Looking Back

I tell people at conferences, workshops, classes in journalism school that when I became a journalist in the early 1980s, I could count the number of other Indigenous journalists working across southern Canada on the fingers of one hand. I could name each one.

Most worked for the CBC. One for a western newspaper. Otherwise, there was slim pickings for Indigenous role models. I’d never met any Indigenous journalist in the mainstream before. It would be a few more years before I did.

As a fresh face, I needed someone to emulate, a role model to inspire me, to prove to me that the “buckskin curtain” could be breached. Finding no one to talk to, I looked elsewhere for someone who might touch a chord within me. A style, a personality, someone that I might like to become. It wasn’t easy because my choices were limited.

Most of my peers, it seemed, copied the stereotypical journalist/reporter, someone who they deemed authoritative. Even women admired someone who looked and sounded like he (mostly male) was assertive, in charge. They seemed to like reporters who shouted at a microphone or camera lens.

That style of reporter never appealed to me. To me, they sounded like pompous asses throwing down 10-dollar words reading from or sounding like a newspaper. Stiff, wooden, caricatures of what they thought a reporter should look and sound like.

I once sent an email complaining about reporters on Parliament Hill, telling whoever that some big shot arse of a senator actually came off sounding less bureaucratic, even more human, than the reporters covering him. It should’ve been the other way around, I wrote. The more I listened, the more I realized this wasn’t an aberration; this stilted, formulaic, jargon-filled voice was everywhere on radio and TV news.

Want to get hired by the mainstream, folks said: adopt protective colouration. Code switch was a term not invented yet. It meant to change even your accent and speech pattern among other things to make yourself less different, more like them, and therefore more acceptable. But that wasn’t that big a problem for me.

I already looked and sounded like an average Canadian reporter., when I wasn’t slipping back into my central New York accent. I behaved much the same as everyone else too. My problem was I didn’t want to BE like them — as a reporter. Their style was formal, stiff, impersonal. Just the facts.ma’am. This is HoHum TooBad reporting, and you’re not.

Comedians made fun of that style. Nope, not for me I thought to myself. Instinctively, for inspiration, I looked to a man who spoke with a distinct Hungarian accent.

Joe Schlesinger had the craggy face and weary look of a journalist who’d seen and done it all. He talked to you — repeat “to you” — in short sentences. Each word held weight and meaning. He gave facts but each one framed by knowledge and experience. He was more than just a reporter. He told stories. His stories let you know what was going on but critically also why.

Vicki Gabereau was by far the best interviewer I’d ever heard. She could coax some cranky old codger to spill the beans about anything even he wasn’t clear about and make us all understand why in just a few minutes. Her interviews were really stories about people — not things. Rich, poor, crooked, bent? It didn’t matter. To her, they were just people who just wanted to get something off their chests. And maybe laugh about it too.

Every weekend, I tried to watch CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt or catch his On The Road series. He spoke in a languid southern drawl. He had a quirky ability to find the human in everything, every place, every story. You might’ve been on your way to the bathroom but you’d just have to stop and watch. He used words that fit exactly. Listening to, watching Kuralt tell a story, made me wish I had half his skill.

Arthur Black looked like a dark-haired Santa clone from Thunder Bay. He was like Kuralt but without that soft North Carolina voice. Nope, Black was a machine gun storyteller. His words were like the comforting sound of heavy rain hitting a tin roof. Interviews or stories, he was always after real people just doing everyday things that humans are apt to do. Like Gabereau, he managed to bring out the humour in humanity no matter how difficult the story.

They became my role models, my teachers. Others might yammer on about “inverted pyramids,” “ledes” and “nut grafs” or some such. I knew then I was drawing a line between “reporters” and “storytellers.” Thankfully, luckily, I had a few teachers who felt the same way. They nudged me toward “storytelling” as a style. Damned good thing too because I had some terrible teachers too.

I had one teacher at j-school inflicted upon we poor Indigenous students by the powers above either as a bad joke or undeserved punishment. I’m still not sure which. He came to teach us “radio journalism.” Right off the bat, he told our small class down in the basement that “the way you write a script for radio news is…” And it was at this very spot where his reputation spun out and hit the ditch.

