That Indigenous women are likely to be victims of violence is not news: Indigenous women aged 25 to 44 are five times more likely to suffer a violent death than other women in Canada.

Generations of North American children have grown up watching “cowboys and Indians” films and TV shows and reading books such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie. Popular films and novels reinforced the notion that Indigenous people existed only in the past—forever chasing buffalo or being chased by the cavalry. These images showed them as destined to remain on the margins of “real” society. Such impressions and childhood beliefs, set at an early age, are often the hardest to shake: as Anishinaabe writer Jesse Wente explains, “In the absence of appropriate representations of Indigenous Peoples in the media, misrepresentations become the accepted ‘truth.’”^[1]

Indigenous media has a long history in Canada. While the earliest newspapers aimed at Indigenous readers were published by settlers, there have been Indigenous-run papers since Ojibwa chief, doctor and publisher Peter Edmund Jones, also called Kahkewaquonaby, launched The Indian in Hagersville, Ontario, in 1885. This tradition has continued with papers such as Wawatay News, based in northern Ontario and Edmonton’s Windspeaker.^[1]

More than anything else in media, news coverage influences what people and which issues are part of the national conversation and how those issues are talked about.^[1] When it comes to Indigenous people and communities, constitutional issues, forest fires, poverty, sexual abuse and drug addiction sometimes appear to be the only topics are reported in the news.

In this lesson, students develop their critical thinking skills by learning to recognize various types of bad faith arguments, including those that are used by hate mongers to spread misinformation and fuel hatred and intolerance. 

In this lesson students learn about the history of blackface and other examples of majority-group actors playing minority-group characters such as White actors playing Asian and Aboriginal characters and non-disabled actors playing disabled characters.

In this lesson students consider diversity representation in video games by identifying examples of diversity in the games they play, comparing their findings to statistics on diversity in the Canadian population.

In this lesson students consider the meaning of the words “bias” and “prejudice” and consider how bias may be found even at the level of individual words due to connotation.

In this lesson students develop an awareness of the ways in which public perceptions regarding young people have been affected by media portrayals of youth violence and youth crime.

This lesson begins by helping students to identify and understand the different aspects of news outlets. Using these skills, students will then collect and identify news stories and categorize them according to subject matter.