture of their humanity is simply not available in the media.”

Thanks to this relationship, many indigenous people distrust reporters, which in turn can further discourage non-native journalists from wading into the deep waters of Aboriginal affairs. It’s a vicious cycle. As Susan Gamble, a reporter who covers the Six Nations reserve for The Expositor in Brantford, Ontario, said, “There’s a lot of reluctance among some people to switch over to something like that because they feel like it’s a delicate subject. They feel like it’s a tough subject.”

Some INM supporters decried criticism as “racism,” even if the issues raised were legitimate. Accusations of racism are nothing new, but when everyone has a smartphone, racist comments and angry tweets are even easier.

Gamble has experienced this. “If somebody doesn’t like what you write, the natural thing is to accuse you of not understanding the issue because you’re not native or that you’re trying deliberately to do something negative to the natives because you are non-native.”

JANUARY 19 > A revealing, magazine-length feature appeared in the Post today. Jonathan Kay visited four reserves along James Bay, and found most were financially stable. “As we drive through the Fort Albany reserve in Edmund Metatawabin’s pick-up truck, he asks me: ‘Do you see any drunk people. Are all the homes broken down?’ The answer is no — and he wants me to say it,” wrote Kay. “Based on the way the media reports stories from remote fly-in reserves such as Fort Albany, many Canadians have formed the impression that communities such as his are crumbling junkyards full of miserable alcoholics.”

Certain outlets and journalists demonstrated how INM coverage could be better. Both The National and TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin hosted round-table discussions featuring native and non-native experts leading up to the First Nations meeting with Harper. On the former show, Idle No More was the top story each night, with analysis of different angles and guests who included urban Aboriginals and young activists. Reporters venturing to nearby or far-off reserves gleaned context that, although removed from highway blockades and mall round dances, showed a fresh take on the movement.

A week ago, I highlighted a Star story in my notes. “To get lost in the diet particulars of one hunger-striking chief in Ottawa,” wrote Jim Coyle in a well-researched feature, “or the accounting idiosyncracies of one reserve’s band council, or a decision in Attawapiskat by a people grown wary of media to ban a TV crew, is to miss the larger and legitimate point of Idle No More and the opportunity it presents for essential change.”

At the height of the Spence-money-management frenzy, The Gazette in Montreal published a feature about the successful Mohawk community of Kahnawake—a reminder that some reserves are indeed financially stable. Late in January, the Free Press published an INM primer. When did it begin? What is a treaty? Where does the Indian Act fit in? It was an informative read.

APTN’s coverage was consistently good. Reporters Jorge Barrera and Kenneth Jackson—focusing on politics and the “streets,” respectively—committed to dig deep and tell the whole story. “Our job isn’t to defend Spence by any means. If I had that audit, I’d do a story,” said Jackson. “I just would add context. And I think that’s the main role as a reporter—add context wherever you can.”

The journalists I talked to agreed that hiring more Aboriginal people is crucial to improving coverage. “There’s a genuine lack of awareness about a lot of issues that are affecting First Nations people, and until you have more First Nations journalists in the mainstream, I think that that might always be the case,” said Tanya Talaga, an Anishinaabe-Polish reporter at the Star. During INM, some papers commissioned native freelancers to write analysis. But King said newspapers should regularly feature perspectives from native people, not just during crises.

The Strategic Alliance of Broadcasters for Aboriginal Reflection (SABAR), a partnership of mainstream and Aboriginal outlets, encourages the media to hire more native reporters and change how they cover indigenous people. CBC has a stronger record of covering native affairs than most—its TV series 8th Fire, for instance, delves into Canada’s relationship with indigenous people—and it broadcasts in eight Aboriginal languages. But this diversity doesn’t carry over to hiring practices. From January 2003 to March 2012, the number of full-time, permanent Aboriginal employees rose from 1.2 percent to 1.4 percent of the broadcaster’s workforce. (As of 2006, Aboriginal people accounted for 3.8 percent of Canada’s population.)

That’s one of the ideas behind a Journalists for Human Rights program slated to launch later this year in several northern Ontario communities. An organization that usually works with reporters and editors in Third-World countries, JHR will train native journalists in print and radio reporting.

Improving how reporters interact with native people is the goal of McCue’s website, Reporting in Indigenous Communities. The toolkit includes a checklist for visiting a reserve and a terminology guide, compiled by SABAR. Journalism schools should also give students some grounding in Aboriginal issues, because with a growing native population in Canada, most reporters will cover native issues at some point. If media outlets want to get it right (and King believes they genuinely do), they must commit more time to understand history, and avoid centuries-old stereotypes.

On a more basic level, Aboriginal people have to become commonplace in the media. “So if there was just a story about a medical breakthrough and then they interviewed an Aboriginal doctor, and it wasn’t a big deal,” said Kinew. “It wasn’t like, okay, here’s a story about Aboriginal doctors.” Steve Bonspiel was more vocal about reporters resorting to stereotypes: “It’s bullshit,” said the Mohawk editor and publisher of The Eastern Door in Kahnawake, Quebec. “I think they can look at a native story not as a native story, but as a human story.”

