Article 1: “Decolonizing Journalism”
Excerpted from Decolonizing Journalism by Duncan McCue, published by Oxford University Press. Used with permission. McCue is an award-winning broadcaster, author, and professor. He is Anishinaabe and a member of the Chippewas of Georgina Island First Nation in southern Ontario.
There’s a long history of non-Indigenous people coming to Indigenous communities, asking about people’s lives, requesting their stories, then leaving. Those visitors interpreted what they saw and heard – in books, reports, studies, films, or photos. Indigenous people had little say in how those stories were told; in many cases, the story never even made it back to them.
Journalists, with our expertise in research and communication, are well equipped to share and promote possible alternatives by reporting firsthand on experiments, sharing data, and involving audiences in dialogue and debate. But is it advocacy to look for common interests shared by Indigenous Peoples and in the rest of Canada? Take, for example, that old newsroom adage “There are two sides to every story.” When on deadline, journalists often settle for presenting “both sides” of an issue, trusting the public to make up its mind about what is true and what is false. The reporter may not have betrayed any bias, but they haven’t pushed the story toward a deeper understanding of the truth, either.
Leave aside (for a moment) how race factors into what types of stories are deemed newsworthy. Consider, instead, the small acts of bias in news stories every day. For example, naming whiteness is unusual in most reports. Can you recall a time when you’ve seen Canada’s prime minister described as “white”? … Yet it is common for the media to use a racial identifier if the subject is Indigenous… Anyone who is not white is thereby Othered.
For Indigenous Peoples, being regularly portrayed in the media as lacking in agency has real consequences. Self-governance and self-determination are goals for many Indigenous communities, but other Canadians may view these aspirations in terms of the threat they pose to their lifestyle and standard of living. If Indigenous people are constructed in news reports as unable to exercise control over their own lives, the public is even less likely to show support for transfer or power or resources. In other words, [if you are a journalist}, your news story may unwittingly become an instrument to preserve the status quo in Canada… How can you change that? By being conscious about race and culture when you frame your story… Make sure you include Indigenous people in a substantive way in a story about Indigenous Peoples.
Anyone working with Indigenous Peoples should be aware of a set of guidelines designed to decolonize Indigenous-Western research relationships. These are known as OCAP, which stands for “ownership, control, access and possession.” These four ethical guidelines were developed by the First Nations Information Guidance Centre in 1998 to govern data collection. In a nutshell, OCAP acknowledges the importance of First Nations people possessing their own data and aims to prevent non-Indigenous researchers from exploiting Indigenous communities. Ownership assumes that a community owns cultural knowledge or data collectively. In the same manner that an individual owns personal information, so the community’s consent is required to use its knowledge. The principle of control asserts that Indigenous Peoples have right to control various aspects of the research on them, including the formulation of research frameworks. Access is the ability for Indigenous people to retrieve and examine data that concerns them and their communities. The principle of possession refers to the actual possession of data. Many First Nations now expect academic to incorporate OCAP into their proposals. Research ethics of journalists and academics sometimes clash, but Indigenous community members many not appreciate or understand the differences.
When missing and murdered Indigenous women became the most covered Indigenous issue in Canadian media in 2014-2015, it wasn’t because the issue itself was new – Indigenous women and girls had been going missing for decades with little notice by mainstream media outlets. What changed was that Indigenous activists and community members had the means to broadcast stories that mattered to them, and that influenced mainstream political agendas, which in turn forced news media to listen.