I am a British/Canadian settler scholar working in the areas of media studies, journalism, and critical discourse analysis. My research focuses on how Canadian news media construct Indigenous rights, treaty obligations, and state legitimacy.
I am not Indigenous. I do not speak for Indigenous peoples, nor do I claim access to Indigenous knowledges, legal orders, or epistemologies. My work is concerned with settler institutions, particularly journalism, and with how those institutions narrate, delimit, and govern public understanding of Indigenous–settler relations.
I have familial ties to Nipissing First Nation through my husband and our son. These relationships locate me relationally within ongoing treaty contexts, but they do not confer interpretive authority or representational standing. I name this connection not as a claim to Indigenous identity, but as part of being transparent about where I am situated as a researcher, a journalist, and a parent.
My academic training is in journalism, political economy, and Canadian studies, and my research approach is grounded in critical discourse analysis. I study how language, framing, sourcing practices, and narrative conventions operate within media systems to produce “common sense” about political and legal issues. In this sense, my work examines the conditions under which Indigenous perspectives are represented, constrained, or excluded in public discourse, rather than interpreting those perspectives on their behalf.
When my research engages Indigenous journalism, it does so with methodological care and ethical restraint. Indigenous media are treated not as sources of cultural knowledge to be translated for settler audiences, but as sites of political, legal, and journalistic authority. My analysis attends to how Indigenous journalists mobilize law, history, and narrative form, while remaining attentive to the limits of my positionality as a non-Indigenous researcher.
Where evaluative judgments are made, they are grounded in Indigenous scholarship in media studies, law, ethics, and research methodology. Indigenous theorists, journalists, and legal scholars provide the primary interpretive frameworks through which Indigenous-authored journalism is contextualized and understood. This approach is intended to ensure that analysis remains accountable to Indigenous intellectual traditions, rather than substituting settler analytic norms as the measure of legitimacy.
I am explicit about this positioning because clarity matters, particularly in a time when public conversations about Indigenous identity, authority, and representation are increasingly complicated by cases of ethnic faired, misrepresentation, and appropriation. Transparency about who is doing the work, from where, and for what purpose is not a gesture of self-exoneration. It is a baseline condition of responsible and ethical scholarship.
Ultimately, my work is motivated by a commitment to accountability in public explanation and to the interrogations of power. I am interested in how journalism shapes political possibility, how it narrows or expands what can be said, known, or contested, and in how more careful, historically grounded, and ethically attentive reporting might better serve democratic publics.
Samantha D. Stevens 