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How we understand and respond to crises is shaped by the stories we tell. And we tend to listen to a few people: reporters and editors, researchers and academics, aid workers and humanitarian agencies.
In Decolonise How? – a new podcast from The New Humanitarian – host Patrick Gathara examines how well communicators fulfil their role, and the ethical questions they navigate. Who controls the narrative? Whose knowledge counts? How are communities in crisis represented? What gets framed as truth? And, he asks, how can we all do better?
“If people keep collectively telling traumatic stories about us, without also sharing about our beauty as human beings and the beauty that we bring to the world,” says Kelsie Kilawna Marchand, a Syilx journalist from British Columbia, Canada, “they're wishing more harm upon us.”
Sophie Otiende, a Kenyan teacher, activist, and advocate for survivors of human trafficking, says this is essential to keep in mind when reporting and researching humanitarian crises. “The stories that are being [told] control who has empathy [for] whom,” she points out. “It's in stories that you are first dehumanised.”
In this first episode of the series, Gathara, Otiende, and Kilawna Marchand dig into what it really means for communities to own their stories; the harmful effects of colonialism and capitalism on oral cultures; and what ethical lessons can be learned from community storytelling. It is time to shift from past beliefs that “a journalist needs to become that bridge between me and another community, so that that community can understand me,” Otiende says. “In reality, we can just tell our stories, and we can understand each other."
Decolonise How? is a new podcast that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises, hosted by The New Humanitarian’s Patrick Gathara.
Guests: Sophie Otiende, Kenyan teacher, activist and advocate for survivors of human trafficking, and Kelsie Kilawna Marchand, a Syilx journalist from Canada.
Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, Stitcher, or YouTube, or search The New Humanitarian in your favourite podcast app.
Have a question or feedback? Maybe you have ideas for Decolonise How? topics? Email [email protected] or have your say on social media using the hashtag #DecoloniseHow.
Transcript | Who owns the story?
Patrick Gathara
Welcome to Decolonise How?, a podcast that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.
Sophie Otiende
The first place that people are dehumanised is in stories.
Gathara
How we understand crises – and how we respond to them – are shaped by the stories we tell. And we tend to listen to a few people: reporters and editors; researchers and academics; aid workers and humanitarian agencies. In this new podcast, we’re examining how well communicators fulfil their role, and the ethical questions they navigate. Who controls the narrative? Whose knowledge counts? How are communities in crisis represented? What gets framed as truth? And, how can we all do better?
My name is Patrick Gathara and I’m an editor at The New Humanitarian. Over the years, I have seen how the way we tell stories about humanitarian crises can distort the realities of the people and communities living through them. From news coverage and academic research, to appeals for donations from aid agencies, there is a tendency to simplify, decontextualise, and even dehumanise – to portray locals as suffering and helpless, and the outsiders riding to their rescue as heroic and selfless. In Decolonise How? I hope to bring journalists, humanitarians, researchers, and affected communities into the same conversation, to understand why this happens, and how to change it.
Kelsie Kilawna Marchand
If people keep collectively telling traumatic stories about us, without also sharing about our beauty as human beings and the beauty that we bring to the world, they're wishing more harm upon us.
Gathara
In this episode, we’re asking: Who owns the story?
Kilawna Marchand
It's really important that we do own the narrative, because it belongs to us. Our bodies are not for clickbait.
Gathara
In crisis reporting, the people most affected often have the least control over how their experiences are portrayed. I really want to dig into what that means, and what responsibility we all have. Joining me today is Sophie Otiende.
Otiende
I define myself as an African feminist, a teacher, a storyteller. My work has mainly involved working with survivors of trafficking and victims of trauma in general, and talking about teaching and advocating for ethical storytelling, and just ethical standards of care.
Gathara
Sophie is the founder of Azadi Community, and of the Collective Threads Initiative, a survivor-led organisation in Kenya, and Kelsie Kilawna Marchand is a Syilx journalist from British Columbia, Canada, and a founding ‘aunty’ of IndigiNews.
Kilawna Marchand
I was born and raised as a storyteller, and do a lot of ethical and culturally aware and sensitive storytelling and journalism training.
Gathara
I started by asking Kelsie whether communities own the stories that are told about them? And what does that ownership mean?
