Candis Callison
One of the UWC values is responsibility and care for the environment, but this should be a universal value for everyone. As we know, media is usually said to be the fourth power. Sometimes we do not understand the power of influence given to media. The interpretation of this influence can be twofold: media can give an example of information that one will use to direct herself/himself in a positive direction; however, sometimes media also can manipulate. At this moment, the media’s attention on the global climate crisis is overtaken by the ideology of the crucial need for economic development, regardless of consequences.
Therefore, the unseen heroes now are those who change the mass media within this sphere. And Candis Callison is one of these journalists.
Candis Callison is Tahltan. She was born in the indigenous community located in northwestern British Columbia.
She is an environmental journalist living in Canada. Candis works as associated journalists at the University of British Columbia. She wrote the book How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts and she is also a co-writer of the book Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities. In this book, she gives a different perspective on what is journalism.
Tahlatan people
Tahltan (also Nahanni) are a First Nations people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group who live in northern British Columbia around Telegraph Creek, Dease Lake, and Iskut.
The Tahltan people have occupied their territories around the upper reaches of the Stikine River since time immemorial. The relationship between the people and the land, as with many indigenous peoples, is one marked by a deep respect for the land as a provider and a strongly held belief that the people are keepers of the land. The Tahltan belong to the land. This prevailing attitude has led to a symbiotic relationship in which the Tahltan people look to the land for sustenance, guidance, and healing. Traditional Tahltan governance was organized around the family/clan system. All decisions affecting Tahltans were made through meetings and councils, and every Tahltan was allowed to express their views and concerns.
Candis Callison is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism and in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Her research and teaching are focused on changes to media practices and platforms, journalism ethics, the role of social movements in public discourse, and understanding how issues related to science and technology become meaningful for diverse publics.
She is a regular contributor on the podcast, Media Indigena. She was also named to Open Canada’s 2018 list of Indigenous Twitterati. Candis is a member of the Advisory Circle for The Indigenous Screen Office.
Reckoning: Journalism's Limits and Possibilities. Abstract from the book:
The book is about how journalists know what they know, who gets to decide what good journalism is, and how we know when it’s done right. Until a couple of decades ago, these questions were rarely asked by journalists. When journalists were questioned by malcontented publics and critics about how they were doing journalism, these questions were easily ignored. Now, if you’re on social media, you’re likely to see multiple critiques of journalism on a daily basis. It seems not only convenient but pragmatic to give most of the credit to digital technologies and/or market failure for how relationships between journalists and diverse audiences have changed. This book rests on a different assumption, however. We contend that technologies offer a diagnostic to understand much deeper, persistent, and structural problems confronting journalism. Counter to much of the recent journalism scholarship, we argue that you can’t talk about the role journalists and journalism organizations could, should, and have played in society without talking about gender, race, other intersectional concerns—and settler-colonialism. Drawing on mixed methods and ethnography as well as interdisciplinary scholarship, this book examines the reckoning under way between journalists, their methods and their audiences in sites as diverse as social media, legacy newsrooms, journalism startups, novel forms of journalism memoir, and among indigenous journalists. The book explores journalism’s long-standing harms alongside repair, reform, and transformation. It suggests that a turn to strong objectivity and systems journalism provides a path forward.
In the interview with the CBC journalist, Candis talks about the current situation in the media, “In 2020, unless there is a significant change, Indigenous journalists and communities in the U.S. and Canada will continue to push back against poor mainstream news coverage. Indigenous people remain underrepresented in vastly white newsrooms — so underrepresented in U.S. media that Indigenous journalists often don’t merit a mention in those news organizations that do report on diversity.
Indigenous journalists, meanwhile, have continued to build their own news organizations and have, as my coauthor Mary Lynn Young and I argue in our new book, Reckoning: Journalism’s Limits and Possibilities, also developed transformative approaches to doing journalism. Indigenous journalists are more likely to recognize their own knowledge and experience as experts and to situate themselves in relation to communities, lands, and waters. They’re leading the way on how to report on complex issues like climate change that bring into focus the global costs, losses, and histories of colonialism. Indigenous journalists are also more likely to recognize how settler colonialism persists in structures and institutions (including media) and how vital it is to access diverse Indigenous knowledge in charting adaptive pathways forward in a future with more drastic ecological changes”.