I’ve recently returned from a reporting trip in Northern Ontario for a special series I’m working on that I can’t wait to share with you. I visited a remote, fly-in Indigenous community where I saw a community coming together to ice fish, play hockey and rebuild dozens of homes after a black mould crisis in 2019. I could only visit because Canada’s National Observer had the funds to send me. Without money to travel, the stories I witnessed would have remained untold.
It’s essential to meet people where they are — to get on the ground to steward Indigenous stories. It’s those stories, those truths, that grow reconciliation in this country. But I can’t do it alone. We’re still a small outfit here at Canada’s National Observer, and we don’t have the extensive travel budgets of mainstream media conglomerates. Without readership support, I can’t go to Indigenous communities to speak with leaders to learn and report the truth desperately needed for reconciliation.
It is often said that what is needed is not reconciliation, but reconciliACTION.
Donate to our spring fundraising campaign to raise $100,000 today and support us to do our part to alter the fabric of this country which was built on colonial harms, land dispossession and cultural genocide.
Indigenous Peoples remain on the frontlines of the climate crisis. We’ve seen it with the tailing pond scandal in Alberta, in the race to develop mining in Ontario’s Ring of Fire and in the slow, steady expansion of nuclear power, including Canada’s first central nuclear waste facility on Indigenous traditional territory.
There are so many more stories that deserve an observing eye and listening ear as Canada begins its energy transition; stories on mining for the critical minerals needed for batteries, nuclear power, and renewable energy. Help us bring governments and industry to account to ensure all developments have free, prior and informed consent from Indigenous Peoples. Help me be there to look, listen and learn and bring you the full story.
Thank you and Hiy Hiy,
Matteo Cimellaro
Ottawa Reporter
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