Kilawna Marchand
Absolutely, yeah, especially because of the weight of history and the damage journalism has done to our people - Indigenous people in Canada - and you know what that history looks like. It's been used to weaponise Canadians against our people as a way to extract from us in a way that feels that there's less white guilt on it, and to normalise colonisation. For me, I'm a Syilx woman, and I come from my land, and I know my land, and the land knows me. And I was born here as a human being, because I was born here to protect this place, which means protecting the stories that are told about it. And so, we all collectively - in our nation, we're egalitarian, which means no one holds more power over anything than anyone else. So, we all have a responsibility to make sure that our collective story is told in a good way, and we do that through our walks in life, through the work that each and every one of us as Syilx people do.
Gathara
What does it actually mean to own your story or own your narrative? A lot of how journalists approach their work, for example is: something happened to you, I'm entitled to interview you, and write a story and publish it in my newspaper. How does that differ from what you're saying about sort of this narrative sovereignty, this sovereignty over the story? What does it actually mean to own it?
Kilawna Marchand
Yeah, so it means rethinking everything from how we approach sourcing and understanding that it's not transactional, but it's relational, that there's kinship responsibilities that tie into that. And how we can share editorial control, how we compensate participants beyond, just like a small little quote that doesn't add the breadth and the context that are very important. In my community alone, we've actually banned a lot of journalists because they don't understand relationality, and it causes more harm than it does good, and we've had people lose their lives over journalism, and so we're very protective over how stories are told about us, even at a deep spiritual level, how someone speaks of you is their prayer for you. For us, we're really just vocal and strong about it, and we're okay to just turn down interviews and to just be like: you can get your information from a public source, like you don't need to come and speak to us if you're not gonna respect our protocols and our way of life.
Gathara
Sophie, what does it look like from your vantage point, this idea of communities owning their own stories. The people you work with, what would it mean for them, victims of trafficking, to own the stories that are told about them?
Otiende
I think the person who controls the story actually controls the knowledge about a thing, becomes the person who's considered an expert on it, and essentially for storytelling in general. We cannot talk about storytelling, of course, and not talk about colonisation, because at the end of the day, the way storytelling was used in our communities before colonisation, is very different. If you think about most Indigenous communities, like what Kelsie is talking about, or even our communities, storytelling was something that, you know, was used as an archive. It was used as a form of memory. It was used to educate. It was used to do all these things. And part of the role of colonisation is wiping out all of that. And how do they wipe that? They wipe all that by the stories that are told. So, most of our history, most of our knowledge, was stories, and we've been told so many times, essentially, that being generally an oral culture, that we weren't superior, that the ways we were collecting those stories wasn't superior. Yet, in reality, especially in situations of crisis, the stories that are being said control who has empathy on who, who is superior, what knowledge eventually does, so that people can be able to act. In terms of trauma, it's also just how people are viewed, right? Like I see, when I introduce myself by just Sophie, who's a feminist, who's a teacher, and then I don't add the fact that I'm a survivor of trafficking, I see how people treat me, versus when I then introduce the trauma into the story. All of a sudden, because people have a specific identity for survivors of trauma and how they show up, it means that they expect certain things. So, stories are not just stories. They're sources of information. They control bodies of work, bodies of knowledge and expertise. If you think about the role of colonialism, it's that it's told us a lot about who we are, so owning my story, I have to own the framing of the story.
Gathara
And also whether it should be told.
Otiende
Whether it should be told or not, how it should be told, when it should be told. And the reality is, most of us, especially as a result of colonialism, have a need for legibility, right. We want to be understood, and therefore we even recognise what stories about ourselves we need to say so that we are legible to people. So for me, my story is my story. It doesn't need to be legible to you. But if you look at how we look at storytelling and journalism, legibility is extremely important. We expect everyone to be legible, right? That's why - I will say - people like me, who are probably eloquent, who are most likely to get a microphone in your face, rather than somebody else. It's also that role of legibility. So for me, ownership is not just about the telling of the story. It's also about us as community understanding that we don't need to be legible, and what knowledge are we using actually, to ask ourselves what stories we are supposed to tell.
Gathara
In the context of journalistic work, should communities and individuals, I suppose, get to pick and choose the stories that are told about them, and does that in some way injure our ability to conceive of the world as it actually is, rather than as people want to present certain faces, you know, there are stories they want to hide. So, at what point do we say that journalists can go and ferret out stories that people don't want told?