Dan David, a Mohawk freelance journalist in nearby Kanehsatake, has a unique take. When I spoke with him last fall, he said the “mainstream media” can seem like such a big, unchangeable entity. “If you had one newspaper just devote its resources to improving its coverage of human rights issues—and that’s what indigenous issues are, they’re human rights issues—then that’s a step in the right direction.”

Yet Kay thinks the main reasons for poor Aboriginal coverage—the cost of travelling to remote communities and lack of reader interest—are out of journalists’ control. “Most Canadians just don’t care that much about First Nations stories, and so the market isn’t there,” he wrote in an email. “The media aren’t going to report on stories that most people don’t care about.”

After the evening newscast on December 21, Rice admitted he was worried about writing that INM analysis piece for CBC.ca. What if his editors saw it as a threat to his objectivity? “Much to my surprise,” he said, “they sort of fed into that and played off it in terms of the coverage, which is kind of cool. I mean, I wasn’t expecting that at all today.” When Rice was a kid, the only time he saw reporters in his Wasauksing, Ontario, community was when things went awry. “I developed a distrust for media very early on. Why are these guys only showing up when something bad here happens? There are so many good things happening in my community.”

Rice first considered a journalism career in high school. “There’s a bridge that really needs to be built there of understanding and awareness,” he said. “I thought, if I can get in there and try to do my part and just do one little story at a time, then I saw that as sort of a success.”

JANUARY 24 > Spence ended her hunger strike today. The media’s sentiment was clearly that INM will fade away as Occupy did—and the fast’s end is certainly the termination of something—but journalists who thought the movement was over clearly didn’t understand it in the first place.

Last week, a poll suggested only 38 percent of Canadians support INM, and 60 percent believe native people’s problems are brought on by themselves (up from 35 percent in 1989). “While most Canadians have likely heard of Idle No More, many Canadians apparently haven’t bothered to properly educate themselves about what exactly it is,” stated a Globalnews.ca article. But have journalists? It’s unrealistic to expect the average Canadian to understand INM, when it’s debatable reporters did.

Journalists missed another chance to cover Aboriginal affairs in a balanced and detailed way. In a guest column for the Cambridge Times, Atinuke Bankole compared INM to the 1950s civil rights movement. Both started out grassroots and protested social justice issues, and both were criticized for being disorganized. “Blaming the victim was rampant among polite, average white Americans back then. ‘Well, things wouldn’t be so bad for blacks if they weren’t so lazy. Black people are backwards and that is why they are  underdeveloped. Slavery ended 100 years ago. Get over it.’ Sound familiar?”

Of course, INM differs because Aboriginal people lived on this land centuries before most of us did. Colonialism and the treaties stemming from it are complicated. Yet, I do see a parallel between the two movements. Mainstream media don’t portray any minority well—black, disabled, or queer. But colonial history sets the Aboriginal population apart. And what’s lacking in much of the coverage is an understanding of that history. Deadlines will always be tight and budgets will no doubt get tighter, but Canada’s indigenous population is growing and the issues INM raised won’t go away. It’s time for journalists to take a step, even a small one, towards consistent, thoughtful coverage of indigenous people instead of waiting for the next crisis or protest.

Photographs by Eric J. Magiskan / AHKI photography

Paul Watson wends his rented car along the picturesque Alaska Highway. Past Carcross, he keeps heading south on a road that hugs a towering mountain to the right with blue snow-capped mountains across a grey lake to the left. The rain gently pitter-patters and the windshield wipers do not change their slow, steady pace. Country music plays on the FM radio.

Watson is on his way to Faro, four-and-a-half hours north of Whitehorse. After spending four days in Yukon’s Peel River Watershed, working on a story for the Toronto Star, the Arctic-Aboriginal correspondent wants to make an extra trip to an old mining town where a reclamation project will cost taxpayers an estimated $700 million. He hopes the visit will give him a good ending to his piece about the battle to protect one of Canada’s last pristine wildernesses in the face of rampant mineral exploration.

When we pass a “Now Entering British Columbia” sign, he remains unfazed. But after another half hour, he realizes he’s going the wrong way. He turns the navy Kia Sorento around on a gravel shoulder used for taking pictures.

“Here’s Carcross and here’s Whitehorse and here’s Faro,” I say as I trace my finger on the glossy yellow tourist map. “So we could have just gone…Carmacks!”

“Oh, Carmacks! Carmacks.”

“That’s over here.”

“Oh shit.”

“Yeah.”

“So we’re not even close.”

“No, we just went the opposite way.”

“OK,” he says nonchalantly. “So where’s Carmacks?” The yellow-green lit clock on the dashboard says 10:30 a.m. We’ve been driving two-and-a-half hours the wrong way.

“Sorry,” he says. “See, I told ya, I always get lost. This is why I need a GPS.”

