JEFF HEINRICH
The Gazette
Friday, August 08, 2008
Kahnawake's private TV station has something new and trendy on its schedule: a show called Rez Reality that depicts its young journalists gathering news, talking about their private lives, buttonholing local politicians and getting into native spirituality.
Turning the cameras on themselves, the reporters want to open the eyes of people on and off the reserve to a different kind of Kahnawake, one that is more complex, more fun and less stereotypically "Indian" than most people think.
But already, tragic news has intruded on the otherwise breezy, gossipy story the reporters want to tell.
For its first installment - viewable online on the station's new website starting today - the show got a sobering jolt of life-and-death reality: the bloody end of a local teenager, Tylor Glasgow, hit and killed by another local Mohawk who was fleeing police in his SUV last week.
"We went to the scene within minutes of it happening and weren't expecting to see what we saw," the station's enthusiastic owner, Regan Jacobs, 34, said yesterday as she and her staff of four busily finished editing the station's weekly news broadcast.
"We realized that, wow, this was really happening. It was real and it was about real issues that affect this community and the people we're close to."
In the segment they prepared on the incident, one reporter is shown consoling a relative of the dead boy, while another one keeps the camera rolling.
"It shows people how much work is involved in covering these stories, and how much emotion, too," Jacobs said.
"We don't just magically appear on air every week. It's a lot of work."
On the South Shore reserve, the station's Channel 4 signal reaches 10,000 people. It's not accessible off the reserve.
Online, its reach is far greater, and that's a boon for the budding journalists, who hope to capture a much wider audience with their unique take on Rez Reality.
The Mohawk TV station's website, mohawktv.ca, links viewers to a series of segments of the 30-minute show streamed on YouTube, where it's sliced into 10-minute chunks.
"It may seem, as journalists, a little self-promoting," said Regan, who runs the station on a $250,000 budget, half what her competitor, KTV, the Kahnawake
Mohawk Council's community TV station, uses for its public broadcasting.
"But the show is not about us as much as it is about the issues we face here every day in Kahnawake - the council politics, the social politics, the things that make life here more challenging."
It's not what outsiders think it is, she added.
"There are a lot of viable businesses, there's a school, it's not just cigarette factories and cigarette stores, and all those black-market politics that we face. We lead normal, everyday lives, just like every other Canadian - except that we're not Canadian," she said with a laugh.
"I also want to cast this community in a positive light, because of all the stereotypes that exist about natives in general," added Jacobs, who founded the station in 2002 after graduating in journalism from Concordia University.
"Some people think we live in teepees and drive horse-drawn wagons. Others think we're just a bunch of gun-toting, cigarette-holding thugs. Actually, we're very developed."
Seeing the Mohawk reality will take outsider's fear of the community away, she said. "They'll see that it's safe to come here, that we have places where they can shop well, where they can eat well."
But seeing their lives played out on camera - including discussing break-ups and wedding plans - hasn't suited everyone. After sneak previews of the show were aired on the station during the past month to promote the show, some viewers complained.
"They were shocked that we were talking publicly about our personal lives," Jacobs said.
"That's such a big no-no in this community."
Mohawk TV's Rez Reality show launches in full in September, with nine 30-minute shows. They'll be aired and available online. For more information, visit the Kahnawake station's website at mohawktv.ca