If you visit Louis Bird, a Cree elder in Peawanuck, Ontario, he will tell you fantastic stories, laughing, over a cup of tea. Some of these tales are about his life: about how he was born in the bush on a winter day 82 years ago and how his mother brought him through the snow to his father and grandfather, or about working as a translator decades ago and staying up through the night to learn complicated medical and legal terminology. Some of them are legends about the history of his people, from the distant, foggy past when men visited from the stars to marry a pair of young women. Bird is a storyteller, and he knows how to spin a yarn. It’s a skill perfected with practice: to have an audience hang onto every word, gasp in the right places, laugh in the right spots. He says that many stories start with a phrase, often a seemingly simple sentence steeped in meaning. Of course, so do all good stories—even journalistic ones.

How to craft a good story is an important lesson for any aspiring reporter. And over the past year, this tiny reserve along the Winisk River, near the shores of Hudson Bay and along the edge of Polar Bear Provincial Park, has seen a surprising number of these new storytellers. This is thanks in part to Journalists for Human Rights (JHR)’s new Indigenous Reporters Program (IRP). One of its goals is to train and encourage Indigenous people in remote communities to tell their own stories and, ideally, to share them with the rest of Canada. In 2015, JHR sent trainers to four remote communities—Peawanuck, Sandy Lake, Fort Albany and Sachigo Lake—to run eight-month training courses.

Peawanuck is the home of fewer than 300 members of the Weenusk First Nation. There are no year-round roads out of the reserve. For a few months each year, an ice road goes from Peawanuck through Fort Severn, the most northern community in Ontario, all the way into Manitoba. The runway at the small airport is packed dirt, and a similar road goes out into the bush, through the spruce trees, past a flag point, right to where it ends abruptly in the soft muskeg. While Peawanuck may be small, it’s rich in stories and storytellers. But like many remote First Nations communities, it doesn’t get much attention.

The Toronto Star sent a reporter up here last fall. Some residents later said they thought—or hoped—the story was about living in the North. The reporter thought it was about the community’s opposition to mining companies. Because of misunderstandings like these, JHR trainers have held open workshops about the job of a reporter. Journalism can seem mysterious and even threatening when it’s not part of daily life.

Pam Chookomoolin is one of a handful of Peawanuck residents trying to change that perception. A master corporal with the Canadian Rangers’ Peawanuck Patrol, a diabetes prevention educator and a mother of two, she signed up for the training program thinking it would be something interesting to fill her free time. Under trainer Brandon MacLeod’s guidance, she’s written stories for publications such as Wawatay News, a northern Ontario paper that considers trainee pitches as part of its partnership with JHR. One such piece is a story about her 10-year-old son, Logan, shooting his first two geese of the 2015 season. For NetNewsLedger, she has written a news story about a prowling black bear and first-person pieces about working with the Canadian Rangers.

Last August, the trainees launched their own website, Pehtahbun Peawanuck Dibajimona (Sunrise Stories from Peawanuck). Chookomoolin’s “Three sisters go camping at Shamattawa Lake” features audio from an interview she did with three elders. Mostly in Cree, it’s a meandering conversation, punctuated by laughter, and doesn’t follow standard, structured interview rules—like many pieces by trainees. Yet, if Canadian journalism ever wants to move past superficial narratives and harmful tropes about Indigenous people, it needs to accept the stories these new journalists want to tell and how they want to tell them.

In 2011, Robin Pierro was a JHR trainer returning home to Toronto from Ghana. She’d spent nine months there working with journalists at TV Africa and students at the African University College of Communications. Her head was full of ideas for improving awareness and coverage of human rights in Canada. She realized there were problems—how journalists covered Aboriginal issues, in particular—that weren’t being addressed. Indigenous people aren’t always treated as reliable sources, and stories about them tend to follow stereotypical narratives about substance abuse, criminal behaviour or victimization.

Pierro was the lead writer on a JHR report called “Buried Voices” that examined how Ontario newsrooms covered stories about Indigenous people. The findings were disheartening. From 2010 to 2013, a period that includes the start of the Idle No More movement, only 0.28 percent of all stories were about Indigenous “people, culture and issues.” Around one quarter were positive, and under half were neutral.