While no sense of direction may be a curse for others, some of Watson’s best stories come from getting lost. And it’s this wandering and losing his way that he wants to apply to his work in the North, a place where southern Canadian journalists face a lot of criticism. By wandering, Watson hopes to find stories that aren’t preconceived; to understand the place rather than sensationalize or trivialize it—even if those stories don’t always create the buzz that editors crave. Using Vancouver as a base, Watson heads north for about six weeks at a time to do a story or hang out.

That’s a luxury that makes him the envy of many southern journalists, who usually report on the North by phone. The Canadian Press, the Edmonton Journal and Global TV have all closed their Yellowknife bureaus. The Globe and Mail—which in 1984 killed its northern column that was predominantly about Yukon—recently ran an in-depth Nunavut series, but it doesn’t have a reporter stationed in the North full time.

Watson admits he has a long way to go, though. He started the Arctic-Aboriginal beat three years ago, but also covers Afghanistan, so he must divide his time between two corners of the world. Typically, southern coverage of the North, a place that is a big part of Canada’s national identity, falls into two extremes that sell: the quaint or the negative. But because this is a vast territory with many different, complex people and issues, many northerners feel that southern Canadians have a skewed perspective of their life and their land. And with the region on the rise politically and economically, understanding the North is more critical than ever.

Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut are home to 111,200 people, just 0.32 percent of Canada’s population. But depending on who’s talking, the borders of the North sink below territorial boundaries to include the northern parts of many provinces, such as northern Quebec, or extend into the international circumpolar region. Indeed, some see it as a way of life more than a geographical designation. Martha Flaherty, former president of the national Inuit women’s association Pauktuutit, who now translates films into Inuktitut at the National Film Board of Canada, believes that while access to the North is greater than ever, there still isn’t enough media interest. She’s the granddaughter of Robert Flaherty, whose 1922 filmNanook of the North follows an Inuk man and his family as they hunt for seal and walrus and build igloos on the sea ice (see sidebar page 34). That movie continues to “represent and misrepresent Inuit” and “northerness” to southern audiences even today, wrote Valerie Alia in her 1999 book Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People.

But the mythologizing began even earlier. An 1899 National Geographic piece about explorer Robert Peary’s quest to conquer the North Pole reported: “The hand-to-hand battle against the opposing forces of darkness, frost and distance which Peary waged during the entire winter makes a chapter daring and effective as any recorded in Arctic history.” Much more has been written since, of course, but colonial attitudes are hard to shake. Journalists parachute in for a few days, usually for a special event. “People joke about it: if you go in for a day you get an article, if you go in for a week you get a book,” says Alia, adding many reporters “don’t pay as much serious attention to the humans there as to the landscape and the resources and a kind of romance with the North.”

In downtown Whitehorse, they joke about the way southern papers cover the North. “They don’t,” is the common line. Others aren’t amused. “I think that they make us sound too remote, almost like we’re so far North that we’re out of reach,” says Yukoner Greta Thorlakson as she walks down Main Street. “Just because we aren’t a province doesn’t mean that a lot of what goes on down south doesn’t happen here too.” A recent poll commissioned by Yellowknife-based magazine Up Here had editors concluding Canadians have a Grade 1 level knowledge of the North. Canadians roared with laughter at Rick Mercer’s “Talking to Americans,” which inspired the poll, but Up Here’s senior editor Katharine Sandiford says when the ignorance is about our own country, “it’s a lot less funny.”

Hoping to change that, Watson sent Toronto Star managing editor Joe Hall a proposal titled “The New Frontier: A Multimedia Arctic-Aboriginal Beat” in 2009. It outlined the veteran correspondent’s idea to cover the North as a foreign bureau, not just restricted to Canada, but including the circumpolar region because this would add more context to the issues the people there face. Watson wrote the proposal from Jakarta, Indonesia; he was working as Southeast Asia bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times but his editor wanted to turn him into a freelancer to save money, Watson emailed Hall about coming back to Canada. To Watson, a journalist who’d made his name at the Star as a foreign correspondent, the decision made sense. Within a few days, he sent his pitch, which came as a shock to Hall because it was so out of left field for a reporter who’d spent much of his career overseas. At the time, the Star’s northern coverage was, like other outlets’, usually done by telephone and occasional visits. But Hall was intrigued. It didn’t hurt that the proposal came from Watson, who won a Pulitzer Prize for a 1993 photo of the dead body of a U.S. soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu after the downing of his Black Hawk helicopter.

Today, he’s in downtown Whitehorse looking for a history book on the Peel watershed. He finds the Globe in the basement of Mac’s Fireweed Books and taps the newspaper on the counter twice. An article on the front page is about the assassination of the mayor of Kandahar. His Afghan fixer had emailed him about it while he was in the Peel, but he couldn’t write the story from Yukon. He can’t get Afghanistan off his mind; after all, he’s covered it since 1996 and, with Canadian troops and reporters leaving the country, he believes reporting on it is more important than ever. Still, Watson says the North is exactly where he wants to be, especially since he’s drawn to places where other journalists don’t usually go.

