A look at the media coverage of the Ipperwash incident

I first heard about the story of Dudley George and Camp Ipperwash when I went for a summer job interview in 2004. The company who was interviewing me, Goldi Productions, was a pair of documentary filmmakers, and they asked me about my media knowledge, specifically, if I read about the incident at Ipperwash.

I had never heard of Ipperwash or Dudley George before, and I admit that I was ashamed of this, as I am a journalism student, so I am supposed to know these things. This was my first hint about the invisibility of Native Americans in North American media coverage.

On September 7, 1995, Anthony (Dudley) George was fatally shot by OPP officer Kenneth Deane during a peaceful protest at Ipperwash Park. This was the first time that a Native American was killed by a police officer during peacetime. The OPP maintain that the natives had guns and shot at them first, which is why they responded back with gunfire. The natives maintain that they never had any weapons and it was the OPP who shot at them first. The media portrayed this tragedy as a clash between militant savages and the honest cops, playing up the violence and anger, but not digging into the deeper story- the reason behind the natives’ occupation of Ipperwash Park.

In July 2004, nine years after the death of Dudley George, a public inquiry was finally established to investigate and report about the events surrounding George’s death. This time there was no violent collision between natives and cops, instead it was a verbal dialogue between the George family and the government. Now that is not too much fun to report about, right? The public wouldn’t be interested in hearing about the legal wrangling between a couple of Indians and the Ontario government, right?

In journalism school, we learn that for a story to make the news there has to be a news hook- that is, a piece of news that is new and interesting enough for the audience to hook the readers in and read. In other words, the media sees the inquiry (at the time of writing, the inquiry is still going on) as boring and in need of excitement and glamour. It is not news to people that those who write the news are supposed to be “unbiased” in their reporting. What may be news to people however is the fact that this so-called unbiased reporting is actually subtly racist, only writing about Native Americans when there is a conflict. As a result, Canadians only see Natives in a negative way and believe that it is normal.

“A thug by any other name is still a thug,” said Claire Hoy in Vancouver’s The Province. Stereotypes rule the writing of many of the journalists who reported on the Ipperwash tragedy and still in the Ipperwash Inquiry. The mainstream media’s coverage of people of colour is full of old stereotypes, offensive language, biased reporting, and a narrow-minded interpretation of society. Do we ever see a happy or positive story about Native Americans in the papers? No we don’t. It is unfortunate that most news stories only show Native Americans in a negative way.

“In day-to-day coverage, minorities often are ignored except for certain categories of stories- notably crime, sports and entertainment,” said M.L. Stein in Editor and I. This is a dangerous way of reporting because the media shapes the views of the audience and plays a role in shaping the formation of Canadian minority identities. The media provides an important source of information through which citizens gain knowledge about their nation, and our attitudes and beliefs are shaped by what the media discerns as public knowledge. “The media is responsible for the ways that Canadian society is interpreted, considered, and evaluated among its residents,” said Minelle Mahtani in Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal.

In my journalism classes we are taught to select the most interesting parts of the story and leave out other less interesting parts. These are not just random selections. We are taught to carefully manipulate which parts of the story go where, which part gets the most attention, which part is the most emphasized. We try to make our news pieces fair and balanced. Despite what we would like to believe, Canadian media is not fair, democratic or objective.

Minority groups are regularly excluded and marginalized, and the dominant culture is reinforced as the norm. As a result, not only does the audience believe that minorities are bad people, minorities themselves feel excluded from their Canadian identity and believe that they are indeed inferior people. “Negative depictions of minorities teach minorities in Canada that they are threatening, deviant, and irrelevant to nation-building; they effectively serve to instill inferiority complexes among minorities; there are few positive role models,” says Mahtani.

