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  • Essay / Indigenous Canadians - 1562

    Media discourse on First Nations peoples written by Frances Henry and Carol Tator, professors at York University, raises a very serious topic regarding discrimination against Indigenous peoples in the Canadian press. The main point of their article is that the majority of “white newspapers” are biased in favor of Indigenous Canadians. It's of course not as discriminatory as it used to be, but Canadian media, in all its forms, still use certain stereotypes on a daily basis. The media, according to Tator and Henry, as a very powerful tool of manipulation, gives the rest of the Canadian population incorrect ideas about Aboriginal people. And they seem to have a lot of pretty solid evidence on this topic. More specifically, the examples were taken from two major newspapers: the Globe and Mail and the National Post. The first concerns the case of sexual assault of a young woman by Jack Ramsay, another presents a series of articles and editorials on fishing rights in Canada. “While admitting that Ramsay had behaved inappropriately, the author of these articles went to great lengths to marginalize the Aboriginal victim as untrustworthy, unreliable, forgetful and an alcoholic.” (Tator, Henry 210). This was the authors' reaction to one of the newspaper passages. And truly, if a reader looks closely, the Globe and Mail quote gives the impression that the purpose of the published documents was to disappoint the natives. The other appropriate use of information emerged in the second case study, analyzed by the National Post in 2000. "It was strongly implied – but of course not clearly stated – that indigenous peoples and their negotiations were there only to “pocket funds”. » more concessions, and that they were not in the middle of paper...... any kind of criticism that was not solely based on stereotypes. So, again, the premise presented does not directly lead readers to the conclusion. Chances are that the premises and subsequent sub-premises should have been chosen more carefully for such a serious topic. Another interesting fact about this article is that there are no references. The authors don't use footnotes or anything like that at all. This is very confusing when reading. Additionally, the authors use some definitions throughout the text, but they have not included them in the references either. Technically, they are only referring to the use of a few articles and editorials from five newspapers, but even here, for some reason, it seems that they got the title of the article wrong. The majority of them exist in the archives under completely different titles than Tator and Henry had us believe..