For the second installment of our 2023 Summer Series, "Indigenous Journalisms"—an 8-part audio book club based on Reckoning: Journalism's Limits and Possibilities—co-author and MI regular Candis Callison joins host/producer Rick Harp and return guest Indian Country Today editor-at-large Mark Trahant to discuss the excerpt 'Indigenous Journalists in Newsrooms.' ✪ Indigenous owned + operated, our podcast is 100%-audience-funded. Learn how you can support our work to help keep our content free...

The opening installment of MEDIA INDIGENA's 2023 Summer Series debuts a new format for this time of year: a kind of 'audio book club' built around eight excerpts from "Indigenous Journalisms," the penultimate chapter of the book, Reckoning: Journalism's Limits and Possibilities, co-authored by Mary-Lynn Young (professor, UBC School of Journalism, Writing, and Media) and MI regular Candis Callison (Associate Professor, UBC Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and Graduate School of...

For our final show of the 2022/23 season, we debut a somewhat new format—working title: 'the RADAR' 📡—as MI regular Trina Roache, King's College assistant professor of journalism, joins host/producer Rick Harp to co-pilot a rapid review of items big and small. From the pope airing the idea of giving Indigenous peoples' stolen stuff back, to a group of Treaty 9 First Nations jointly suing Canada and Ontario for violating their collective jurisdiction, to Inuit-friendly eyecharts and quiche...

This week: The function of injunctions. When First Nations challenge the authority of a province or corporation to enact decisions that ignore Indigenous consent, there’s a handy legal tool those non-Indigenous parties can turn to: the injunction. Basically a court order which forces someone (or someones) to immediately put an end to a particular action, an injunction is, in principle, available to anyone who can make their case. But according to research by the Yellowhead Institute, decades...

This week: when culture and commerce collide. Three underground art rings producing hundreds if not thousands of fake artworks worth as much as $100 million: some mind-boggling numbers shared by police during recently-announced arrests of eight people on 40 charges for allegedly forging the work of the late Norval Morrisseau. Known for his bright, bold colours and dramatic composition, Morrisseau’s work vividly conveyed the cosmology of his people. But where some saw something profound,...

Can a reserve’s chronically unsafe drinking water be associated with a greater risk of suicide for its residents? That’s the lethal link hypothesized in newly-released research entitled “Is Suicide a Water Justice Issue? Investigating Long-Term Drinking Water Advisories and Suicide in First Nations in Canada.” Co-authored by scholars Jeffrey Ansloos and Annelies Cooper, their investigative framework connects the colonial dots between relentless indignities inflicted upon Indigenous...

This week: our second, long-overdue MINI INDIGENA of the season features regulars Trina Roache (Rogers Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College) and Kim TallBear (professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta) as they join host/producer Rick Harp to discuss: •  Why we don’t necessarily love the idea of a First Nations person as Canada’s next top cop •  How a few Winnipeggers ain't lovin' some newly-proposed Indigenous names for city streets •  Why...

This week: Press Proximity to Power. For our latest TalkBack edition of MEDIA INDIGENA, where monthly supporters of the podcast debrief with us on our latest deep-dive discussion, MI regular Candis Callison and host/producer Rick Harp are joined by listeners as they follow up on their earlier sit-down with Regan Boychuk, an independent political economist and researcher whose paper, "Proximity to Power: The oilpatch & Alberta’s major dailies," was the subject of episode 313.  //...

On our latest TalkBack edition, where monthly supporters of the podcast share their questions and comments, a follow-up with journalist Dawn Marie Paley about her piece, “Canadian developers are gentrifying Mexico’s beaches,” published at The Breach. Also back are host/producer Rick Harp and Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University Brock Pitawanakwat, as we pick up where we left off last episode, “How Canadian tourists help endanger Indigenous lands in Mexico.”  //...

This week: Storming the beaches. Some Canadian property developers hoping to lure so-called ‘snowbirds’ to sunny beachfront in Oaxaca, Mexico have hit a bit of a hitch: like, the fact that Indigenous people already own the beach. And according to a recent article in The Breach, such land theft by outsiders is all too common in the region, sparking concerns about environmental degradation and unchecked water use, which Indigenous locals fear risk the future of their territory. Put another...

Media bias: something many suspect is at play in mainstream outlets. But proving it—that's a different story. Amidst the daily, dizzy churn that is the news cycle, finding a way to parse out and pin down reasonably comparable data isn't always obvious. But new research out of western Canada seems to have found a clever way around that: by looking at how different dailies treated the same original newswire stories within their respective papers. Spoiler alert: what you got to read depends on...

This episode, a live debrief with our patrons on 'Oil and Gaslighting,' our December 21, 2022 discussion about the jarring juxtaposition between federal underfunding of First Nations’ preparedness for floods, fires and other disasters worsened by climate change on the one hand, and how Canada overfunds the extraction and emissions changing that climate on that other. Back to dialogue directly with patrons are Kim TallBear, professor in the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of...

