IN ORDER TO LEARN FROM NATIVE PEOPLE ABOUT OUR RELATIONSHIP with the natural world, we have to recognize that they exist. To most of us, they are invisible.
A radio reporter is interviewing one of the early settlers in the northern part of British Columbia. The old-timer recalls that when he arrived in the area, “there was no one else around,” adding as an aside, “just a few Indians.” Now I’m sure the man meant to say that there were no other people of European background in the area, but his remark recalls Ralph Ellison’s classic novel Invisible Man. Ellison’s book was a searing commentary on the consequences of being black in the U.S., the most dehumanizing aspect of which was being invisible to the white majority.
On May 5, 1988, B.C. minister of forests Dave Parker met with a First Nations group from the interior of B.C. to continue negotiations on the future of the Stein Valley. Chief Ruby Dunstan of the Lytton Indian Band listed a number of grievances in which their requests had been repeatedly ignored or slighted. She ended with the plea, “Stop treating us as if we are invisible! We’re human beings too.”
Parker’s reaction was astonishing. He took umbrage and huffed, “I deeply resent what you’ve just said. There’s reverse racism too, you know.” Chief Dunstan’s plea to be treated with dignity was grotesquely twisted into a ministerial insult.
As in Ellison’s novel, Native people in Canada don’t seem to exist except as government statistics. When Europeans arrived in North America, the continent was already fully occupied by aboriginal peoples with rich and diverse cultures. Yet Canadians refer to the French and English as the “two founding races.” This denial of the very existence of already thriving Native people is reinforced by their cursory description in our history books. Our governments have systematically oppressed and exploited First Nations people, destroyed their culture, and denied or opposed their right to claim aboriginal title.
The history of Native people after contact with Europeans is a tragedy that continues to the present. Hunting-and-gathering nomads were forced to give up their traditional way of life for permanent settlements. Children were exiled from their remote homes to be educated in urban centers hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. There they were taught to be ashamed of their culture and were punished for speaking in their own language. And we outlawed some of their most important, even sacred, cultural activities—the potlatch, the drums, dancing, religion, Native medicines, even hunting and gathering.
Their original population ravaged by disease, dispossessed, forced to leave the bush and to abandon ancient traditions, aboriginal people today occupy the lowest rung in social standing in Canada. It is hardly surprising that alcoholism, unemployment, suicide, sexual abuse, and crime afflict many Native communities across Canada. And these negative images are only reinforced by their constant repetition in reports by the electronic and print media.
I have recently watched three films about Canadian First Nations that had been commissioned by the aboriginal people themselves. What a difference they are from the usual stereotypes in the media. The films allow Native people to talk about themselves and their own ideas, obstacles, and goals. The reaction of media people who screened the films for possible television broadcast is instructive. “Beautiful footage, but too one-sided” was a standard response. When a Native person in one film talked about the urgency of conserving salmon because the fish are at the core of his culture, a television executive snorted, “Are they trying to tell us they know something about ecology?” Another remarked, “If you leave it to the Indians, there won’t be any salmon left.” Another person suggested, “The women are too fat and the men look too white.” When the narrator said, “Along these banks are remains of ancient civilizations dating back nine thousand years,” one man interjected, “I don’t think you should call them civilized, because they were nomadic.”
Underlying these responses is the assumption that people in the media know what reality is and how Natives should be portrayed. But there is no such a thing as objective or balanced reporting in the media. Everyone in the world is molded by heredity, personal experience, and cultural milieu, factors that shape not only our values and beliefs but the very way we perceive the world around us. It’s easy to confirm this—just talk to an Iranian and an Iraqi, a Northern Irish Catholic and a Protestant, a South African white and a black, or an Israeli and a Palestinian about events that both in each pair have witnessed.
The point is that we edit our experiences through the lenses of our personal worldviews. That creation of subjective reality doesn’t suddenly stop when people become part of the media. Human beings cannot help but impose their personal priorities, perceptions, and biases on their reporting because that is all they know. Implicit in our newscasts are all kinds of biases— we just don’t recognize them as such because they happen to be the dominant view in society. But ask a Soviet or Chinese visitor and they’ll see the biases immediately.
As long as Native people are not a part of the media, they will be portrayed as the rest of society chooses to perceive them. At the very least, the media ought to be willing to let members of the First Nations present reports from their point of view, if only to make them a little less invisible.
JOURNALISTS OFTEN DO HOLD UP OBJECTIVITY AS A HIGH GOAL IN reporting. A few years ago, one of the Globe and Mail’s most respected reporters chastised me for publicly supporting a political party, because, in his opinion, it compromised my objectivity as a broadcaster. When I signed a letter supporting an antinuclear petition, I was informed that some in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation management felt I had lost credibility on nuclear issues.
If there really is such a thing as “objective journalism,” then there would be no difference in reporting by women or members of visible ethnic communities. Nor would it matter that there is a preponderance of upper-middle-class white males doing the reporting, as long as they were “objective.”
If most reporting is truly objective, then there is no legitimate claim for the necessity of Canadian print or electronic media. If reporters simply observe and transmit objective reality, then the source of news ought not to matter. Of course this is ludicrous. The reason we value the CBC, the National Film Board, and Canadian magazines and newspapers is that they present perspectives from within this country’s culture. None of us can escape the limitations of our heredity and personal and cultural experiences. There’s no such thing as objectivity.
There is plenty of evidence to show that complete objectivity does not exist even in that most rational and objective of all activities, science. Harvard’s great science popularizer, Stephen Jay Gould, wrote a marvelous book entitled The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he documents the history of the scientific study of the human brain and shows how existing beliefs and attitudes affect not only the kinds of questions asked and experiments conducted but also the way the results are interpreted.
So, for example, when it was believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence, scientists obtained evidence that the brains of blacks were smaller than the brains of whites. Decades later, when Dr. Gould measured the cranial capacity of those very same skulls, he found there were no statistically significant differences. By then it was also clear that brain size alone is not an indicator of intelligence.
Similarly, Dr. Gould describes how scientists once believed that intelligence could be pinpointed to a certain part of the brain. And, sure enough, when comparisons were made, that part of the brain in women was found to be significantly smaller than it was in men. Years later, when it was known that that particular part of the brain had nothing to do with intelligence, a reexamination of the data revealed that the differences were not significant.
We acquire genetic and cultural “filters” through which we perceive the world around us. I was struck with the power of those filters in 1987 when I visited the Stein River Valley. I was flown by helicopter into the valley with my host, a Lillooet Indian Band member. He pointed out the burial grounds of his ancestors, the battle site between his people and the neighboring tribes, and their ancient hunting grounds. Our pilot told me that a week before he had taken a load of foresters over the same area, and all they spoke of were the number of jobs, the years’ worth of logging, and the enormous profits those trees represented. The foresters and the Native people were looking at the very same place, but what they “saw” was worlds apart.
Now you see why Native people must have a means of seeing themselves through the lenses of their own values and culture; otherwise, they will live only with the fabrications of non-Native journalists.
But I have a far more selfish reason for supporting them. I believe that as North Americans explore the spiritual values of Eastern religions and African cultures, we ignore an important perspective right here in our midst. Canada’s First Nations have a view of their place in nature that is very different from the non-Native view, and in spite of the way they have been brutalized over the centuries, they have hung on to those differences. Through a Native perspective, non-Natives can measure and reexamine our own assumptions and beliefs. It is only in having a contrasting view that we can truly recognize our strengths and deficiencies. To do that, we have to abandon the myth that there is some high form of objective reporting and acknowledge our inherent and inescapable biases