Darrell Greer, editor of the region’s Kivalliq News, was one of the few photographers who caught Governor General Michaëlle Jean eating raw seal heart when she visited Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, in 2009. Southern news outlets offered Greer as much money as he makes in a week for his photos, but he was pretty sure he knew how they would use them, so he turned down the cash and now says, “Go through all the stories of that period and try to find one that will tell you why the Governor General came to Nunavut to begin with.”

CP photographer Sean Kilpatrick was one of the other photographers in Rankin that day. His news wire’s lead read: “On the first day of her trip to the Arctic, Michaëlle Jean gutted a freshly slaughtered seal, pulled out its raw heart, and ate it.” Other articles quoted animal rights groups calling her actions “revolting” or “Neanderthal.” The narrow spotlight doesn’t do justice to a complex place with its own traditions and culture, though CP’s Alex Panetta did add that Jean made a forceful pitch for federal money to create a university in the North. Perhaps the headline on Up Here’s online article put it best: “Michaëlle Jean Eats Raw Seal Meat, World Goes Nuts.”

Coverage varies from reporter to reporter, but Kent Driscoll, Nunavut bureau reporter for Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), says the most frustrating misunderstandings happen when journalists come in packs to cover big stories such as a prime minister’s visit. He’s seen Iqaluit’s name spelled with an extra “u,” which changes the meaning of the city from “the place of fish” to “unwiped buttocks.” In a pack, journalists tend to all pick up on the same story, without worrying about context. During the conference of G7 finance ministers in 2009, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., a group that looks after Inuit land claims, offered workshops about Inuit culture and perspectives. Driscoll says no southern journalists showed up, and in order to see more than the backs of other reporters’ heads on the tour bus, southerners should come alone more often and when there isn’t a big story.

Researching ahead of time also helps. When Bob Weber headed up to the Northwest Territories to cover an election in 1997, he discovered there were no political parties, in the southern sense, with decision-making leaders at the helm. His whole plan fell apart because he didn’t know that the territorial government operates by majority consensus. The Edmonton-based reporter, who does most of CP’s Arctic coverage, has since built a formidable list of contacts and a knowledge of the North that impresses many of the people who live there.

Yet, he admits stories written from a desk tend to be more institutional because they rely on the government, police and land claims groups that have the resources to get their information to journalists. But when they travel, reporters can get the stories that nobody’s packaged and go beyond cute and fluffy or big issues such as poverty, addiction and crime. Weber is proudest of his stories that have come out of being there.

But that’s expensive. The Star devotes about $150,000, excluding salary, to post Watson there, a cost comparable to the Star’s foreign bureaus, which range from $100,000 to $150,000, without salary—but it’s four to five times more expensive than other national bureaus. Ed Struzik of the Edmonton Journal, who has been reporting on the North for over 30 years, says his newspaper sent him up at least once or twice a year, but now doesn’t have the budget to send him at all. Since the bureau closed, he pays his own way to the eastern Arctic to research and write books in and about the North. His editors give him time off and, in exchange, he usually files a few stories from each trip. Given the cost, he has some sympathy for his bosses. “I can understand the trepidation of editors when they look at a bill of, say, $5,000 or $10,000 to do a story and then wonder what the fallout will be when the story is just okay instead of spectacular.”

In the fall of 2010, a spate of gun violence in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, prompted the entire RCMP detachment to take stress leave. The story caught the eye of the Globe’s Patrick White, who’d covered the territory when he was the paper’s Winnipeg bureau chief. It had the makings of an intriguing story: an artist’s colony unraveling was “symptomatic of a territory unhinged,” he later concluded. National editor Sinclair Stewart thought so too and, much to White’s surprise, sent the reporter and photographer Peter Power up North for two weeks. “I imagined just doing it from my desk in Toronto,” says White with a laugh. After all, that’s how southern journalists usually cover the region.

At more than 7,200 words, his April 2011 article looked at how Nunavut was doing 12 years after its launch. With a violent crime rate seven times the national average and a homicide rate 10 times that of the rest of the country, White concluded, “The bold experiment in domestic nation-building Canada launched in 1999 has gone deeply wrong.” Being there gave him stories such as the man who lived in one small house with 15 others. Remembering his conversation with the man, White explains, “He offered his own personal diagnosis for what was wrong, not only with his family being in such an overcrowded house, but for all of Nunavut.”

On the first Saturday of April, the Globe’s front page showed Leo Nangmalik looking off into the distance. In White’s piece, the man talked about the abuses he suffered in residential schools, his time in jail and his attempted suicide. But the story ends on a hopeful note with his words: “What I have told you…I have never been able to tell. I feel a peace right now. Maybe this is what we need, this talking.” Later the same day, though, White’s BlackBerry pinged: Nangmalik had committed suicide. The reporter alerted Stewart and Power and within an hour Stewart posted an editor’s note on the paper’s site. White soon learned that the source, who’d become more than that, was facing the prospect of going back to jail for a charge from his past drug dealings. He killed himself a few days before the article ran.

