 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. For a long time now, reporters have had unconscious biases about Indigenous peoples and other minority communities in this country. We all have unconscious bias, and we have to start identifying that and recognizing that we're replicating tropes in our news coverage that have existed for a really long time in books and movies and in our history texts in this country. I don't know if you know this about me, but I used to teach journalism, and I used to start off my first year class by asking my students to write out their reasons for wanting to be journalists. Many of them spoke about needing to call out powerful institutions. But journalism itself is one of those powerful institutions, and it has failed time and again to address criticisms around who gets to tell the news and whose perspectives get left out. I mean, look at how Indigenous peoples and issues get covered in this country. Part of the reason so many Canadians are not familiar with the history of Indian residential schools, for example, is because Canadian media failed to tell that story. We failed to address the issues, and that has meant that urgent Indigenous issues have been ignored or sensationalized. Journalism schools have only recently begun teaching their students how to think critically while covering stories like these, and our guest today has been working on correcting these issues both in the newsroom and in the classroom. Duncan McHugh is an award-winning Anishinaabe journalist. He has worked at the CBC for over 20 years, reporting on the national and as the host of cross-country checkup. Most recently, he's been the host of the documentary storytelling show, Hal of a Story. Duncan was part of a CBC investigation into missing and murdered Indigenous women that won the Hillman Award for Investigative Journalism. He also produced and hosted Cooper Island, a powerful eight-episode podcast that focuses on four students of a residential school, three who survived and one who did not. As an educator, Duncan has taught journalism at the University of British Columbia and at Toronto Metropolitan University, and he just published the book Decolonizing Journalism. Welcome, Duncan. It's so great to have you here. Thank you. Yeah, that was a very nice introduction. I appreciate it. So I want to start at the beginning, which is really your beginnings as a journalist growing up. What did media coverage of Indigenous communities sound and look like to you? Oh, I mean, there wasn't much of it. I mean, that was one of the reasons that I got into the business in the first place. I mean, I always knew, I think, from a young age that I wanted to be a storyteller of some kind. For me, it was a writer. I was journaling and writing poetry as a teenager, and when I discovered the campus newspaper, when I went off to my undergrad at the University of King's College in Halifax, I thought, boy, this journalism thing, this is kind of neat. So I mean, I always knew that I would become a storyteller, I think, but I gravitated to the news in part because there was just a dearth of Indigenous voices. And at that time, I'm dating myself now, people have started to call me a veteran and I'm feeling my age. I got to admit, Vanita, but at that time, there were one of the major frames of news coverage about Indigenous peoples was conflict. It was an us versus them. So these are the days of OKA and blockades and this narrative that the Indigenous people were standing in the way of the progress of the country, that was a really common kind of narrative, this conflict. And then the other narrative and one that has not abated is the notion of pitiful Indians, the terrible living conditions that Indigenous peoples are forced to live in in this country, whether it is drinking water or the gaps in healthcare. Those are news stories that have been in the news for a really long time and continue today, but the news media for decades now has really kind of looked at this narrative of the pitiful Indian. And I use the term Indian purposefully and without looking to Indigenous peoples themselves for solutions, without looking at the colonial framework that established these situations and really kind of casting Indigenous peoples as the ones to blame for their lot. And so it was either victims or warriors, those were the two kind of frames that made Indigenous peoples newsworthy and that was something that I wanted to see change. In some ways you're saying it actually hasn't changed, but you're not saying let's not report on it. You're saying let's continue to report on it, but let's make sure that we're including things like historical context, making sure that we're placing Indigenous peoples in there as actors, as players, as not victims. Completely. And so I mean, there are many things in what you just said, but let me unpack a few of them. I mean, I'm not telling journalists that they shouldn't go when there is a tragic house fire and six children die in an isolated Northern community that they shouldn't race off and send all of their resources there. I'm not saying that when a child girl is murdered in a community that they shouldn't be dispatching teams immediately. But what I am saying is that they need to start being more nuanced in their approach and start looking, are you only interviewing white experts or non-Indigenous experts when you talk about solutions? Do the characters in your news story, do the Indigenous characters have agency or are they only two-dimensional? Are they only part of the problem for a long time now? Reporters have had unconscious biases about Indigenous peoples and other minority communities