Negative stories focused on corruption on reserves, criminals and drug use. While no similar reports exist for other regions, anecdotal evidence suggests Aboriginal coverage is not much better outside of Ontario.

A 2011 book, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers, offers a longer-term look at the situation. University of Regina professor Mark Cronlund Anderson and associate professor Carmen L. Robertson found Indigenous coverage in Canadian newspapers from 1869 to 2009 both colonial and paternalistic. In 1990, Mohawks in Kanesatake, Quebec, set up a blockade to protest the proposed expansion of a golf course onto an old burial ground.

The standoff known as the Oka Crisis, lasted 78 days and started with the shooting death of Sûreté du Québec Corporal Marcel Lemay, who went to the barricade with an emergency response unit. Newspapers often described the Mohawks as violent or unreasonable, calling them, for example, “militant Mohawks.” Meanwhile, some referred to the police benignly as “law-enforcement authorities.”

A headline on a Montreal Gazette story about the Mohawk Warriors, who established the barricade at Kanesatake, was “Less like Warriors than thugs.” Many columnists called for cultural assimilation. Other journalists toed the government line, relying on news releases while treating Indigenous sources as less trustworthy.

A couple of months after the crisis, CBC’s then-chairman Patrick Watson cited the recent Oka Crisis as an example of journalists going for polarized political sources without analysis out of laziness. To avoid having to rely on outsiders for coverage, Kanesatake residents started their own community newspaper, the Eastern Door, two years later.

The archives of The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s show that stereotypes persist. In 2013, both publications covered Idle No More, a national movement for sovereignty and better protection of treaty rights. A column by Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe titled “Too many First Nations people live in a dream palace” mocks Indigenous communities for calling themselves nations and claiming sovereign rights. He commended those that have formed partnerships with natural resource companies and criticized people in Attawapiskat for refusing to move closer to Timmins, Ontario, where they could, he argued, get jobs. He didn’t mention the nearby Victor Diamond Mine, which hasn’t brought prosperity to the community.

Globe stories, and those by other publications, often called Idle No More a “protest,” rather than, say, a movement, and highlighted civil disobedience—reinforcing the idea that Indigenous people are troublemakers or criminals, complaining about problems that other Canadians don’t see or experience.

The headline on a Maclean’s story about an Aamjiwnaang First Nation demonstration in Sarnia was, “Idle No More disrupts railway traffic, but CN fights back.” The short article focused on the losses for business and the inconvenience to the Canadian National Railway. Apart from mentioning the Aamjiwnaang people’s support for Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike, the piece ignored the community’s motivations.

This story, like much of the Maclean’s coverage of Idle No More, links it all back to Spence, who was a convenient central character. Spence features heavily in many reports, which simplifies the narrative and could lead readers to believe the national movement was really about only one community and one chief. Even stories that included Indigenous voices and concerns often failed to adequately address the motivations behind Idle No More, apart from noting that many communities, including Att wapiskat, were in poor shape.

Last November, Billy-Ray Belcourt, one of Canada’s first Indigenous Rhodes Scholars, wrote a blog post criticizing journalists for relying on stereotypical narratives of Indigenous people, especially the depiction of them as victims of violence. Belcourt wrote the post after a Metro Edmonton article about his scholarship described him as someone who “faced family violence.” The sentence was a poor paraphrase of his comments in the interview: he had experienced violence and racism, and his grandfather was a residential school survivor. The story has since been corrected. Belcourt ended his post with five rules for journalists who want to speak to him. The first: “Violence should not be your lede. Indigenous suffering should not be your angle.” Reporters often fail to provide enough context, especially when covering conflicts, says Trina Roache, a Mi’kmaq journalist and the Halifax correspondent for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) National News. “It’s hard to mess up a story on a powwow or an Indigenous artist or something like that,” Roache says, although the Belcourt story is proof that journalists can bungle those, too. When Aboriginal interests conflict with other communities, she adds, an Indigenous perspective becomes even more important.