“You pick up a newspaper, ” doomed teacher said, “whatever newspaper is around. The London Free Press, for example. (fine.) You look for a story that will mean something to your audience. (okay.) You take a scissors… (???) cut out the newspaper story… (huh?) and you take scotch tape and paste it onto a blank piece of white paper. (what??) And that’s a radio script.” (holy crap?!)

By the time he’d finished that last sentence, our small group was looking across the room with WTF eyebrows and stifled laughter. As soon as legally possible, we marched out to complain because this was not what Joan Donaldson (Saint Joan of CBC) had taught us about writing for broadcast. Did Western’s school of journalism really believe a bunch of Indigenous students deserved that level of incompetence?

We survived because we were united in demanding better. We learned a few valuable lessons that day. The “buckskin curtain” existed even in this place of higher learning. We should have expected to connect with educated minds drained of disgusting attitudes. We didn’t need to endure common indignities as existed “out there among the great unwashed,” a demeaning term we’d heard over and over from journalists of national prominence.

They expected us to blend in, take what they gave us and be satisfied with second and third best. Of course, this just pissed us off. It wasn’t the first time we’d boycott a teacher or a class. But it was one thing to raise hell for the right thing at a university with a few principled academics in your corner. It was something else to expect to do the same thing once you became the only Indigenous reporter in a mainstream newsroom.

These were only a few reasons why every year nearly every Indigenous person graduating from a journalism program chose to work at Indigenous organizations or their band offices rather than mainstream newsrooms. Attitudes behind the “buckskin curtain” discouraged Indigenous peoples considering mainstream jobs, or it wore them down when they managed to actually get a job in a mainstream newsroom.

Take my cohort, for example. I was the only one to even try for a mainstream job. In years before and after, only a handful even thought about it. Even if they got hired, they didn’t last very long. It wasn’t because they weren’t good enough, although they might’ve improved with a little help. Most were just worn down by the attitudes even if they loved the work.

But who needed the hassle. They might wind up working back home or for an Indigenous organizaiton, for a small community newspaper or radio station, for a lot less money. But at least they wouldn’t come home every night nursing frustration and anger.

This shouldn’t be anyone’s experience but it was common among mainstream Indigenous journalists. Why join mainstream newsrooms then? Because it wasn’t just about better pay, more prestige or fitting in. It was about making change. It was about changing old newsroom cultures that were missing a big part of this country’s story.

It also meant slow, I mean deadly friggin’ agonizingly slow, small, incremental changes to moldy attitudes in these newsrooms. My favourite phrase to describe the process and progress? “Like molasses in January.”

The numbers, what little data available thanks to federal Employment Equity reports, and not all newsrooms filed them or made them public, proved how slow things changed in the years and decades that followed. There might be a half percentage point increase in hiring grunt positions, never in those jobs with titles and authority though. There might be a percentage point down the following year or decade. And so it went.

This didn’t affect Indigenous journalists only. The employment equity figures for Black, Brown and Asian journalists remained almost static just like those of Indigenous peoples. Data for journalists with disabilities was nearly insignificant. There was no category back then for LGBTQ2S+ journalists. The only real gains in hiring went to women in every category; from clerical to technicians, on-air reporters and senior managers.

The few Indigenous journalists who wound up in the mainstream by design or accident stayed because someone had to. We stayed to keep the door open for as long as possible for the next crop of bright-eyed Cree, Mohawk or Mi’kmaq scribe hoping to change the world just a little for the better. Some stayed longer than others. A few never stopped trying.

What about today? Have things changed? Really changed for Indigenous journalists in Canada? If things really did change, if that “buckskin curtain” doesn’t exist anymore, who made that happen? Was it pulled aside or even torn down from within? Or dismantled by outside forces?

I think I’ll leave it right here, for now.

I’ll chew on that last paragraph a bit more.

In the meantime, stay tuned for a story about that time I nearly slugged the head of news and current affairs.