in this country. We all have unconscious bias and we have to start identifying that and recognizing that we're replicating tropes in our news coverage that have existed for a really long time in books and movies and our history texts in this country. Some of the ways what I'm hearing are some really amazing lessons and I can only imagine what it feels like to be in a classroom with you as a student. I'm wondering about your students and your new book and if you wrote it for them. Decolonizing journalism comes out of a website that I established over a decade ago called Reporting in Indigenous Communities. When I created that website as a guide for working journalists, I created it and put it up on online open source for anybody to use and read. I wrote it with a working journalist in mind who doesn't have a lot of time, who isn't getting paid to take a course, but wants to try to do a better job at reporting in Indigenous communities, recognizes that they may not be satisfied with the kind of coverage that they're producing, that they may be unhappy with the way that their newsroom is treating Indigenous issues and they want to try to find practical solutions. You know, we can talk about systems and the media industry, but most of my colleagues care deeply about their stories. They're under pressure, they're under resource, they have deadlines, but they care deeply about their stories and they'll do anything to make their stories better. That's been my experience with most journalists. We just haven't equipped them with the kind of training that they need to understand Indigenous communities and other minority communities that they might be unfamiliar with. And so that was the goal behind my online guide over a decade ago, it was written for working journalists. And so it was conversational and it was funny and there were inside jokes about assignment editors and things like that. But as it turned out, the biggest uptake for the online guide was journalism classrooms. I found that journalism profs were hungry for any kind of diverse content because there was so little being written from that perspective and in particular there was so little being written about the challenges of reporting in Indigenous communities. Do you think things have gotten better? I do. I mean, here's where I've been at this long enough that I remember the bleak and dark days when the few number of Indigenous reporters that there were in this country had to fight long and hard just to get our stories pitches on the air. That's not just my opinion. That has been well documented by organizations such as Journalism for Human Rights in the past decade to be less than 1% at times of the news coverage in places in provinces like Ontario. So the under-reporting has long been an issue and we're finally starting to see data that shows that news organizations are getting the message that audiences want more news about Indigenous people, both Indigenous audiences and non-Indigenous audiences. We now have analytics which show how much time down to the second people spend listening to our podcasts or reading our online articles. And 10 or 15 years ago, it was up to some non-Indigenous white producer in Toronto to make a decision about whether or not he often cared about this news story and whether it should make the news. Now we can make the case. You know, this is an important story that is going to win us audiences. I spoke earlier about tropes, you know, the culture of news and what makes something newsworthy. That's hardwired into the DNA of a lot of journalists and a lot of newsrooms. And that's been a slower change. Unfortunately, I can point to numerous examples in the past month of newsrooms where, you know, the headline is not as thought through as carefully as it should be. I'm still seeing coverage which, you know, what I might call trauma porn rather than trauma informed. I still see journalists who are acting as story takers rather than storytellers. You said so much there. I want to unpack a little bit. You mentioned trauma porn, but you also talked about story takers versus a storyteller. Tell me a little bit more about that. What do you mean by a storyteller versus a storytaker? One of the most important things that journalists in Canada need to understand is that when they embark on a news story about Indigenous people, that they are the latest in a long line of visitors to Indigenous communities who have come in and said, I want something from you. You know, whether it is I want your artwork, I want your legends, I want your children, I want your land. A lot of taking without giving. That's right. And I don't think that journalists think of themselves that way, but they have to because that's what we're doing. We're going in and we're asking people to share their stories with us. And then we take it away and we put it on the news. And that model of extractive storytelling is something that you need to be extremely conscious of when people are distrustful of you. As a journalist, you need to recognize that you're the latest in a long line of people who are taking things away. Why should they trust you? And that's what every journalist needs to be aware of going in, is that that's one of the reasons, one of the reasons that you're going to have a challenge right out of the gate when you're operating in Indigenous communities. That trust has been broken and we need to do a better job at building trust if we're not going to be storytakers. Do you think that that's one of the reasons non-Indigenous journalists may hesitate to cover Indigenous stories? Is the amount of time or relationship building? I can't speak for non-Indigenous