Ottawa Report

Page 3

I was lucky enough to have a front row seat when the Native media honoured their own recently because I was one of the judges. The National Aboriginal Communications Society (NACS) organized the Native media awards. The ceremony, held in Banff, Alberta, was the first of its kind and it was a huge success.

When the organizers asked me to be a judge a few months ago, I said, "no sweat." I thought all I had to do was stroll in, run through the entries and pick a winner. Boy, was I wrong! To begin with, I was stunned by the size of the job ? there were 150 entries in English, French, Inuktitut, Objiway, Blackfoot and Algonquin. I was lucky, though, because I had "only" 24 radio entries to judge ? many of them a half-hour long. So I settled down to a long night of listening.

Listening to the entries was the best part of being a judge ? and the easiest. The hardest part was trying to decide which one was the best. Twelve Native communication societies submitted entries and when it was all over, eleven societies had won an award. It was not a deliberate effort by the judges to divide the prizes more or less evening. Instead, it was a simple recognition that every society is producing excellent work.

Don't just take my word for it, though ? take Wendy Smith's. She was the Native affairs reporter at the Calgary Herald for the past two years and she judged the newspaper entries.

She was particularly impressed by the way that Windspeaker covered the story of Peerless Lake ? the Alberta Metis community that was in the news a year ago. You'll remember, because it's so hard to forget, that five people died there after they drank photocopying fluid in a wild drinking bash. Wendy Smith says that Windspeaker, the weekly paper published in Edmonton, "put the mainstream coverage ... to shame." She praised Windspeaker for its "comprehensive and compassionate" coverage of the Peerless Lake tragedy. Windspeaker, she says, provided a tightly written hard news account under deadline pressure, and followed it up with a series of background stories and feature reports.

She wasn't the only judge to praise the work of the Native media. Tim Knight, an executive producer in the training division at CBC television in Toronto, headed the panel of judges for the television entries. He called them "superb".

The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation won the award for best overall television programming. The winning entry was called "The Summer of Louisa". The half-hour program is a stunningly powerful drama about alcoholism and wife-battering in an Inuit community.

It so happens that Tim Knight was also a judge at a recent international television competition in Spain. That contest included new, variety and current affairs programming from public broadcasters around the world. Tim Knight says the Inuit film and the other Native entries are so good, he wants to take them to the next international competition later this year in Philadelphia.

The awards ceremony itself was an evening of non-stop smiling, clapping, hugging, kissing, laughing and hand-shaking. I got a kick out of the way the winners lined up at the pay phones to tell the folks back home. One happy winner, in fact, came back to his table with the news that the people at home were going to meet his plane at the airport with champagne in hand.

The celebrations in the banquet room that night made me think of what it must have been like in the Edmonton Oilers' dressing room a few weeks ago. Even though the prize the winners received was just a simple little plaque, in the world of Native journalism that night, that plaque was the Stanley Cup. I was just as happy as everyone else that night because it's about time the Native media received the recognition they so richly deserve. The Native media should be congratulated for doing a great job in the face of money problems, language problems, and distribution problems the mainstream media don't have.

I'm glad that MACS organized the awards eremony, especially since the mainstream media ignores Native achievements. The most blatant and inexcusable example of that happened when the Calgary Herald not only failed to send someone to cover the ceremony, but refused to print the results ? even though the local Indian media society won two awards.

I think we all should pay attention to the Native media awards because they serve so many functions. For starters, they recognize excellence in a new field of Native endeavour. The awards also reward editorial courage for tackling sensitive and controversial topics. On another level, the awards give Native journalists an incentive to produce work of the highest quality.

Lastly, the awards help give Native people a shot of plain old-fashioned pride. In my case, I've been a journalist for most of the last twelve years and I've always been an Indian. But thanks to the award ceremony, I'm proud to say I am a Native journalist.