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A Chance to Change the Headlines

Award gives Indigenous journalists an opportunity to report beyond stereotypes.

Katie Hyslop 25 Feb 2015TheTyee.ca

Katie Hyslop reports on education and youth issues for The Tyee. Follow her on Twitter @kehyslop.

It's rare for a week to go by without Indigenous issues making national headlines in Canada. Whether it's Idle No More, natural resource projects, missing and murdered women, treaty negotiations, land claims, or education bills, aboriginal Canadians are big news.

Finding an Indigenous byline behind those or any news stories, however, is less common.

First-year University of British Columbia masters of journalism student Ryan Erwin, a documentary filmmaker and member of the Heiltsuk Nation, chalks it up to a lack of exposure among young aboriginals to Indigenous journalist role models.

"On the reserve, you generally aren't exposed to journalism as a career," said Erwin, 28. He grew up in Burnaby, with parents who regularly watched the evening news.

But as recently as 2011, almost half of status First Nations people lived on reserves in Canada, and, Erwin noted, the daily news depicts aboriginal Canadians in stereotypes.

"I think a lot of the [news] that's nationally televised is more of protests, or missing and murdered women," Erwin said, citing CBC reporter -- and his UBC journalism professor -- Duncan McCue's "WD4 Rule on How Indians Make The News": only if they're "drumming, dancing, drunk, or dead," or a warrior.

Indigenous coverage in mainstream media is "better now than it was," said Robert Lewis, a former Maclean's editor-in-chief, and current member of the board of the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

Lewis cites the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, with reporters stationed in almost every Canadian province and territory, and the CBC Aboriginal online news site as evidence of a growing demand for news through an Indigenous lens.

But for decades, media largely ignored the social, political, and economic ills colonialism inflicted on Indigenous communities, including residential schools, on-reserve infrastructure problems, and widespread poverty.

It's an issue Lewis hopes the Foundation has begun to address with the launch of its Aboriginal Journalism Fellowships in 2014.

The fellowships are open to aboriginal journalists, including First Nations, Metis and Inuit, who have worked in journalism between one and five years. Recipients will receive a $3,000 stipend, plus expenses, and spend a month working at CBC's aboriginal bureau in Winnipeg. The goal of the fellowship is to help launch journalism careers, Lewis said, while instigating the recruitment of Indigenous people in Canadian media.

"I thought it would be a good idea if we could help aspiring aboriginal journalists to get the kind of training and background that would equip them to move into either community journalism or [mainstream] journalism," Lewis said.

Exceeded expectations

Lewis said Chantelle Bellrichard, a producer at CBC Vancouver and the fellowship's first winner, exceeded everyone's expectations by writing several news stories during the month she spent at CBC Aboriginal, including a feature on expectant First Nations mothers in rural Manitoba who contravened their local medical team's evacuation policy of sending them alone to Winnipeg to give birth, by choosing a home birth with an Indigenous midwife instead.

For two years, fellowship funding has come from the Royal Bank of Canada Foundation, journalist and Canadian Journalism Foundation board member Rosemary Speirs, and Canadian National Railway. This year new funding was added from two former news executives, Trina McQueen of CBC and CTV, and Isabel Bassett of TVO, providing enough money for two fellowships at CBC Aboriginal. Applications will be accepted until March 6.

In the future, Lewis hopes the fellowships will last longer, between six to 12 months, and expand beyond CBC Aboriginal to partner with more media organizations, as well as universities to provide journalists an academic background in their area of interest.

Erwin isn't applying for the fellowship; he's more interested in video journalism than online reporting. But he says the fellowship is a boon for an early-career online journalists.

"It would give them training, opportunity, and access," he said. "Help them get their foot in the door and boost their profile."

Overall, he believes we all benefit from a more diverse media: "Having an Indigenous perspective [on the news] would shake things up a bit in the mainstream."  [Tyee]

Read more: Indigenous, Media

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