Even without the suicide, the piece was controversial. Greer dismisses it as a typical southern take on the North. He has no problem with White broaching uncomfortable topics, but says an outsider wouldn’t understand much of the context about territorial development. “It’d be nice once in a while to see a tip of the hat from southern media as to what we’re accomplishing and not always beating us down.” Meanwhile, Health Minister Tagak Curley delivered an angry speech in the Nunavut Legislature. He was outraged that the series had suggested “there is no hope” in his territory and that “the leaders have their face under the snow and they’re not willing to admit it.”

White, who is currently the Globe’s Toronto City Hall reporter, counters that Nunavut’s social issues were something that hadn’t been thoroughly covered by the media and “to just dismiss that outlet as being overly negative is a pretty easy way to ignore what that outlet has reported on.” And Jim Bell, editor of Nunatsiaq News, a paper based in Iqaluit, believes the story was accurate and says Canadians have a right to journalism that explores the reasons the territory is in trouble, considering the amount of money the federal government has invested in Nunavut. “You can’t fix a problem if you don’t know there’s a problem.”

Jimmy Johnny, a Na-Cho Nyak Dun First Nation elder, chats with Watson outside the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society office in downtown Whitehorse. As he puts a Player’s cigarette to his lips, he whips around and points to a tan-coloured chipmunk as it scurries across the fence. Watson smiles knowingly: their time together in the Peel provided plenty of evidence of Johnny’s ability to recognize wildlife that Watson couldn’t even identify with his telephoto lens. Days spent hiking and talking around the campfire helped Watson know more about Johnny’s life and how decisions on the Peel will ultimately affect him and others. Southern Canadians may romanticize the northern wilderness and believe it is unlimited, but it’s disappearing.

In his story on the Peel, Watson devoted just as much space to Johnny as to environmental scientist David Suzuki, who was also in Whitehorse. That’s uncommon; “I often hear up North: how come we never got to be part of these stories?” says Mary Simon, president of national Inuit organization Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. “We are the experts of the North.” The story appeared in the Saturday and Sunday editions of the Star in late August. The first part, “A Majestic Yukon Where Humans Are Still Outsiders,” ran on A1 with a photo. Watson began the story with a spiritual tone because he thought it was the best way to connect his audience to such a remote place. He ended Sunday’s story, which ran on A8, with his visit to Faro and gave the mining industry one paragraph. Faro is, he suggested, a cautionary tale for those making decisions about the Peel. Johnny liked the story: “His writing is a lot different from other people.”

Others are more critical. Valerie Alia notes how few aboriginal voices were actually in the series. About the first story, adds: “The headline implies that old-style portrayal of ‘unpeopled wilderness.’” Of course, Watson isn’t the first writer to have his best intentions ruined by a headline writer.

Although he has many ideas for his beat, Watson admits he hasn’t come close to what he wants to do with it. He is experimenting, trying to figure the place out, acquainting himself with people, which often means leaving the paper, pen and camera in the hotel. But the wandering pays off. When University of Guelph researcher Tristan Pearce met Watson in the coffee shop of the Arctic Char Inn in Ulukhaktok during white-out conditions, he was the first southern Canadian reporter Pearce can remember seeing in the hamlet on the west coast of Victoria Island, let alone one who stayed a while. And Watson found a story. But instead of focusing on Pearce, who has been studying the impact of climate change on the community since 2003, “Victoria Island: Where Warming Means Danger” looked at the issue from the perspective of Jerry Akoaksion and Jack Akhiatak, two local hunters who took the reporter on the ice with their sled dogs.

Watson wants to earn people’s trust, which takes time, before tackling hard-hitting stories, though he thinks his High Arctic exiles series in 2009 came close. The three pieces were about how the federal government moved Inuit 2,000 kilometres north from the southern Arctic to the High Arctic during the Cold War, essentially leaving them to fend for themselves. Although other reporters have covered the issue, this part of Canada’s history is not yet in the public consciousness. Watson envisioned a landing page for the Star site that teachers could use in classrooms, but that never materialized. Indeed, as of November, Watson had produced just nine videos and hadn’t taken advantage of the web nearly as much as he and his editors wanted.

It takes time to build a bureau, and progress on this one has been slowed because Watson splits his time between the North and Afghanistan. (And this fall, Watson’s title changed from Arctic-Aboriginal correspondent to foreign affairs columnist, which will mean a portion of his time will be spent in the circumpolar region—and, therefore, the Arctic—but he’ll also be dividing his time between even more countries across the globe.) Still, Flaherty, who was only five when her family relocated to Grise Fiord and who went back with Watson to tell her story, was impressed with him. “We go through a lot of pain. We go through a lot of problems, but we also have a lot of beauty and people don’t see that when they don’t go up there,” she says. “He’s seen the beauty of it.”

“The Toronto Star Discovers the ‘Arctic’” was the sarcastic head Nunatsiaq editor Jim Bell wrote on his personal blog when Watson started his beat. He thought Watson did a good job on his first story about researchers aboard the Louis St. Laurent, a coast guard icebreaker, but it wasn’t really news since the project had been announced a couple of years earlier. And the display didn’t impress Bell. Phrases such as “the planet’s new frontier,” a place where “nations rush to stake their claims” and where “Ottawa aggressively fights back to protect our land,” had him laughing: “The Star’s dim-witted copy editors pack in more clichés per pixel than I ever thought possible.”

