Dan David, a renowned Mohawk journalist and the founding member of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, died on Jan. 12.Loreen Pindera/The Canadian Press
Stubborn and blunt, with a love of language and loud Hawaiian-print shirts, Dan David, a Kanien’kehá:ka, or Mohawk, journalist who was the founding editor-in-chief of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network, spent much of his life trying to change the narrative surrounding Indigenous People in Canada.
No matter if he was reporting, editing or mentoring, Mr. David lived up to his Mohawk name, Thaioronióhte, which means “the sky is immersed in water.” Over a career that lasted more than 40 years, he reached across barriers, teaching and chastising as he tried to ensure that stories about people of colour or with disabilities broke down what he called “walls of apathy.”
In remarks recorded in 2021, when the Canadian Journalism Foundation gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award, he noted that the media narrative tended to reflect the attitude and opinion of society in general – often based in bias, ignorance, prejudice and stereotypes – of Indigenous peoples being either perpetual victims or perennial problems that would not go away.
“Our job was to try to change those predominant narratives as journalists of colour,” he said. “We tried to get people out of their comfort zone to explore and answer the questions: ‘Who are we? What are we? What are doing?’”
Teen shown on $2 bill grew up to become world’s first Inuk bishop
Mr. David, who died Jan. 12 at the age of 73 after a years-long battle with cancer, had a varied and distinguished curriculum vitae that included stints at TVO, Vision TV and CBC. It was CBC that gave him his breakthrough, hiring him in 1983 for its Regina bureau even though the newsroom director later admitted he first doubted if the rookie reporter could do the job because he was Indigenous.
By 1986, Mr. David was CBC’s first national Indigenous affairs reporter, telling stories and explaining issues that many Canadians had not thought of before. As a child of the Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk community in Quebec, his experience of the Oka crisis – a 78-day standoff between the community and the Quebec Provincial Police, the RCMP and the Canadian Army that was sparked by the town of Oka’s attempt to expand a golf course on land that contained a Mohawk cemetery – was markedly different than that of other journalists. To them, it was a tale of good guys versus bad. (One British tabloid headlined an article about the standoff: “Shoot-out at the Oka Corral.”) For him, it was about so much more.
Opinion: Did Canada learn anything from the Oka Crisis?
In a foreword to a 1991 book about the crisis by journalists Loreen Pindera and Geoffrey York, he said that most of the people behind the barricades were his friends and relatives (including two brothers who had taken up arms). “They didn’t want things to go back to the way they were,” he wrote. “They knew that would mean a certain and steady ride down a one-way street to an oblivion called assimilation.”
For Ms. Pindera, a former CBC radio reporter and editor who was thrust into covering the standoff with little experience, Mr. David was a patient, impartial teacher. “I’ve never forgotten him teaching me to pronounce Kanehsatà:ke properly,” she said. “He wrote it out – ‘Gone-as-a-dog-eh.’”
He spent long periods abroad training journalists, in places such as Azerbaijan, Indonesia and South Africa, where in 1993 he began to train employees at the South African Broadcasting Corporation, or SABC, as they prepared to cover a postapartheid country without cruel government interference.
In a tribute written upon learning of Mr. David’s death, former SABC journalist Sylvia Vollenhoven described a soft-spoken teacher who imbued the newsroom with moral principles that rekindled their humanity. “Danny with his Mohawk warrior spirit nudges us all toward the impossible. He is giving us back our power in a way that helps me understand the deep unspoken bonds between his people and mine. Some cry, overwhelmed by the freedom they are being asked to embrace.”
Upon his return to Canada from South Africa, he helped launch APTN, where he was finally able to change the media narrative of Indigenous communities on his own terms and inspire others to do the same.
APTN’s new channel wants to boost access to 18 Indigenous languages
“We shook the pillars of heaven because Dan said we could,” former APTN news correspondent Kenneth T. Williams said in a video that marked the CJF award.
Karyn Pugliese, an APTN host and producer, told CBC that he was an icon. “Dan David was Indigenous journalism in this country,” she said.
Despite what others had to say about him, Mr. David refused to be put on a pedestal. He described himself in his later years as an “old fart” rather than “elder.” And as he was dying, he welcomed visitors only if they agreed to leave their solicitous “pity pack” at home because he did not want to be treated like an invalid. He was who he was right until the end – Dan, Danny, Thaioronióhte – a man whose body may have been weak, but who still loved sunrises, music, podcasts, political discussions and gummies to ease the pain.
Dan David was born on June 2, 1952, in Syracuse, N.Y., the third of Walter David and Thelma Nicholas’s eight children. His father, a former U.S. Marine who was injured during the Battle of Iwo Jima in the winter of 1945 and then worked for the U.S. Postal Service, had grown up in the Akwesasne Mohawk territory that straddles both the borders between Canada and the U.S., and Ontario and Quebec. His mother was from Kanehsatà:ke, and a homemaker who wanted her daughters and sons to be adept at cooking and sewing.
“Mom always said that there wouldn’t always be a woman in the boys’ lives and they had better learn to do for themselves,” his sister, Linda David Cree, recalled. “Dan even made his own satchels to carry his books. And he became such a fantastic chef.”
When Dan was a toddler, the parents moved the family to Kanehsatà:ke in order to help care for Ms. Nicholas’s aging parents and instill in their children an appreciation and respect for tradition. It was a hard transition, from an insulated house with electricity and indoor plumbing to a series of homes that were often not insulated, with outhouses.
But the kids did adapt to their new way of life, and they took to heart the lessons taught to them by their maternal grandfather, Daniel Peter Nicholas.
“He told us that when we are born, we are given a name that is honourable and clean, and we have to keep it that way,” Ms. Cree said of their grandfather. “Dan knew what he wanted and he went out to get it in the right way. He was always like that.”
Once, she continued, in the midst of a frigid Quebec winter, he and his siblings were to transfer from one school bus in Oka to another that would take them all home to Kanehsatà:ke. During their wait, a friend gave young Dan 10 cents to get him a Coke at the corner store; when he came out with the can of soda, the bus home had already left without him.
“Dan being Dan, he simply walked more than two miles in the freezing cold, through wind and snow, to deliver a nearly frozen Coke to this boy because he had been paid 10 cents to do so. For him, to do anything else would have been wrong.”
At school, whenever the siblings were confronted with prejudice and ignorance, their parents taught them to counter, not with fists, but with explanation and reason.
“Dan did that so well,” his sister said. “There are people who go off and pretend they love and care, but he gave every part of himself from the beginning.”
A civics class in high school sparked Mr. David’s interest in journalism, setting him on a trajectory that also included serving as the chair of diversity at Toronto Metropolitan University’s journalism department and working as a researcher and writer for both a provincial justice inquiry and royal commission that examined the country’s broken relationship with Indigenous peoples.
He was appointed to boards of various Indigenous arts, journalism and literary organizations, won two National Magazine Awards and was most recently the first writer-in-residence the non-profit webzine Montréal Serai, where he wrote essays of belonging, identity and truth-telling.
He could be poetic. The first of his essays in the webzine began like this: “I am a river running through ancient lands, like veins carrying ancestral memories, a thousand stories whisper on winds, and land like drumbeats on our hearts.”
Or, as he put it in a 2021 interview when asked what advice he would have for his high-school self: “Just go with the flow, baby. Just go with the flow.”
In addition to Ms. Cree, Mr. David leaves his siblings Lise, Denise, Marie, Valerie, Walter and Nick David.
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com.