Roache points to hunters, guides and non-Indigenous locals in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park protesting a Mi’kmaq moose harvest in November 2015. The Mi’kmaq have a treaty right to hunt moose and had been working with Parks Canada to control the overabundant population through what would be the park’s first moose harvest. The protesters sent mixed messages: Roache saw someone with a Stop the Slaughter sign next to someone with a Let’s Hunt Together sign. News outlets gave a lot of ink to Parks Canada and the protestors’ concerns, but some didn’t include a single Mi’kmaq voice in their stories.

As imperfect as Idle No More coverage was, many people credit the movement with making Canadians—and journalists—more aware of Indigenous issues. Hayden King, an Anishinaabe writer and professor of politics and public administration at Ryerson University, where he also serves as the director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance, says Idle No More changed the way reporters approached Indigenous stories. The number of people participating in Idle No More introduced journalists to many new Aboriginal voices, which meant a wider variety of opinions made it to print. King hopes news organizations are moving toward a better
relationship with Indigenous people, one that involves talking to them rather than talking for them.

One promising example is at CBC, which has a dedicated online hub for Indigenous stories that launched in 2013, a year after Idle No More started. CBC Aboriginal cross-posts some content with other pages on the network’s website. Connie Walker, a CBC News reporter from the Okanese First Nation, worked on the strategy for the unit before it launched and still contributes to it. The goal was to build community and showcase stories that aren’t traditionally part of mainstream coverage. When the documentary series 8th Fire aired in 2012, it proved there could be an audience for something like CBC Aboriginal. The four-episode series explored the relationship between Aboriginal communities and the rest of Canada. A separate online component, 8th Fire Dispatches, featured short films from 20 First Nations, Inuit and Métis reporters and filmmakers. There’s now a platform for Indigenous voices in journalism and the arts. “It’s telling our own stories,” Walker says, “and it’s this recognition that there’s an appetite for these stories.”

Telling more stories is only part of the challenge—they also need to be told well. Angela Sterritt is a journalist from the Gitxsan First Nation who has worked for CBC, on and off for 13 years. She’s writing a book about missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. After she completed a broadcast program as a teenager, the representation of Indigenous people bothered her more. It was a bleak picture. Most stories portrayed them according to tropes— savage warrior, greedy chief or victim. The victim narrative was the hardest to take, because the stories rarely addressed the root causes. These narratives are changing, especially at CBC, she says. Early in her mainstream broadcast career, colleagues told her that Indigenous reporters shouldn’t cover Indigenous stories because they might be biased—a sentiment she likens to saying non-Aboriginal people can’t write non-Aboriginal stories. “We’d never get any news done,” she says. “It also didn’t make sense because a lot of us are sort of the experts.”

When Sterritt runs workshops for non-Indigenous journalists as part of the IRP, some of the questions—about what terminology to use for Indigenous people (it’s always a good idea to ask) or what a status Indian is—are basic. But she encourages all questions anyway. “Whenever I start any of my classes, I say, ‘Don’t beat yourself up.’ Because this stuff has been erased out of school, out of education, out of our minds, out of the public discourse.”

For those who aren’t in the workshops, the Reporting in Indigenous Communities website is one of the few resources for people who want to educate themselves. Duncan McCue, a CBC journalist and a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation, created the resource and designed the site while on a fellowship at Stanford University. He wanted to help journalists report on Indigenous communities respectfully and with context, which is also what he teaches as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia. There’s hope reconciliation between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada is possible, he says, if we can all work together toward that goal. “Journalism needs to be a large part of that bridge-building,” he says. “And that will happen by educating journalists about some of the sins of our past and how we can improve things for the future.”

And people do want to change the way they work. Roache tries to edit TV reports with longer clips and removes her voice-overs to let sources tell the story. But it’s hard to do well within the constraints of a newscast, and it takes longer than a traditional format with shorter clips. She and other Indigenous journalists say including context (like complex treaty rights or colonial histories) is difficult in short news reports. Online pieces allow for richer storytelling and for posting full interviews, but APTN lacks the necessary resources to prioritize and build its web presence.

