Candace Maracle: 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: 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?