journalists. You know, there are some who have never experienced reserve life and so they're immediately struck and uncomfortable by poverty. You know, when they get sent out to either that side of the tracks in the city or they get sent out to some remote reserve where the internet connection is a wing and a prayer. You know, so some people feel uncomfortable. I have lots of students who question whether they have a right to be telling these stories. There are non-Indigenous students who have heard the debate over appropriation and so they have a hesitancy to be asking whether they should be telling the stories at all. I've met journalists who try really hard but people don't phone them back and when the news van rolls up on the reserve, it's crickets all of a sudden. There are many different reasons and then, as you say, good reporting on Indigenous issues means taking time, this notion of Indian time, this very cultural notion of the time it takes to do things in a good way. Well, that's not newsroom time. Real, like, fast, fast pace that the deadlines are coming. And I got to say, it's not just non-Indigenous journalists who face that problem. It's Indigenous journalists as well. I've got the same deadlines that everybody else does and I got to get something on the air tonight. And so I come up against that as well. We've got assignment editors listening, I hope, to this. But this is part of the battle, right? Like, thinking journalists who want to do a better job, I would urge you to go that half the battle is fought within the newsroom. You need to go to the assignment editor and say, I understand that you think that this is a news story tonight. But if you give me one more day, I guarantee you will have, you know, let me go and spend time, break bread, sit with the elder and drink some tea. These are all, you know, cultural expectations about a visitor coming from the outside. Before we ever turn on our microphones, we should be trying to build those relationships when it's not a crisis, when it's not some massive tragedy and people are in shock. We should be doing a job of building relations. Let's talk about another thing that you mentioned just a few minutes ago, a term you used as trauma porn. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean by that. I think that all journalists should understand that any time you do an Indigenous story that there's very likely to be some level of trauma involved in it. So whether you're racing off to cover a house fire, which happens, you know, at alarming rates in this country in Indigenous communities or whatever the tragedy may be. I mean, Indigenous people in this country are four to five times more likely to experience trauma than non-Indigenous Canadians. So you are going to encounter trauma. But even if you are not a daily news reporter, if you're a sports reporter, an arts reporter, you know, if you cover books, you're going to be talking with Indigenous people who have suffered, perhaps, tragedy in their own life or historical trauma, you know, the fact that land dispossession, children being taken away from communities, the loss of language, all of these things. I think it's not unfair to equate those things to an apocalypse. Indigenous people on Turtle Island have experienced an apocalypse and there is a cultural memory of these things that have happened to our people. So you're going to be encountering trauma and it shouldn't be your lead. I remember Billy Ray Belcourt penning a blog post about his appointment as a Rhodes Scholar and being really frustrated and angry with the way that media were portraying that accomplishment. They were, you know, reaching back into some of the tragic things that happened in his life, trauma should not be your lead. You know, we are more than our trauma. I'm not suggesting that journalists should ignore these things, should ignore the awful things that happened at residential school. We'll be telling residential schools for another stories, for another couple of generations, because this country needs to understand what happened and why it continues to ripple throughout Indigenous communities today. So keep telling those residential school stories. Keep asking those challenging questions about what was it like at residential school. But be aware that the survivors are more than their trauma. They have passions and love and joy and you should be sharing that as much as you should be sharing the awful and difficult things. Anishinaabe writer Gerald Visner penned the term, survivants. And I think that that's, you know, the resilience when it comes to the name of this podcast, don't call me resilient. I understand that people get tired of being called resilient. I prefer Gerald Visner's term, survivants, because there's an element of power in that. And I think that that journalists need to look for that hope and optimism and survivants, because it has been my experience that any Indigenous person who's lived through trauma and is ready to talk about it has an element of survivance to them. Oh, that's beautiful. You were talking a little bit about how to approach stories. And I was very inspired by your recent podcast, Cooper Island. Miigwech. And as I mentioned at the beginning, it's a podcast about four children from a residential school, three who survived and one who did not. And I was particularly inspired by how you addressed your audience and who you centered as an audience. You spoke directly to your Indigenous audience. Could you speak a little bit about that choice as a journalist operating in Canada that we're often taught in journalism who we center as our audience? In your podcast, you really make an