Written by: Kate Morris, Corporate Communications and Public Relations Post-graduate Student, Centennial College, Intern at Kaiser & Partners (Fall 2021). Media Relations Lead at MaxSold.
In the wake of discoveries of unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., Cowessess, Sask and Brandon, MB, organizations have struggled to respond and to do so appropriately. What is the right tone for a post for National Indigenous Peoples’ Day? What tone is suitable, if any, for Canada Day? Do you feature more Indigenous content? Is it appropriate to lean on Indigenous staff for insight during a time when members of the Indigenous community are grieving?
Ultimately, these are not the urgent questions that need to be asked in the weeks and months ahead as more unmarked graves are discovered. Instead, consider Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style, which provides a helpful starting place for communicators looking to build Indigenous relations, work with Indigenous creators and feature more Indigenous content.
A Style Guide for Working Together
Style guides provide valuable rules about things that most readers never notice, from capitalization, spelling and abbreviations, to acronyms, foreign language words, titles, and place names. The implicit goal of a style is to make reading seamless, by not calling the reader’s attention away from the content of the words towards the surface of the page over niggling inconsistencies of how those words appear. But Indigenous Peoples are readers, writers and editors too, and as Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples points out, they are the ultimate source on how their cultures and peoples are represented. The given style of seemingly innocuous things can have significant impacts to Indigenous publics making it more important to get those styles right. Making small but significant changes in how an organization writes (and speaks) about its Indigenous staff or contributors, community members and stakeholders can impact how Indigenous Peoples interact with your organization.
Style guides are an agreed upon system accepted by professionals in the field either explicitly or implicitly, but they can serve as an excuse not to wrestle with complex issues, or not to allow dialogue about the ways that a certain project might exceed the style as it exists today. This extends from how something or someone appears on the page to how we work together which is also a style, and one that the profession considers neutral and thus taken for granted. For Younging, and for the Indigenous communicators that I interviewed as part of a student-led campaign for the Communicators Collective, how we work together is important.
Younging’s Guide celebrates collaboration in a way that surpasses our current model. As Warren Carriou points out in the foreword, the book “[provides] an Indigenous methodology for working from the basis of relationships,” whether between editor and writer, or journalist and subject. Younging’s book surpasses the kinds of nuts-and-bolts rules that we are accustomed to in publishing and producing content and moves towards a framework of content creation and public relations that is necessary and urgent. Although the book is centred around publishing and print content, it also provides a framework for thinking about collaboration and community-building in the act of making content that is instructive for our industry and in reconsidering business as usual in light of the discoveries of unmarked graves across Canada.
By any measure, Younging was a generative force in Canadian publishing and Indigenous advocacy. From the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, Younging, who passed away in 2019, held an MA from the Institute for Canadian Studies at Carleton University, MPub from Simon Fraser University and a PhD from the University of British Columbia. He was a long serving managing editor and publisher of Theytus Books, an Indigenous publishing house which provided him with a wealth of personal experience which he draws on to illuminate the state of Indigenous storytelling in Canada. He also served on the faculty of the Indigenous Editors Circle at Humber College in Toronto and held many significant advisory roles with the Assembly of First Nations and Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. He was also the assistant director of research for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and I like to think that the communications and public relations profession will take his words on as part of our communal response to Truth and Reconciliation.
22 Principles of Indigenous Style
Younging’s central concern in Elements of Indigenous Style is to prevent serious errors, painful biases and the perpetuation of stereotypes in how Indigenous Peoples are written about and represented in published texts. The book provides publishers and editors who “want to do it right” with the tools for doing so and they are equally useful for PR professionals looking for ways to respond and engage communities. (3) Editors often joke about taking the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm,” and Younging’s book will help content creators to better understand how to do that in an Indigenous context. Specifically, Younging dispels the notion that an Indigenous story could be adequately conveyed by a non-Indigenous person because Indigenous Peoples “are best capable of, and morally empowered to, transmit information about themselves.” To not understand this foundational principle is to perpetuate the “colonial practice of transmitting ‘information’ about Indigenous Peoples rather than transmitting Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives about themselves.”(1) This is why much of the conversation on “how to respond” to colonial injustice needs to shift toward listening to Indigenous voices and boosting Indigenous creation. According to Shani Gwin of Gwin Communications an Indigenous-led PR firm in Alberta, some of the most meaningful projects have been initiated by communities themselves. Building a relationship and making space for those initiatives should be central to how organizations respond long-term.
