Kashechewan was not news

Page 5

Editorial

You will notice that the frenzy that was on display in the national mainstream media in late October and early November is not echoed in the pages of this publication.

Day after day, front-page stories in large circulation dailies were followed by "in depth reports" on the national television news packages: There's a problem with the drinking water on a remote Indian reserve in northern Ontario and the government isn't doing anything about it, we were breathlessly told over and over again. Gee, really?

That might have been news to the residents of the big southern Canadian cities, but believe us, it was not news to any Aboriginal person, especially those who have read Windspeaker over the last dozen or more years.

It was not news to Canada's own commissioner of the environment and sustainable development, Johanne Gelinas, who pointed out on Nov. 17 that Indian Affairs' own research revealed years ago that three-quarters of Indian reserves have concerns about water quality.

And no, this is not an "I told you so" message. What we're saying is simply that the mainstream media-not just the government-needs to do a much better job on Aboriginal issues.

The Kashechewan coverage underlines that point dramatically. That situation at Kash, as it has become affectionately known, was allowed to fester for years. Those who had observed the persistent misery on the reserve had stopped believing that any Canadian government would take action to deal with the Third World-like situation to bring it to a resolution. But once the media grabbed onto the story, things happened, and fast. It was a stirring reminder of the power of the press.

But when you have the power to do good deeds and you use that power selectively, what does that say about you? There's two ways of looking at this. Maybe the news organizations with the big budgets and the resources required to cover the stories in the remote communities of this vast land only occasionally stumble over something that our readership sees as obvious. If that's not true, then these news organizations have known all along what's there but only occasionally decide to do anything about it. The Canadian media look bad either way. Either they're hopelessly out of touch with the reality of day to day living for more than one million Canadians or they don't particularly care about those one million Canadians. Take your pick.

Dear news directors and executive editors: Don't you see that you are part of the problem? If you don't dig into the workings of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and other departments that play a role on reserves, the officials will continue to do the bureaucratic equivalent of sitting on the couch eating bonbons while people get sick and die.

As long as the mainstream press fiddles with other comparatively inconsequential matters, our taxpayer-fed bureaucrats will never have to take the career risk that comes with telling someone higher up the food chain that they need to spend money to address the fallout of generations of neglect on reserve.

If you snooze, Indians lose, media folks.

Take it from us, there are enough compelling stories to be told on the Indian Affairs beat to keep an entire news organization going full time.

Here's what we usually see in city after city as we travel the country. The local paper or electronic media outlet is represented by a junior reporter who is eager to pay his or her dues covering Indian Affairs and then graduate to a more prestigious (and easier) beat as quickly as possible. When that happens, the next new grad starts from scratch all over again. That, as much as anything, is what allows the government to get away with Kashechewan-type abuses for years and years and years.

It wouldn't take much to drastically improve the quality of coverage of Aboriginal issues in the mainstream media. Just a little more of what Justice Minister Irwin Cotler calls the seven "Rs."

Cotler sid the under-representation of Indigenous people as lawyers or judges in the justice system and the over-representation of Indigenous people as defendants and convicts can be corrected through recognition, respect, redress, representation, responsiveness, reconciliation and relationships.

If government and media actually embraced that strategy, things would get better in a hurry.