MEDIA AND RECONCILIATION

Help aboriginals by swapping CBC’s budget with APTN. Cosh,

Idislike executive summaries, as a genre. I resist reading them. They are a species of predatory instrument for which journalists on deadline are the intended prey. At their best, they are intended to deliberately launch columnists into precipitate action; at worst, they are designed to mislead us outright. This week’s summary report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, about which tens of thousands of words have already been generated, has put me in a bit of a bind — partly because, at 382 pages, it’s not very summary-ish. It looks like an impressive, useful work of scholarship in itself. But how many of us will still read the full report when it eventually emerges?

Let’s make a note to do that. In the meantime, I find myself puzzled by the “Media and Reconciliation” segment in the section of the summary devoted to “calls to action” concerning the legacy of Indian residential schools.

“Media and Reconciliation” starts with a brief description of the role the CBC has played in promoting aboriginal language and culture. It could be meta-summarized in one word: “Feh.” The Broadcasting Act requires the Corporation to “create programming that reflects the aboriginal cultures of Canada” — but only, the Act adds, “as resources become available for the purpose.” The result, combined with the relative stagnation of the CBC’s overall budget during the Chrétien-Martin-Harper years, has been what the report calls “a minimum level” of service. The Corporation creates little aboriginal-specific programming and directly employs few aboriginal Canadians.

There’s good news, though! We have an independent aboriginal-run public broadcast apparatus — the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Which was basically founded to make up for the failure of the CBC to meet its half-hearted after- thought of an aboriginal mandate.

We all know that APTN has a weird business model in which it monetizes its legally mandated cable carriage by airing a certain amount of dubiously “aboriginal” programming. (Airing Friday night: direct from Hollywood, Kevin Reynolds’s Rapa-Nui.) This approach gives APTN a budget that is still a minuscule fraction of the CBC’s. But that money has been used to create viable career paths for aboriginal creatives, technicians, and producers; to make programming in threatened aboriginal languages; and to fund aboriginal news reporting, documentaries, and shows for children and youth. Seventy five per cent of APTN’s employees are aboriginal.

Having set out this Goofus-andGallant contrast between the CBC and APTN, the recommendation that results from this is almost literally incredible: “We call upon the federal government to restore and increase funding to the CBC.” The hope is that the Corporation, out of the goodness of its thrumming white heart, will use the cash to create more opportunities for aboriginal broadcasters. Meanwhile, APTN gets a cheerful pat on the back: it is urged to continue providing “leadership” in making First Nations television, with no mention of any possible adjustment to its budget.

Am I crazy, or does this seem like an example of the settler-vs.-colonized mentality that facilitated the creation of the residential schools in the first place? For some months before the TRC report came out, I had already been asking myself a question: why the hell don’t we just swap APTN’s budget with the CBC’s?

The whole crux of the TRC report is that the Canadian state has been engaged in a century of destruction of First Nations culture, creating an obligation to “reconcile.” Among Canada’s worst crimes was the suppression of aboriginal languages, which inevitably disconnected Indian youths from their national backgrounds and traditions, leading to effects that would have been scarcely less destructive and impoverishing if inflicted on people named Smith and Jones. Residential schools were a well-meaning, expensive government megaproject that, thanks to their what’s-best-forsomeone-else nature, led to copious amounts of abuse and death.

We cannot undo that harm, but no apology has the sincerity of cash, and funding aboriginal-language media made by aboriginal creators is something we could do now to assist and revive cultures Canada poisoned en masse. Languages need a corpus — that’s Latin for “a body” — to thrive. APTN could start assembling multiple bodies more ambitiously, if it had a CBC-style grant, and wasn’t required to get by on what it makes from selling Beachcombers reruns.

It doesn’t have to confine itself to broadcasting — Lord knows the CBC doesn’t. APTN could expand into aboriginal-language Web offerings; it could develop totally separate content streams for major aboriginal language groups. It could get into community radio. It could fund scholarship, translations, poetry. You can think of a hundred new ideas without breaking a sweat.

Compared to a moral demand of that nature — the preservation of varieties of human thought and experience for which Canada has a lone and inescapable responsibility — having a state broadcaster making media in official languages spoken worldwide seems like idiotic vanity, doesn’t it? How much are we spending every year just on forehead makeup for Peter Mansbridge?

Euro-Canadians don’t really need to be spending a billion dollars a year staring vapidly at their own self-image, especially since so many of us do not particularly recognize ourselves in the CBC mirror. Even Québécois French isn’t going to disappear in three generations if they shut down Radio-Canada tomorrow. Swap the budgets. Or explain to me why we shouldn’t.

If we really want to promote native culture, why not give small but effective APTN the money we now give to the public broadcaster?