Something of a different turn for us this episode, as we roll into the realm of games. A way to play off another side of our personalities and help host/producer Rick Harp hit his happy place, he somehow cajoled some of our roundtable regulars (and a few special guests) to join him at the table top this past New Year's Eve to play out the old year and bring in the new with a rousing game of Hit or Miss! Among the fun folks who helped us get game the final day of December: University of...

This week: Oil and gaslighting. They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Guess which one the Canadian government funds way more than the other for First Nations emergencies like floods and fires? Karen Hogan knows the answer: in fact, the Auditor-General dedicated a whole chapter to it in her latest report, much like her predecessor did nine years prior. Since then, it’s been the usual flood of excuses and the burning through of budgets as Canada perpetually reacts...

THIS WEEK: Our second-ever 'TalkBack' edition of MEDIA INDIGENA, where monthly supporters of the podcast on Patreon get a chance to share their feedback live via Discord about our latest deep dive conversation. This time around, it's a debrief on our discussion of Alberta’s new Sovereignty Act. Back to dialogue directly with patrons are Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University Brock Pitawanakwat, as well as Ken Williams, assistant professor with the University of...

This week: Alberta sovereignty. Sovereign over what and whom, you may ask? Great questions, ones that finally got an answer last week when, on November 29, Premier Danielle Smith introduced her first bill, the Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act. Or did they? Already it seems, Smith has done a western walk-back of some of the bill’s more controversial aspects—indeed, days after we recorded our discussion about it on December 2—making it a bit of a moving target. In any case, it...

This week: 'Nation to nation,' or funder to client? When it comes to describing the financial relationship between the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian government which signs its cheques, critics are anything but kind. Through their jaded eyes, the department of Indian Affairs’ purse strings serve more like a leash on AFN, tightened whenever someone 'misbehaves.' And if this Chiefs’ lobby group can’t much function without so-called Canadian taxpayers’ money—which, to be fair, is...

On our first MINI INDIGENA of the season, host/producer Rick Harp and MI regular Trina Roache (Rogers Chair in Journalism at the University of King’s College) are joined by special guest Melissa Ridgen (former co-anchor of APTN National News, now a network managing editor at Global News), as they discuss: • The Siksika First Nation to create reportedly first-ever First Nation bylaw prosecutor's office in Canada • Trina’s RT of the @APTNNews post: “NDP MP Leah Gazan [successfully]...

Introducing our first-ever 'TalkBack' edition of MEDIA INDIGENA, where monthly supporters of the podcast on Patreon get the chance to share their feedback about our most recent deep dive directly with our roundtablers. This week, we debrief about last week's conversation, “The unravelling story of Mary Ellen Turpel Lafond.” She's the high-profile figure in B.C. whose long-standing claims to biological Indigeneity were seriously undermined by a recent CBC News investigation. Returning for...

This week: another one bites the dust? Who is the real Mary-Ellen Turpel-Lafond? A question very much on the minds of Indigenous people in Canada these days, still digesting the exhaustive and explosive CBC News investigation into her public and private life—not least, her repeated claims to being a treaty Indian as a daughter of a Cree man from a northern First Nation in Manitoba. A man the CBC could only verify as the B.C.-born settler son of settler parents of Euro-American ancestry. Just...

On our last Summer '22 episode of collected, connected conversations: settler election fever! In this back half of our political retrospective on Election 2019 and more, we revisit the 2019 campaign's first debate, an infamous campaign scrum, and whether the real solution to our political woes might be an all-Indigenous party.   Featured voices this podcast include (in order of appearance): • Hayden King, Executive Director of the Yellowhead Institute based at Toronto Metropolitan...

In this set of collected, connected conversations (the penultimate episode in our Summer '22 series): Neech the Vote! Was it really a year ago that Canada held its last federal election? A contest we didn’t much concern ourselves with, to be frank; after all, we’d gone hard on the election two years prior. But, looking back, maybe that 2019 campaign taught us all we needed to know about how Indigenous interests fare in such settler exercises.   Featured voices this podcast include (in order...

On this week's collected, connected conversations (the sixth in our Summer '22 series): Settlerology. That’s right: our chance to turn that gaze around, to peer deep into the soul of settler society! Heck, who better to lead a course on colonial culture than Indigenous people?   Featured voices this podcast include (in order of appearance): • Brock Pitawanakwat, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University • Christohper Powell, Associate Professor of Sociology at...

For the fifth instalment in our Summer '22 series, we burrow into bureaucracy, the Canadian civil service which administers every aspect of Indian life from cradle to grave via the technocratic tentacles of Indian Affairs.   Featured voices this podcast include (in order of appearance): • Shiri Pasternak, Assistant Professor in Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-founder at the Yellowhead Institute • Danika Billie Littlechild, lawyer and international Indigenous...

For the fourth instalment in our Summer '22 series of collected, connected conversations: freedom of speech. From censorship to libel, press access and accountability, there are many facets to free speech, and we’ve sounded off on many of them. Featured voices this podcast include (in order of appearance): • Ken Williams, Assistant Professor with the University of Alberta's Department of Drama • Brock Pitawanakwat, Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies at York University ...