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Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers
Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson
Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011. 336 pp. $27.95 paper.
Seeing Red is a tough read. It's tough because the sheer amount of data gathered from Canadian newspapers ends up, at times, reading like endless lists of information rather than as a coherent narrative, argument, or analysis. And it's tough because the pejorative colonial, racialized, and essentialized images of Aboriginal people in the news are as pervasive and persistent as the authors claim they are. Sadly, this book's relentless demonstration of this will come as no surprise to anyone involved in Aboriginal issues in Canada. The catalogue presented here is so remorseless and so disturbing that I would suggest reading just the introduction and conclusion, which contain the bulk of actual analysis, and, for context, perhaps one chapter of particular interest.
The authors' central...