The book outlines 22 principles of Indigenous style, including Indigenous terminology, capitalization and place names. These sections have concrete applications for all communicators, and outline what to do when there is disagreement between Indigenous style and other style guides in order to maintain respect. Younging centres the relationship between collaborators and the process of working together which take precedent over the finished product. If the project doesn’t build a relationship, then who is benefitting from the work?
Other principles provide useful salient information about avoiding certain words, phrases and concepts, and these sections are educational and sit at the intersection of communications and issues faced by Indigenous Peoples. There is an explanation of pan-Indigenous terms (blanket, catch-all) and offensive possessives such as “our Indigenous peoples,” which imply a kind of ownership that is highly problematic. There is also a section about referring to Indigenous Peoples in the past tense which regrettably persists. Instead, Younging points out “Indigenous Peoples wish their culture to be perceived as dynamic, in interaction with the modern world, and existing in a continuum between past and future generations of Indigenous Peoples. They are not encapsulated in the past—static and resistant to change or absent.” (19)
Why should an organization take on this work? One possible answer comes from an international PR crisis experienced by Aveda after starting a line of products called “Indigenous.” Younging includes an appendix on copyright and intellectual property in Indigenous cultures which provide instructive case studies of businesses who appropriated Indigenous terms and symbols without adequate consultation. This section shows both the specificity of Indigenous cultural property and how companies have flouted Indigenous communities’ wishes because of limitations in how the law understands and values Indigenous culture. By its very nature, then, in-house legal counsel will not always be able to satisfy questions of Indigenous IP.
Listening and Relationship Building
Elements of Indigenous Style invites readers into a dialogue that is both rigorous and intimate, shuttling between historical research and personal anecdote in a dynamic way that redefines the stylebook genre for the better because it emphasizes the relationships at the centre of a project, whether literary or other:
“Showing respect does not come from following rules. This chapter won’t tell you “what to do” so you can jump through hoops and check the “did it” box. There is no single, cookbook way to do Indigenous publishing, because Indigenous Peoples are diverse. Indigenous publishing is about finding your way through, grounded in respect for Indigenous ways of being in the world and for Indigenous Peoples as distinct from one another.” (30)
The overarching message of the book is that “the key to working in a culturally appropriate way is to collaborate with Indigenous Peoples at the centre.”(31) The work doesn’t speak for anyone, but rather enables Indigenous Peoples to speak and be heard, and this certainly is part of the reconciliation work that public relations and the communications profession can participate in. Achieving this will take time and it takes a kind of open-mindedness that is willing to unlearn habits and learn new ways of thinking and being that better inform the work. A simple example is in extending the right of review to contributors and in seeking consent from the right people when using content.
Several of Younging’s principles address other more complex issues that arise such as publishing stories about Indigenous trauma with respect and sensitivity, the reparative work of correcting offensive historical documents and distinct conventions around Indigenous cultural property, such as Oral Traditions and Traditional Knowledge.
Decolonize Your Style
Whether doing media relations and strategy or editing and writing newsletters and annual reports, Canadian communications professionals live by The Canadian Press Stylebook: A Guide for Writers and Editors. To this tome, we sometimes add an in-house style guide to address the particularities of branding and other organization-specific elements. Combined these guides determine how something should appear, ensuring consistency across communications products. At times, we are guilty of clinging to these rules to such an extent that would-be collaborators who beg to differ get the proverbial book thrown at them, as if it contained the only way, as if the latest edition provides the last word in style debates.
We forget that how we use language and the styles that we accept as given are nonetheless active decisions that we make every time we use the style. And those decisions and assumptions feed back into our assumptions about what makes a story good or newsworthy, in a way that is limiting and may lack inclusion by default.
From Younging’s perspective, “Indigenous ways of knowing and being should inform the work of publishing,” particularly when the content pertains to Indigenous Peoples. The takeaway, for a profession looking for ways to ‘Indigenize’, to be inclusive and to respond to Truth and Reconciliation, is that relationships are central to the act of producing Indigenous content. And they may be more important than what we ultimately produce.
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Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging was published in 2018 by Brush Education, with a foreword by Warren Carriou. The book is available for purchase online at the link above for $19.95 in print and $11.95 in digital.
This article was written as part of a student campaign on Indigenous communications for The Communicators Collective, a group fostering diversity, equity and inclusion in the communications profession. To hear more from Indigenous communicators, check out the podcast we produced here. Thank you to Seán Kinsella, director of The Eighth Fire for the book recommendation.