Otiende
One of the key things about storytelling, about even journalism as a role, is a role that is very extractive, in a way - and all respects to all the journalists on the call right now - for me, the extraction is always going to happen if a journalist, even the most ethical journalist, because we have a framework that is already extractive, and I think we've been convinced, right, again, of the fact that we need to be legible to each other in a particular way, therefore a journalist needs to become that bridge between me and another community, so that that community can understand me, when in reality, we can just tell our stories and we can understand each other. But, I don't want to get journalists out of work.
Gathara
Kelsie, do you see yourself as a journalist? And do you agree with Sophie that journalism is essentially this extractive colonial enterprise, and is that what you're engaged in?
Kilawna Marchand
A hundred percent, I agree that journalism is absolutely extractive, with the human costs of that extraction. So, when stories, when they are taken without consent or reciprocity, the harm in those stories is not an individual harm that's experienced, it's a collective harm, and reinforces cycles of exploitation where trauma is - our trauma is commodified then, and communities are left to manage the repercussions long after any journalist leaves, which is why IndigiNews was actually created. It was first founded on the idea of having communities telling their own stories. Because we have such deep protocols around how we engage with trauma, for us, we don't talk about trauma as being a traumatic experience, or trauma as experienced in the way that clinical people see it. We see it as being in kinship with a harm, or being in kinship with something like, let's say, you're going through deep grief because there was a collective loss, such as the uncovering of the 215 relatives at the residential schools. We think about something like that in the reporting of how that happened, and having journalists fly in from New York and having their cameras in our faces while we're grieving, while our people are attempting suicide, while our people are falling off the path of sobriety to try and function, and manage the fact that our story that we've been telling this whole time is finally believed. And so IndigiNews, we were like, we can't do anything to help right now. What we did is, we started following our ceremonial protocols of how we deal with this stuff. So, we shut IndigiNews down for the whole month, and we did a blackout. We were like, we're not telling stories. This is not a time to extract. We are not telling stories on this situation at all, because this is our ceremony time, and that goes totally against the grain of journalism. I do want to say, I don't have any formal education in journalism, and I'm grateful for that, and IndigiNews purposely hired people without journalism backgrounds. We wanted community storytellers, but you know, in order to be in the industry and be respected, and to carry your responsibility, and what we call coyote moves, which means making slick-sly moves to try and change how people, how people work in the industry…
Gathara
I love that.
Kilawna Marchand
Yeah. In order to make our coyote moves, we have to call ourselves that. So, we don't necessarily see ourselves as journalists, but we have the love for our people, and that's where I think it changes, right? And whereas, what you're taught in formal training is that the farther you are from a story, the more validity you have to tell the story, which is - we have said is - completely wrong. And so, what we do is, in the bottom of our stories, we'll have what we call a kinship protocol, and then we say: we are honoured to be tied to this story through this way, like, that's my mother, that's my sister, that's my cousin. And we say it with pride, because we're not ashamed that we're the ones who are telling it, and that's how journalism tries to make us feel, right, that we can't tell a story about our own people, but we are the ones who are most qualified to tell that story, because we have accountability. I don't get to go home and hang my hat at the end of the day, and cut off the rest of the world. No, I'm gonna have my aunties at my door holding me accountable for how I spoke about my people, and so, and you know, whether I bring harm to our people through the types of stories I tell. I have, you know, hundreds of stories I've never told. And the beautiful thing about being a community storyteller is being able to tell people like: I understand you want to tell your story, and here's what happens when I press ‘publish’. They have the right to know. Once you press publish, you are up for public scrutiny in any way possible. The story lives forever, and so we have to be very careful of how we tell our story, and that we continue to share the true narrative of who we are as Syilx people. We must hold up our beauty, with much more importance than we hold up our trauma. Our trauma is how we're dealing with something we collectively experienced versus we have all these teachings we still live by. We have ceremonies, we still do today. We're still very alive in who we are, and that's what we want to share. That's the beauty that we want our kids to look back and see about our people.
Gathara
Obviously communities still live in places where journalists come. You've mentioned yourself that, you know, you had to ban some journalists not to be there. And I was interested in this media kit that you developed in 2023, I believe, after you had like a wildfire in your locality, and it was meant to give communities agency and power over how their stories are told. Could you talk a bit about what that kit was, how you developed it, and whether it includes lessons for communities in other spaces that they could take about how they deal with journalists coming to extract their stories?