effort, I think, to de-center that and re-center an Indigenous audience. Thank you, Vanita. And I appreciate that. It was a deliberate choice. And when I was talking with my producers, Jody Martinson and Martha Trojan, I recounted a story to them about long ago when I first started teaching at Capilano University in British Columbia. An old mentor of mine, Jeff Baer, asked me a question, a very pointed question. He said, who are you speaking to when you are doing stories on the national? This is a long time ago. This was 15, 20 years ago. But my knee-jerk reaction at the time was that I was speaking to a non-Indigenous audience in my news stories because I have to explain the history of the Indian Act in a way that I wouldn't do with an Indigenous audience. But then I came home and thought about it and I said, that's not right. Like, I'm not only speaking to non-Indigenous audiences because I am well aware that there are Indigenous people watching the CBC right across this country and listening to the CBC. And I'm constantly doing what I would call like an Indian head nod to my Indigenous audiences. Like, I'm like, yeah, I hear you. I see you, right? Like walking down the street and you see another Indigenous person, you go, yo, how's it going? And I'm always doing that in my pieces. And so I realized that I was speaking to both. I thought it was important that we address that head on with Cooper Island because I was aware that there would be non-Indigenous people who would be consuming this material for the first time. It continues to shock me, but our education system has done such a terrible job in this country. There are a lot of people who are still learning about residential schools and the impact that it has. So I knew that there would be non-Indigenous listeners who would find this challenging and difficult material that they were hearing for the first time. But I also knew that we were crafting a story that Indigenous people would be interested in listening to as well because so many of our families have suffered in silence. As I say in the podcast, they were like a bomb that blew our families up, depriving us of our language and our culture. But they may not know the specifics. They may not know the details. And I knew that there would be Indigenous listeners for whom this was difficult listening material for that reason. I like the way that you also don't hide your own surprise when something happens and someone gives you an answer that you find surprising. I've been reporting on residential schools for over two decades now. And you would think that, you know, as I tell Belvi in the last episode, you would think that, you know, you've heard the worst, that it can't get any worse. And then you meet one more survivor who has one more tale that just is shocking. I mean, it is shocking to imagine that children endured this kind of treatment in this country. I think it's important to remember that even someone who knows so much and is an insider, it's still shocking. It's still traumatic. You talk about journalistic objectivity in your book. Can you explain a little bit about how this notion of objectivity fit into your book and into your conversation about decolonizing the news? Yeah. So and then to go back to the Kuper Island podcast, the first line of it is Ankudansi Indizhna Kata Majboondal. I am Duncan McHugh. I'm an Anishinaabe Indigenous journalist. And my simple goal in that opening line of the podcast was rather than the view from nowhere, which has so long been attached to this notion of objectivity and falsely interpreted as being balance and fairness. I wanted it to be a view from somewhere. I wanted our listeners to know right out of the gate. This is who I am. This is the perspective that I am coming from and work that into your interpretation of this podcast. Understand that I have a point of view and that I am going to do my utmost to practice fairness and evidenced based journalism. And likewise, I think that if a reporter is going into an Indigenous community and they are white, then they should say so. They should let people know, you know, like I'm not from your community. I firmly believe, especially at a time when fake news is so much a concern, that journalists need to lean into verifying their reporting, verifying what they're sharing. You're saying is it's got to be fact based, you know, fact based journalism is different than neutral journalism. We can't be neutral, but it can be fact based. The real problem of that is that the whiteness of our newsrooms has been the default for far too long. And so whiteness is the default. Whiteness is the unspoken status quo, which objectivity, you know, gets wrapped up in. And that's that's, of course, the problem. Yes, that's very important to make that objectivity or whiteness is sort of became the neutral baseline. In your book, you talk about this apology that took place in New Zealand. I'm one of the largest media organizations there. Stuff, they published an apology on its front virtual page, on its front page, apologizing for over 160 years of racist coverage. Do you think that Canadian journalism will have its moment of reckoning and this kind of apology as well? The TRC specifically singled out media and said that the media is not arms length from reconciliation. And you need to be involved. So many Canadians have not gotten the history of colonialism, have not learned about the politics and culture of indigenous peoples in elementary or secondary or even post-secondary education. So it falls to journalists to do that education, which is why the TRC said media needs to be a part of these acts of reconciliation. For the most part, the