Native Canadians

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Media Discourse Involving First Nations People written by York University professors Frances Henry and Carol Tator brings up a very serious topic concerning the discrimination of Native People in the Canadian press. The main point of their article is the fact that the majority of “white people’s newspapers” are biased toward Native Canadians. It is not of course as discriminative as it used to be, but the Canadian media in any of its manifestation still use certain stereotypes on the daily basis. The media, according to Tator and Henry, as a very strong manipulative tool, does give wrong ideas about Natives to the rest of the Canadian population. And they seem to have a lot of quit strong evidences for this topic. More particularly, the examples were taken from two major newspapers: The Globe and Mail and The National Post. The first one focuses on the case of sexual assault of a young women by Jack Ramsay, another one have a series of articles and editorials about fishing rights in Canada. “While admitting that Ramsay did behave inappropriately, the writer of these articles was going to great lengths to marginalize the Native victim as untrustworthy, unreliable, forgetful, and alcoholic”(Tator, Henry 210). That was authors’ reaction to one of the passages from a newspaper. And truly, if a reader takes a close look the quotation from The Globe and Mail does sound like if the purpose of the materials posted was to let down the Natives. The other proper usage of information appeared in the second study case, which was analyzed by the National Post in 2000. “It was strongly implied – but not, of course, clearly stated – that Native peoples and their negotiations were there only to “pocket” more concessions, and that they weren’t th...

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... any kind of critique that was not solely based on stereotypes. So, again the premise presented does not lead readers straight to the conclusion. There is a high chance that the premises and following it sub-premises needed to be chosen more carefully for such a serious topic.

One more interesting fact about this paper is that there are no references whatsoever. Authors do not use footnotes or anything like this at all. This confuses a lot while reading. Also, authors do use some definitions throughout the text, but they did not include this into references either. Technically, they refer only to the usage of a few articles and editorial from five newspapers, but even here, for some reason it appears that they messed up with the article title. The majority of them exist in the archives under a completely different titles than Tator and Henry made us believe.

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