Covering the Apocalypse: What it is like being an Indigenous journalist in Canada

This event took place on October 27, 2022
6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
at the Vancouver Playhouse (map)

The event will be livestreamed and video along with audio clips will be posted online following the event.

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About the talk:

Indigenous journalists have always covered stories that are personal. You can’t be part of an Indigenous family and not be touched by the residential school experience, the Sixties Scoop, climate change, addiction or incarceration. We write from a perspective of deep knowledge and we often find ourselves as unwitting teachers, activists and truth tellers. What does our perspective mean to news organizations and to readers? What is our responsibility and what is yours?

About the speaker:

Tanya Talaga is Ojibwe with roots in Fort William First Nation in Ontario. She worked as a journalist at the Toronto Star for more than 20 years, and has been nominated five times for the Michener Award in public service journalism. Talaga holds an honorary Doctor of Letters from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, and shares her expertise on the boards of PEN Canada and The Narwal. She is the president and CEO of Makwa Creative, a production company focussed on Indigenous storytelling.

Talaga is the acclaimed author of Seven Fallen Feathers, which was the winner of the RBC Taylor Prize, the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and First Nation Communities Read: Young Adult/Adult. The book was also a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the BC National Award for Nonfiction, and it was CBC’s Nonfiction Book of the Year, a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book, and a national bestseller.

Talaga was named the 2017–2018 Atkinson Fellow in Public Policy, and this series resulted in her new book, All Our Relations: Finding A Path Forward. Talaga shared the messages of this book through the Massey Lectures 2018 across Canada. This book was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize for Non-Fiction in 2019. All Our Relations has also been published and released in the United Kingdom and Australia under the title, All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism. The book was released in French in 2020.

She lives in Toronto with her two teenage children, but her heart is in northern Ontario.  Her great-grandmother, Liz Gauthier, was a residential school survivor. Her great-grandfather, Russell Bowen, was an Ojibwe trapper and labourer. Her grandmother is a member of Fort William First Nation, and her mother was raised in Raith and Graham, Ontario.

UBC Connects and the Vancouver Playhouse adhere to Provincial Health Orders and Public Health Guidance for all in-person events. Please check back regularly for specific information and details about attending this event safely.

We look forward to seeing you.

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Pending approval from the speaker.