Candace Maracle 0:06 Now in this last video, I'm gonna be talking about how best to get in touch with people in Indigenous communities, how to get those interviews, and what to do, what kinds of questions to ask, once you're sitting with your interviewee. I remember when I was working at CBC and one of the colleagues looked over to me and said that I was probably one of the most dogged chased producers she'd ever worked with. I was trying to chase down someone in Attawapiskat, for a story I was doing on the people who had been first approved to get the house on this long wait list of people who actually were in urgent need. They didn't have running water in some cases, or plumbing or hydro, let alone an easy way to reach them. Which brings me to my second point is for journalists, we tend to get a little bit lazing. And I think it's really important if we want to get the best story and put it out there for all to consume, that we want to be really dogged in our search for the best guest. It's very easy for us to fall back on that contact list in the interest of time and deadlines, and to reach out for the first person that we that we're familiar with. But in this way, our stories tend to be kind of narrow, or at least the scope of them. And I think we would do well to get the Indigenous voice that's not often heard that kind of perspective that we don't often get to hear from or see. The person who's not a chief actually had a film critic, talk to me about my movie, critique my movie, before I had applied the titles to it, and assumed that every person I had interviewed was a chief. The people in our communities with the strongest and best voice for your story might not necessarily be the chief or band Council. We have a lot of untapped wisdom in our communities. And reaching out to someone just by doing a little bit of extra digging would help bring a really fresh and unique perspective to your story. One of the other points that I want to make is that I think your assumptions are best left at the door, at least to be aware of your personal biases, and everyone has them, even though we might like to think that we don't. We do. If you've never had an addict in your family, it's going to be very difficult for you to be able to relate to one in reference to your story. Be accountable. If I intend to work with a community again, or cover a story or an issue that's going on within that community, I had better make sure that I'm going to be accountable in some way to that community. A simple follow up call or an email will do. But what I've experienced is that some communities are quite reluctant to give interviews if they've already been poorly depicted in media. This makes it really hard for journalists to do our jobs, because some journalists maybe didn't do this very well. While I'm doing the story, I might ask myself, will the community consider it to be an accurate depiction of what's actually going on with this community? Or is it more sensational? Will it contribute to a greater awareness? Or will it trigger anger and hostility, Lindsay Monture 3:25 There was always these cameras and stuff around there would always be on the other side of the barrier. And they're kind of always covering from the Caledonia side of things and verybody was, like kind of excited to see that we were on the news, but also kind of I don't know, I felt a lot of times it turned sour for us, because of the way that we were being represented, how the story wasn't, wasn't really, it seemed like a lot of things were out of context, you know, and they didn't get the full story or like the history about the Haldimand Tract treaty, and why this is all happening. They're just kind of shooting all the chaos and stuff that was going on. Without giving it that context, and really taking the opportunity if you're telling the story to actually educate the viewers about why this is happening. How did it get to this point, you know, and what we hope to happen from here, you know, and what are what are Canadians responsibility in this situation too? Right, it's not just an isolated situation for you know, people in Caledonia and for us. You know, this is all over Canada. They need to look at what land whose land they're on and what are the laws of that land. You know, what are the treaties set in place and the agreements made between Canadians and Indigenous people? Transcribed by https://otter.ai