I should have anticipated the blowback to the final report of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls.

I should have realized as I listened to question after question from non-Indigenous journalists during the formal release how much the pushback would hurt, that Indigenous people would be reminded, once again, of the great gulf of misunderstanding between ourselves and Canada.

I should have realized that the inquiry’s finding that Indigenous peoples are the victims of a “race-based” genocide empowered by colonial structures would be mocked by pundits in the media.

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After all, the media is among those colonial structures. My profession has been complicit in the suffering of Indigenous people. It still is.

I was an expert witness at the national inquiry in June, speaking about racism in the media. One of the commissioners asked me why no journalists came to hear them. Not one media outlet applied for standing during the inquiry. I had no answer for her. Only that this was nothing new.

For decades, news outlets chose not to report on Indigenous issues. Where were the investigative exposes on the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora while children were medically experimented on? Or the special projects on the pedophiles preying on the children of St. Anne’s Indian Residential School or on Ralph Rowe, the flying Anglican priest believed to have sexually abused hundreds of First Nations boys?

Where were the stories on First Nations, Métis and Inuit women and girls in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, who were picked up off of sidewalks, raped and left for dead?

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There are exceptions of course. I have, since January 2019, been paid to cover Indigenous issues as a columnist for the Star. I’m not alone in the Canadian media landscape. But we are few.

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The inquiry did not mince words in calling out the media. The commissioners found that media has not accurately portrayed Indigenous women and girls and 2SLGBTQQIA (two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual) people, too often reinforcing negative stereotypes, perpetuating racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny — perpetuating the notion that Indigenous peoples are “less-than.”

But rather than listen, rather than take this opportunity for sober self-reflection, the media, on cue, proved the commissioners’ point.

Most major Canadian media organizations quickly published pieces dismissing the genocide finding, while mostly ignoring everything else in the 1,200-page report based on the testimonies of some 2,300 families, survivors and experts.

The Star’s editorial board, for instance, concluded that “genocide” is not the right word. The editorial board is the voice of the paper, but I, an Anishinaabe kwe and Polish Canadian, am also a voice at the Star. The editorial did not speak for me. The Globe and Mail’s editorial board, meanwhile, came to much the same conclusion: “The commission’s accusation of a continuing genocide doesn’t ring true,” it wrote. Well, it rings true to those who live it.

Wouldn’t it be better for those being accused of complicity in a Canadian tragedy to listen and consider rather than rushing to engage in precisely the sort of behaviour the report says is so dangerous?

In any case, surely something is wrong when so many expend so much more energy defending colonialism against the “genocide” allegation than grappling in good faith with the cruel consequences the commissioners chronicle or their 231 recommendations for redressing those consequences.

Maybe it’s no wonder. For the past 150 years this country has taught its children — its future police officers, politicians, doctors and editors — to look away from Canada’s true history, to avert their eyes to the “Indian problem” or to treat it as a problem of Indigenous peoples’ own making.

Many Canadians remain blind to the existence of 139 Indian residential schools whose sole purpose was to erase the Indian from the child; blind to the malnutrition, electrocution, physical and sexual abuse that were the hallmarks of these schools; blind to policies of subjugation like the 1876 Indian Act, which remains law to this day or to the trickery of treaties that were signed but never lived up to; blind to the land-grabs and the penning-in of people on reserves, to the casting-aside and steamrolling that built this nation.

There is a violence to this looking-away while the state causes bodily harm to members of a group or deliberately inflicts on that group painful conditions of life, while it takes away children and sterilizes women so they cannot reproduce.

This looking away, this denial, is a tool of genocide. The consequence of our failure to teach Canada’s true history in our schools or to report on colonial violence against and oppression of Indigenous people is that too many Canadians are blinded to reality and the violence and oppression are allowed to continue. That is one of many important findings in the report that has received little coverage.

It’s time Canada opened its eyes and ears and started having the difficult discussions we need. And that can’t happen until journalism takes a long hard look in the mirror.