But Bell believes that southern media coverage has improved in recent years due to a core group of reporters who report on the North more frequently and have a better understanding of the region. In addition, APTN and CTV have an informal copy sharing agreement. AndNunatsiaq News entered into a similar arrangement with Postmedia, after the former Canwest papers wanted a story about a murder trial in Iqaluit. No money changes hands; the copy just gets credited to the organization and author. But the southern outlets save money and get better northern stories, while the northern outlets get access to more southern stories.

Although Bell says an Arctic beat is a good idea, he sees little evidence of the Star really having such a beat. After all, Watson lives in Vancouver for family reasons and says if he lived in the North, he would no longer be able to relate to what his southern audience would find new. “You have to have more than the idea,” says Bell, who argues that a reporter who splits his time between Afghanistan and Canada doesn’t do much to make the newspaper look serious about covering the region. And although Sandiford believes Watson has become the trusted voice for his reporting, she says the fact that no major southern newspaper has a correspondent in the North full time “baffles me.” From his hotel room in Kabul, Watson says, “Ideally, I should be there all the time. As a compromise position doing it as much as I can when I’m not here or somewhere else is better than where we were before.” And Alia says all reporters juggle different topics: “It’s how you go if you go and how seriously you take it.”

Former Star national editor Tim Harper hopes the paper continues to take it seriously, but admits, “We often jump on a hobby horse for a while and then tire of it and move on to some other area that is underreported.” And Watson’s beat took some explaining to a newsroom operating in a “southern” style. “Every so often one of my many masters in Toronto would say, ‘Where’s Paul? We haven’t seen Paul lately. What’s he got?’ There seemed to be a misunderstanding sometimes that he could hop on a plane and file something by three o’clock.”

Watson says he won’t give up on the Arctic-Aboriginal beat, in part because he realizes how easy it would be to not cover the region. “No one’s going to notice, no one’s going to wail and say, ‘How dare you not cover Canada’s North?’” But northerners would notice.

In 2010, he stands among a crowd of kids who play with faded yellow soccer balls in a school gym on a Friday night in Ulukhaktok, N.W.T. They wait for Ghanaian-born Isaac Ayiku, an economist and soccer player, to arrive and teach them the sport. The Vancouver Olympics are underway and Ayiku is coming to make sure this northern community of about 400 people isn’t left out of the Olympic fever transfixing the South. A plump boy with a round face notices the outsider and boldly walks up to him. He looks up at Watson, his chin no higher than the journalist’s waist and blurts, “What’s your name and when are you leaving?”

Watson bursts into laughter and the boy is gone before he can answer, but the kid’s simple view of the world was the most genuine thing anyone had said to the journalist since he had started the beat. That moment crystallized the attitude northerners have for southerners. “All they ever see is outsiders who pass through, get what they need, take it and leave.”

“And everyone laughed. It was so preposterous, as if I said to you that the world is flat. People don’t realize how unanimous and overwhelming the conventional wisdom was.”
– Michele Landsberg, recalling an incident in the 1950s as a first-year student at the University of Toronto. She had told a group of students that women were the intellectual equals of men. (The Ottawa Citizen, November 13, 1992)