Meanwhile, some Indigenous people are looking beyond mainstream news to publications such as Red Rising, a Winnipeg magazine, to share their stories. Too often, reporters cover Indigenous stories when the subject is “dead, drunk or drumming,” says Anishinaabe activist and Red Rising co-founder Lenard Monkman, using a pithy, oft-used phrase. Monkman and his friends wanted to give Indigenous youth a venue to write about their experiences. Red Rising, which appears in print and online, is currently produced by volunteers. It includes personal essays, poetry, art and videos. The goal is to be unfiltered and uncensored, and ultimately inspirational. “I’m trying to move it far away from telling victim stories,” Monkman says. “There’s a lot of negative, but there’s also a lot of reasons to be optimistic.”

On a chilly mid-October day in Peawanuck, some snow’s already gathering on the ground when MacLeod, the JHR trainer, arrives at the empty community hall. He sets up his blogging workshop in the building’s drop-in activity room, which is strewn with toys and games. Chookomoolin always comes, but MacLeod doesn’t know if any of the other trainees will. Sometimes people get busy, and in a community without cellphone service, it’s not as if they can easily call ahead. He has a start time in mind, but he won’t stick to it too rigidly. Up here, things start when people show up. Rather than lecture about journalism—an initial fear for many of the trainees—MacLeod helps people develop the skills they need to tell their stories. He’s run workshops on human rights, interviewing skills and photography (with a guest appearance from a local photographer) and worked one-on-one with trainees to help them write and pitch their stories.

Tonight, he has a handout that covers what a blog is and how to make one, with examples. People start trickling in about 10 minutes late, grabbing cookies and orange slices and settling in around the round table so everyone can see MacLeod’s laptop screen. Chookomoolin brings a huge pot of tea and Logan, her son, who takes an interest in the cookies. MacLeod starts by explaining what a blog is—a web log—and why people keep them. He restarts a few times as more people arrive, including a couple who aren’t in the usual group of trainees.

MacLeod points out that a blog means they can publish whatever they want. They don’t need an editor’s approval, and they don’t need to justify why a story’s important. While MacLeod talks, Gilbert Chookomoolin, another trainee, sets up a Tumblr blog for sharing his thoughts. He hasn’t published any stories, although he’s working on a personal project about a long walk his family took through the muskeg to Howley Lake, a summer fishing ground. He hopes the training will help his community research and respond to companies that want to mine in the area. There’s a lot of laughter as people poke fun at each other.

Almost all residents of Peawanuck have lively Facebook profiles. They share thoughts, photographs and videos and post on Peawanuck group pages, so some of them don’t see the need for blogs right away. Journalism, or even blogging, sounds more serious and formal than simply posting on Facebook. But the core trainees want the sense of legitimacy that comes from a platform other than social media—MacLeod explains that a blog lends their story importance and shows that they worked to get it right. Sam Hunter, a trainee who wasn’t at the workshop, later says he wants a newsletter to keep the community properly informed.

If we want Indigenous journalists embedded in communities, we need to accept that these stories can’t all be about corruption or resistance. Reporters need to reflect the community and interest the audience to stay relevant. Although Pam Chookomoolin has written several traditional news pieces—bears in the community, a vet clinic—as well as personal essays, she’s also interested in preserving stories about life and culture in Peawanuck. Traditional legends or tales from the elders about the old ways aren’t what we usually consider journalism. But the trainees know they need the skills to record them or they’ll be lost. They want to preserve their culture and their way of living and experiencing the world, or nobody will know who they are and where they come from.

For now, this knowledge is stored in the memories of their elders, although the trainees aren’t the first to try to create a record. Louis Bird, the storyteller, has been working since he was young to preserve the legends he heard from his elders. He recorded the tales in his head and on reels of tape that are now stored in his basement. Bird knows the stories he tells don’t always sound like they can be true, and many probably aren’t.

But some have turned out to harbour truths he didn’t expect. One old story is about a man from a place far to the south, the home of small people with tails, with pyramids where men were killed. As it passed down through the generations, people assumed it was just a fanciful tale, until it reached Bird, who knew about ancient Mexico. He argues that not all stories are meant to be an exact telling of history. Sometimes, they are sharing a version of history or teaching a lesson, even if the original facts have been lost to time.

The trainees are Peawanuck’s new generation of journalists, for stories old and new. They’re here to preserve the traditional tales, continue to unravel more mysteries and share new ones. What they want to tell may not always sound like hard news or classic journalism, but they just might show us something deeper about ourselves.

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