How Media Can Help Bring Indigenous Traditions Back to Life – The Walrus

Sep. 29, 2025

Why Indigenous storytelling is essential to counter erasure and reclaim history

My first week as a journalist was the same week the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released the summary of its Final Report. I was twenty-two, a recent graduate of a university named after Christopher Columbus. The Huffington Post had hired me to be their “Native Issues Fellow,” essentially a glorified intern working mostly from behind a desk in New York City. My first headline, written in that tabloid-y left-of-centre HuffPost style: “Canada Just Confronted Its ‘Cultural Genocide’ of Native People. Why Can’t the U.S. Do the Same?” Ten years later, I find myself asking strikingly similar questions about what it means to reckon with genocidal histories—to get the story right but come to different conclusions.

I’ve now spent a decade reporting on Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States. I’m a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen in British Columbia, an Indian under Canada’s Indian Act. My father was born at St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian residential school near Williams Lake, BC, and found minutes later abandoned in a trash incinerator. He had a hard upbringing, bouncing from one house to the next. He got off the rez as soon as he could, found his way to Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver, and landed a job at a fine art printmaking studio as far away from Canim Lake as he could imagine: New York. That’s where he met my mother, a loud, quick-witted Irish Jewish New Yorker, at a bar outside the city. According to legend, Dad took a gold feast ladle earring out of his lobe, gave it to Mom, and that’s how I came to be.

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