Indigenous Reporters Program recognized with Excellence in Conservation award

By Rick Garrick

TORONTO – The Journalist for Human Rights (JHR) Indigenous Reporters Program was recently recognized with one of 12 Lieutenant Governor’s Ontario Heritage Awards for Excellence in Conservation.

The Toronto-based organization has provided training and internship opportunities for about 245 emerging Indigenous journalists in 16 remote First Nation communities and training for more than 1,400 non-Indigenous journalists and journalism students on best practices for reporting on Indigenous people, culture and issues since the initial pilot program was launched in 2013.
“Since then we have been slowly building the program and expanding it, and it was nice to be recognized for the hard work,” says Hannah Clifford, senior programs manager at JHR, about the Feb. 23 awards ceremony at Queen’s Park in Toronto. “The award really speaks to the power of the Indigenous voices that are showcased in the stories that are written by the community members we worked with, so the award really should go back to them.”

The Indigenous Reporters Program is designed to empower local community members with the skills to preserve stories and increase the presence of Indigenous voices and perspectives in the media.

“The main goal of the program is to increase the quality and quantity of Indigenous voices in Canadian media,” says Lenny Carpenter, manager of JHR’s Indigenous Reporters Program. “The idea is to empower Indigenous people to tell their own stories because historically media has misrepresented and underrepresented Indigenous voices in Canadian media.”

Carpenter says about 30 of JHR’s Indigenous journalism students or emerging journalists have received an internship or accepted a scholarship through the Indigenous Reporters Program. The internships were hosted at a variety of media organizations, including the Toronto Star, The Tyee, Global, CTV, Wawatay Native Communications Society and NetNewsLedger.

“(For) the majority of the interns, who went through our intern program, the internships have led to a full-time position in the industry, not necessarily at their internship but definitely it led to some other opportunities,” Carpenter says. “(In) Outdoor Life magazine, one of our trainees published a story about her son’s first goose hunt.”

Carpenter says the interns have been excited to see their work being published in national publications.

“What (an accomplishment) to put on your resume when you’ve lived most of your life in community and fairly isolated,” Carpenter says. “To have your name in a national news outlet, that’s obviously very exciting for somebody from one of our communities.”

Carpenter says the training for non-Indigenous journalists or journalism students was delivered at universities, colleges and newsrooms in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario.

“When I personally present, I talk about my family’s history, particularly with the residential school and how that’s impacted my family,” Carpenter says, noting that his family’s residential school experiences had a “definite impact” on the participants. “It is very rare that a journalist actually has an opportunity to speak with someone or hear from someone about their direct experience as being a child of residential school survivors and that the impact is still being felt and is a root cause of a lot of the problems in some of the communities.”

In addition to the 12 Excellence in Conservation Awards, 36 young people received Youth Achievement Awards, four individuals received Lifetime Achievement Awards, one community received the Community Leadership Award and one organization received a Special Achievement Award.

“These exceptional individuals, organizations and communities are champions of our past and architects of our future,” says Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell. “On behalf of a grateful province, I thank them for their exemplary achievements in conserving the best of Ontario from which we may learn and mature.”