In various newspaper articles about the events surrounding Ipperwash, reporters used shocking use of words to portray the Native Americans. An article in Vancouver’s newspaper The Province is called “Nuts to giving in to armed native thugs”. The reporter Claire Hoy did not even interview any of the natives, did not do research of any kind behind the occupation of Ipperwash Park and automatically believed the OPP’s story that the natives had guns and shot at the OPP first. “Who do you believe? Well, based on the track record of these so-called ‘occupations,’ there’s no doubt who I believe, and it isn’t the militant warriors who think they have the right to take up arms against the state. They don’t,” wrote Hoy. Hoy is portraying the natives as angry military warriors who can’t be trusted and is inferring that they have no right to fight the government. This statement is blatant racism and further entrenches completely wrong stereotypes about Native Americans.

Readers will develop a sense of the social world through their exposure to this kind of news media. How real are these representations? Representations are not reality; they are the result of processes of selection that invariably mean that certain aspects are highlighted and other neglected. For instance, many of the reports of the Ipperwash Inquiry played up how “explosive tapes” (Sidney Linden wrote in The Windsor Star) would reveal the truth behind the shootings, and played down the less “exciting” parts of the inquiry that explained the occupation of Ipperwash Park and the history of how the government took the land from the natives over a century ago. This wasn’t just one newspaper who hyped up certain aspects of the inquiry and downplayed others; most media who reported on the inquiry and on the shooting in 1995 did this. It is easy to say why this is so; just look at what my journalism professors are teaching me. Already I am learning to highlight aspects of a story and not include others.

It should come to no surprise that the producers of media are dominantly white. White, middle-and upper-class men (think of the Aspers, Conrad Black, George Hearst, Steve Case, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, the Barclay twins) have historically controlled the media industry, and media content has largely reflected their perspectives on the world. Therefore, the inequalities in the social world have affected the organization of the media industry that produces media products.

“When subtle racism appears constantly in media, it becomes routine, and therefore “normal”, at least for the dominant group, which means that racism is not often recognized, not acknowledged- let alone problematized by the dominant group,” says Mahtani. In many of the news stories about the Ipperwash Inquiry and the shooting of 1995, most sources of authority were white men. Hardly any reporter talked to the native men to hear their side of the story, and none of them were used as authoritative sources except for Ovide Mercredi, a First Nations leader. This under-representation suggests the unimportance or non-existence of Native Americans. The producers of the media are whiting-out the multiculturalism in the news. In terms of choosing sources, the media seem to avoid people of color.

In a CBC News broadcast about the shooting of Dudley George, members of the Kettle and Stony Point First Nations who were occupying the park where interviewed by reporter Havard Gould, however they were given no byline or title when they were speaking. When members of the OPP were being interviewed such as Const. Jack Sharpe, their name and title were given on the screen. This made it seem like they were the authority and were to be trusted over the natives. They are being silenced by the media and their invisibility is increasingly seen as normal.

In one 2001 study by Media tenor Ltd., a nonpartisan German media analysis firm, some 18,765 broadcast news reports were analyzed for content and types of sources. Nearly 92 per cent of all sources used in television news broadcasts were Caucasian, far out of proportion to their 69 per cent of the population. Only one Native American appeared for a paltry 0.008 per cent of sourcing. Even when minority sources appear on the news, they are more likely to be presented as “ordinary” citizens rather than authorities or experts.
Why is this? Part of the reason has to do with the makeup of the newsroom itself. In Canada, natives make up three per cent of the population, but out of 41 newspapers with 2,620 employees, only two are native. So not only do we have management composed of white, middle- and upper-class men dictating the news, we also have white journalists who are unfamiliar with the history of natives and other minorities, writing about them in an unfair way.

An editorial from The Globe and Mail wrote “Have governments been as intransigent or as apathetic as some native suggest? Is that intransigence really at the root of native militancy? The evidence is thin.” The editors who wrote this did not look into the background of native land claims at all, and just assumed that was the government was telling them was correct. Journalists cannot deepen their understanding if they don’t know the local and national history and cannot offer context.

Lack of familiarity with minority issues can have serious consequences. For example, during the Oka Crisis in 1990, Canadian Mohawk tribe members protested the expansion of a golf course into their native lands and sacred burial grounds by setting up a barricade. Press coverage conjured images of fierce native warriors likely to be violent, causing authorities to deploy 4,000 soldiers and police-to deal with that turned out to be 27 men, 16 women, 6 children, and 10 journalists.