press has glossed over that in Canada. I haven't seen any media organizations who have taken the step that this prominent New Zealand media organization took to apologize to its readers for racist and blinkered coverage. I haven't seen Canadian media organizations take the step that National Geographic did in 2018 and look back at a century of, again, stereotypical and at times racist photography and say, we're sorry, we're going to do better. I'm not sure that our media organizations have taken the long, hard look at themselves and their past and seen the mistakes that they've made. They've simply kind of acknowledged and paid lip service to the fact that they need to do better. But I think it would be helpful if media organizations looked back and they wouldn't have to look back all that far to be honest with you to recognize that they have done disservice to Indigenous communities. I think that act of recognition of past coverage and the problematic past coverage would guide the journalists of today in terms of how to not replicate those mistakes tomorrow. I want to just on a personal level ask you about your survivants in the newsroom, in the newsrooms of Canada, in the classrooms, in the institutions that you work in. I'm sure it can be draining. I'm sure it can be frustrating. I can hear the energy and the excitement in your voice when you talk about educating fellow journalists and also students. I'm wondering about your survivants, if you can tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, there've been ups and downs, Vanita. I mean, for sure, I spent the first couple of years of my career just trying to learn the craft and understand what it meant to be a news reporter. And then I spent another couple of years trying to fight to get the stories that I knew mattered on the air. And that wasn't always an easy time. I have been at the public broadcaster at the CBC for 25 years now. I have had amazing colleagues. I have had supportive producers, lots of resources. And I continue to just feel privileged at the kinds of opportunities that I've had to tell Indigenous stories in this country and share them with an audience coast to coast to coast. I don't doubt for a second why I do this work. But there have been hard days and there have been times when I needed to step away and say, how can we get better at this? Not just my newsroom, but newsrooms across the country. I carry an eagle feather with me. The feather was presented to me by someone that I did a story on. I was deeply honored to to receive it. And I take it in with me just as a reminder of who I am and the privilege that I have as a storyteller and to do honor and treat with respect the stories that are shared with me. And you can lose yourself in that. In the textbook, Decolonizing Journalism, I spoke with nine of my colleagues and they shared some wonderful, fantastic, smart insights into their approach to the practice of journalism, which I say amounts to Decolonizing Journalism, the way that Indigenous journalists right across this country are doing that work of changing the business. But my friend, Wabigi Gris, who's now a writer and stepped away from journalism, shared this wonderful teaching with me. He said, you know, one of the most important things that I always brought to my journalism was one of the Anishinaabe grandfather teachings, which is humility. And I don't think that a lot of journalists think about humility when they head out into the field every day. And in fact, this is a business that in many way rewards ego. But I think it's important to try to be humble. I ask for that every time I go into the into the lodge, I say, please, please try to help me be humble. For over a long period of time, I just feel tremendously privileged to have people when I sit down and say, tell me your story. And I press play on the on the mic and they they share their story with me. And then I get to share that with other people. The magic of that hasn't hasn't left yet. And I still feel like that's just such an honor. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Vanita. It's a real pleasure to have such a lengthy conversation and such smart questions. I really appreciate it. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient, a big thank you to Duncan McHugh for his insights and wisdom. His book is called Decolonizing Journalism. If you're interested in learning more, you can go to theconversation.com. We have information in our show notes with links to additional stories and research. To talk more about this, send me a note on Twitter. I'm right beneath that. That's W R I T E V I N I T A. And if you tag our producers at ConversationCA, they can get in on the conversation, too. Use the hashtag Don't Call Me Resilient. Finally, if you like what you heard today, please help spread the love, tell a friend about us, or leave a review on whatever podcast app you're using. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. It's produced in partnership with the Journalism Innovation Lab at the University of British Columbia, with a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This podcast is hosted by me beneath the Srivastava. The episode was produced with help from Lija Navarro and Rooksar Ali. Our consulting producer is Jennifer Morose. Danielle Piper is our associate producer. Remitula Shake is our audio editor. Ali Nicholas is an assistant producer. Atika Kaki heads up our marketing and visual innovation, and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada. And if you're wondering who wrote and performed the music we use on the pod, that's the amazing Zaki Ibrahim. The track is called Something in the Water.