'Knowledge stems from asking questions'
Last fall, I attended a march in remembrance of the overwhelming number of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. As both a participant and a reporter for a student newspaper, I joined in song and ceremony, interviewed attendees and took notes.
The next day, after submitting my report, I read an article that narrated a slightly different account of the march. The author wrote about how participants “burned incense” and engaged in “the ritual of sharing tobacco.”
In actuality, elders burned sage, a sacred plant and medicine, for cleansing purposes. Women sang ceremonial songs from different territories, in honour of Indigenous women. And tobacco was offered, filled with prayers.
This wasn’t the first time that I had felt Indigenous people were misunderstood or misrepresented in the media.
Calling a sacred plant “incense” may not cause immediate harm, but it represents the tip of a much larger iceberg. Inaccurate narratives of Indigenous culture, some more severe than others, prevent any possibility of meaningful reconciliation.
Sections 84 to 86 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada final report, established in 2015, calls for those who work in the media to be educated around topics that concern Indigenous communities in order to responsibly write about them.
Throughout my experience learning the Western journalistic values of objectivity and timeliness, I started to ask questions. What about relationship-based research and reporting? What does culturally safe journalism look like? How does objectivity relate to accountability in our work? What is Indigenous journalism?