The Ipperwash tragedy is remarkably similar to the Oka Crisis. The Kettle and Stony Point First Nations group was protesting to get their land (Ipperwash Park) from the government because they claim that it is a sacred burial ground. The media reported that the group was a militant band of thugs and so hundreds of OPP officers from southern Ontario came with many weapons, expecting a lot of violent resistance. In reality, it was about thirty people consisting of families.

“Ethnic minorities in Canada do not see themselves mirrored in the media, and this perpetuates feelings of rejection, trivializes their contributions, and devalues their role as citizens of their nations,” says Mahtani. This unfortunately becomes the norm, and seen as the way things are.

“You fucking cowards!” A Native American from Ipperwash Park is shown dressed in military-style clothing, yelling at the OPP officers in a CBC Newsworld broadcast. It seems that in mainstream media in Canada, ethnic minorities are presented as threats. The media uses a position reminiscent of President Bush’s “us” and “them” in which the former is the mainstream audience, and the latter is the ethnic minority. There always has to be a “tension” between the two groups to prolong the story, to make it appear more exciting, to make the readers want to read the article or watch the news broadcast, and to show the mainstream opponent as the authority over the minority. To create dynamic stories, for example, reporters will often choose “sound bites” to make good television.

The conflicts actually have a long history to them, but because of a newspapers tight deadline, there is no time to research and analyze the history behind the conflicts.

“Prevent, if possible, the press from reporting on “the enemy” as full-fledged human beings with their own story to tell; don’t let the public see the complexity of the ethical issues behind the show of weaponry,” said Tony Hall in his article “Manufacturing Contempt” in The Canadian Forum. “Rather than correctly representing the recent stand-offs as expressive of growing distinctions of class, interest and ideology within Indian Country, the mainstream press tended instead to present the episode through the simplifying, distorting lens of right and wrong, good and bad. On the other [side] stood the rebels, the renegades, those who, in the words of Rudy Platel, simply wanted ‘to thumb their noses at authority’. For this group, wrote the Globe’s Indian expert, ‘it’s pay-back time’.”

By making it a case of good guy versus bad guy, journalists are trivializing the events that happened at Ipperwash Park and are making the inquiry that is going on right now seem unimportant and pointless.

“Journalists rarely enter minority communities except during a riot or racial dispute,” says Virginia Whitehouse in The World and I. This makes it seem like riots and fights are a broad pattern in minority communities, when in reality they really are isolate events. By only showing the fights, the audience believes that this is all minorities do and therefore are not intelligent, peaceful people.

The media livens up the story by making violence and anger an important aspect to the story.

“Witness working on anger over Ipperwash shooting,” reads a headline from The Windsor Star on February 3, 2005. The lead talked about how a cousin of Dudley George was angry over his death and that there would be a war is natives controlling Ipperwash Park were confronted with force. “There’s a lot of anger there. I am still working on getting rid of that anger,” The Windsor Star quoted Glenn George. Journalists fail to educate society when coverage of minority communities is superficial and primarily tied to racial conflict. That makes it easier for racism to be perpetuated. If reporting is only about angry people swearing and throwing things, then what is the image that you are projecting about the community being covered?

The determined drive to silence, distort or trivialize the protesters at the Ipperwash Inquiry looks like the advancement of a dangerously exclusive and dictatorial approach from Canadian media. While the media continues the cycle of silencing the voices of minorities, thousands of natives live in miserable poverty. Born into a cycle of disenfranchisement and hopelessness, they feel they have little control over their destiny while the media continues to portray them as criminals and the public continues to see them as dangerous thugs.

What can be done to stop this? Change the make-up of the newsroom and change the way news is made, for starters. As soon as journalists became aware of the history of minority communities and are allowed to have the time to research them, then significant changes can be made to give a fair voice to minorities in the media.






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