That quote hit me right in the forehead when I first read it. Landsberg was talking to a journalist at a Women in the Media conference, explaining the foundation for sexist attitudes that women still confront in the newsrooms and on the front page. But I saw parallels in that quote with attitudes towards aboriginal peoples.
A few years ago, a radio producer from the Maritimes told me, with no sense of embarrassment, that he didn’t think people in his region were interested in aboriginal stories. Furthermore, he promised to dump stories about aboriginal people into my lap. After all, I was the aboriginal affairs broadcaster for CBC Radio at the time.
I’ve heard it all, from the local producer who didn’t cover a breaking story because they “just did an Indian story last week,” to the editor who thought it wasn’t worth visiting an Indian caucus on election night because “they’re probably all drunk.” But the absolute best was the editor who told me her newspaper didn’t do Indian stories because “Indians don’t buy advertising.”
Things are improving. The coverage, overall, is more balanced, more knowledgeable and more insightful. The media seem to acknowledge that, in the past, they routinely overlooked important stories-not because they lacked time, money or expertise, but because the stories were about aboriginal peoples.
Like the attitudes about women, the most persistent vehicle for attitudes about aboriginal peoples has been the media, through their use of misleading or demeaning stereotypes. Rudy Platiel, who’s covered aboriginal issues for more than 20 years in The Globe and Mail, says Canadians have a “schizophrenic view of native people.” People may recognize parallels with the “super-morn” and “bitchy feminist.”
“The public image of native people is very unreal. It’s very Hollywood,” says Platiel. “On the one hand, there’s the noble redman, the saintlier-than-a-saint, environmentally conscious, more spiritually-in-tune-with-the-earth native person. Then there’s the drunken, bloodthirsty savage that we’ve been taught to fear, on the other.” This latter stereotype, of course, has evolved into the radical or militant warrior.
Since Columbus, Europeans have regarded aboriginal peoples as either simple children of nature, needing the guiding hand of civilized whites, or as dangerous renegades, needing the controlling hand of civilized whites. These two themes, Platiel adds, are still predominant when the media interpret aboriginal stories.
Take a column by William Johnson of the Montreal Gazette. It used the inquest into the suicide of a 13-year-old Indian boy in Manitoba, Lester Desjarlais, to buttress his arguments against self-government.” For those who think aboriginal self-government a panacea,” he Wrote, “one might recommend as remedial reading the inquest report.”
The father, Johnson alleged, “beat the mother and the boy before the parents separated. The boy complained that he had been raped anally by his uncle, Joe Desjarlais, [a relation] of the chief of the Sandy Bay reserve… those people and institutions who and which should have protected the young from the adult abusers instead protected the abusers, especially when from a politically powerful family.”
The corruption of an aboriginal child welfare agency, the “abuse of power and gross violation of rights” in this case was an example of the “chaos” people might expect if aboriginal peoples regained self-government, Johnson hinted.
He goes further. He says that the aboriginal-run agency “was founded amid accusations that the existing children’s aid society, staffed by whites, did not understand native culture and so made terrible decisions” affecting native children and families.
It wasn’t quite that simple. A provincial inquiry in the early eighties found white social workers routinely took aboriginal children from their families and placed them in white neighbourhoods with good, white middle-class values. Aboriginal parents, their homes and their families were deemed deficient because they were aboriginal.
So many aboriginal children were taken from their parents and placed in white foster homes outside the province, the judge concluded that the effect on aboriginal communities was nothing less than “cultural genocide.”
Johnson made it sound like a minor cultural misunderstanding. He was glossing over the facts, and echoing the sentiments of many Manitobans who saw the inquest report as a chance to further their views on self-government.
The facts are: when the province rushed to dump responsibility on the new aboriginal agencies, it failed to give them enough money or time to train workers or give them the experience they would need to deal with the tremendous problems in their communities. It created a ticking time bomb for disaster.

The Program in Journalism for Native People at the University of Western Ontario changed Juanita Rennie’s life. The intense, 12-month course prepared her and six other graduates of PJNP’s first class for entry-level media positions. Rennie, then a 40-year-old mother of six and grandmother to three, graduated in 1981 knowing exactly what to do next: “I wanted to show people-anyone who would listen-that there are positive things happening in the native community.”

Although Rennie grew up an urban Indian on the outskirts of Toronto with little knowledge of her ancestors’ culture, her ambition was typical of the program’s early students. The idea of a special journalism school to help natives achieve their aspirations arose in the 1970s, after an emerging political consciousness in the Canadian aboriginal community led to a dramatic increase in native media activity.

There’s been a change in recent years, however, and Allan Chrisjohn, PJNP’s current director, says many more students are considering entering the mainstream media. Still, very few do-and Dennis Martel, its director from 1982 to 1985, wonders if PJNP hasn’t outlived its usefulness and is in danger of becoming moribund. “As long as it’s just for natives, then the students are going to go into native journalism,” he says. “We felt they should be journalists-not Indian journalists. It’s becoming a bit of a cultural ghetto.”

Martel’s concern mirrors a dilemma facing many aboriginal Canadians: whether to enter the mainstream of Canadian society or to work from within the confines of their community. Chrisjohn says that PJNP graduates are equipped with the skills to work wherever they want, and opportunities in the mainstream media have never been better. Since the introduction in 1986 of the federal Employment Equity Act which requires broadcasters to hire aboriginal peoples and other visible minorities, Chrisjohn has received “all kinds of inquiries” from the media asking for applications from PJNP students. But despite the Act-and the students’ own aspirations and training-only a handful of graduates have landed in the mainstream. Others feel it is un-challenging and not a place where native issues can be discussed in depth.

The mainstream wasn’t much of an issue when the program set up shop inside the staid stone walls of Middlesex College. Classes were held in the basement while the students from Western’s graduate journalism program, with which PJNP is affiliated, studied upstairs in more comfortable quarters. In 1983, Martel moved PJNP upstairs to help integrate the students culturally and socially, and to cut costs by sharing equipment and space. Two-thirds of this year’s budget of $175,000 was paid by the Secretary of State and the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, which also pay many students’ tuition and living expenses. But PJNP isn’t a make-work project -it’s tough and the failure rate is high. Last year only four of its 14 students graduated, and past years have had similar failure rates.

Natives from the cities and reserves of every region in Canada, including 10 Inuit and three Metis, have enrolled in the program. They range in age from their late teens to midforties: four of this year’s students are in their forties. Western’s entrance requirements make allowances for older students like Rennie, who dropped out of school in Grade 10. “They usually make up for what they may be missing in formal education with a wealth of past life experiences,” says Chrisjohn.

For some, like 1982 grad Dan David, PJNP provides an invaluable second chance. He grew up near Montreal on the Kanehsatake reserve and planned to enter Carleton’s journalism program until a high-school counselor advised him he was better suited to bricklaying because he was good with his hands. After 10 years of odd jobs, David heard about PJNP and now works in Toronto as a writer and broadcaster for Infotape, CBC Radio’s syndication service.

Today PJNP has three native instructors including Chrisjohn, each with a long history in journalism. The program’s first native director, Chrisjohn believes that native instructors provide excellent role models, reminding students that native journalists can make it. Martel agrees this is important-but having the best teachers, no matter what their race, is crucial. A tribal elder once told him not to worry about being white: “You teach them to be journalists, I’ll teach them to be Indians.” Only one course deals specifically with aboriginal issues, training the students to analyze government policies by scrutinizing the Indian Act, the Constitution and documents on self-government and land claims.
All other courses focus on the basics of journalism, with the students publishing a newspaper and producing weekly half-hour radio shows and short video documentaries. A magazine course taken with the Western grads includes a competition for the best magazine mock-up, and PJNP students take great pride in the fact that, with only one-third of the grads’ enrollment, they’ve won about half the contests. David says one of the program’s few drawbacks is that students do not have time to take liberal arts courses which would provide the broader base of knowledge often required in the mainstream.

The students’ first opportunity to address a non-native audience usually comes at the end of the year when they are placed in a three-week intern program: last year, Global Television, London magazine, CHIN Radio and CKO Radio participated. According to Joe Snider, CKO’s London bureau chief and news director, PJNP students compare favorably with interns from other journalism programs and his last intern “was gung ho all the way. He knew what was required of him and went out and did it.”

Snider says CKO’s door will continue to remain open for PJNP students.

About half of this year’s class are considering walking through that door to a career in the mainstream. Their reasons vary. For some it’s the lack of money in native communications although a few are willing to postpone entering the mainstream until they’ve “paid their dues” for a couple of years in native media. Others, like Geoffery Johnston, simply don’t want to be limited to native communications. He knows what he eventually wants-a job with Hockey Night In Canada: “I am interested in native issues but I love hockey. I want to meet the stars.”

Despite these ambitions and encouragement from employers like Snider-almost all of this year’s grads will probably end up in native media. Rennie’s career is typical. After graduation she began reporting for a native newspaper, then spent two years as founding publisher and editor of SweetgrO$S, a national native magazine which folded after two issues. She went on to produce Native Express, a television series profiling native political and artistic leaders, and now contracts her skills to government agencies involved in native issues.

Sherry Huff, a 1988 graduate, is following in Rennie’s footsteps and is now a reporter with the Wawatay Native Communications Society at Sioux

Lookout in northern Ontario. Wawatay operates a radio and television station and publishes a monthly tabloid in both English and Oji-Cree syllabic. Huff plans to continue working on native issues but may eventually do so in the mainstream, using her experience at Wawatay “to build a stronger base of knowledge on native issues so I’ll know exactly what I’m trying to tell the Canadian people about native people.”

Huff was one of the PJNP grads who intended to enter the mainstream after graduating, and she did her internship at Global Television. For now she has chosen Wawatay because she believes her job, which includes flying into some of Ontario’s most isolated communities, is more challenging than an entry-level position at a Toronto television newsroom. Dan David puts the case more forcibly: he believes most grads work in native communications because that’s where the real stories on native issues get covered. The mainstream is only interested in them after a sit-in, blockade or blowup: “There’s no examination of the burning fuse that leads up to that explosion-only the body count afterwards.” He adds that many other natives “don’t feel comfortable at a white publication. They come in believing they’ve been hired as the token Indian.”

Throughout his career, David has rejected tokenism and any suggestion that only natives should cover native issues. After three years as a CBC- TV reporter in Regina, a new executive producer told him to take the native affairs beat. Instead, David let his contract expire, moved to Ottawa and supported himself as a freelancer.

Tokenism and providing role models are very different issues. In fact, one of the program’s most important achievements is that its graduates pro. vide role models for Canada’s native community: David was one of the first native journalists Regina’s large aboriginal population had seen on its local television news. As well as working on reserve newspapers and newsletters, grads may help research their bands’ land claims. Some get politically involved-one former student, Les Carpenter, became mayor of Sachs Harbour, NWT.

When the PJNP started, many native publications were little more than propaganda broadsheets published by inexperienced reporters. The program is partly responsible for raising their standards. And despite his misgivings Martel says, “PJNP did what it set out to do-it’s turned out some damn fine journalists. They’ve interpreted Indian concerns and Indian news to both Indian and non-Indian audiences.”

Western’s acting dean of journalism, Andrew MacFarlane, who was instrumental in the founding of the Program in Journalism for Native People, agrees with Martel that the program should ultimately self-destruct but feels “his timing is off.” Until there are a large number of native applicants in other journalism programs and many more native students enroll in regular university programs, MacFarlane says the program remains too positive a force in too many lives to shut down now. Graduates like Juanita Rennie agree. “If it wasn’t for PJNP,” she says, “I’d still be a waitress in Markham.”