Kilawna Marchand
Yes, thank you. That was born from such a necessity at the time, just like the crisis reporting and the tourism of our own trauma through our communities. People were still, you know, moving through the rubble at the time. We lost ten homes. And for us in our community, that's huge. We have a housing crisis as it is. Having ten homes lost, ten families having years and generations of things in their homes that are gone that, you know, are older than this country. So, the loss was so collectively felt, so deeply, and I was watching journalists try and convince our people to tell their story, and so, I wanted people to be empowered to know that you're allowed to say no when a journalist reaches out to you. You're allowed to ask for your record, because that's your property. You have told the story. You have the right to silence. You have the right to reframe your story, like these are things that are actually possible, and are just at the control of the editorial process, which is very colonial, and so at IndigiNews, we don't reach out and ask anybody for a story that is embedded with their own experience of trauma. We work our butts off to make ourselves a safe place where people feel empowered to come to us and tell the story and create that space. And we've had that happen so many times where people are like: you are the journalist that we want to work with to share this story, because we've seen how you care for our people in the story, and that you still show up to community outside without a camera recorder in your hand. So, I wanted people to understand that cultural protocols are allowed to be followed, that we do not drop our indigeneity at the door just because someone wants to tell our story. No, you can tell my story, but you have to do the work. You have to earn your way into this. You have to show up as a human being first. I think people see journalists - well, and, you know, understandably so - see journalists as an authority figure in a sense. And then when you're kind of in the world of journalism, you're like: whatever. You really don't hold any power. You're just like somebody with…who can tell a story, like…
Gathara
Although the ability to tell a story is an exercise in power, isn’t it?
Kilawna Marchand
It has that collective power, absolutely, so there is that human cost to the extraction. I'll just give an example. One of our protocols is, when we're in grief, we're not allowed to have photos taken of us. Our grief is a journey, and we have to move forward and advance our own journey. And when people take photos of us, they actually leave us in that place of our journey. And so, that's why I wanted to write in there, like, you don't have to have photos taken of you. Ask them to put the money out to have, like, an art piece created about your story…
Gathara
Right.
Kilawna Marchand
…so that people have control over that narrative.
Gathara
Sophie, does this resonate with what you do and your work with the communities you work with, this idea that we could actually format and come up with media kits, such as the one Kelsie developed to help people in their interactions with the media?
Otiende
Yes, absolutely. I'm a strong advocate of ethical storytelling, and some of the work that I've done with Azadi has really included guidelines. A while back, I did a toolkit for ethical storytelling, and it really looked at those things. What do you do before, what do you do during, and what do you do after you tell the story? Actually, there's an ethical storytelling project at Azadi that is specifically controlled by survivors. And what happens is that we work with someone, and that person actually trains survivors of trafficking on storytelling, and cameras are provided and everything, so that everything is actually led, because it was this question of: if communities were empowered, would they tell the same stories that journalists want to say? We don't know. And in most cases, when survivors were empowered, they did not tell stories of their trauma, right? What they spoke about was a happy day when they took their child to school. What they spoke about were their dreams. What they spoke about was beauty, and you know, what they wanted the world to be, as opposed to like, this is what happened to me, right? And essentially, you see that most of the time, journalists actually come and ask for a story from survivors of trauma, and they think these people's lives start when the abuse happened, right? And they focus on that, and then the next thing they focus on is how this person got out, right? And then the third thing is, how can we learn from this story…
Gathara
Right.
Otiende
…completely, without thinking about everything, so…
Gathara
It sounds horrible when you put it that way.
Otiende
No, but it's like, if you, if you go through the stories, like this is the trope, right? It doesn't give any context, it doesn't give any nuance, it doesn't give the things that Kelsie is saying. And for me, that has been the most important thing, the question of: if we actually empowered communities to tell stories, would they tell the same? And it's not just - for me - storytelling is not just media, it's also research. So, one of the things that we've also actively done is train survivors to be able to collect data, to be able to, you know, write reports. For me, storytelling is being in control of knowledge, right, and knowledge as power, right. Most of the time, we're not told how important your information is, and how that information is going to be used, and how that information is a resource actually. Part of the ethical storytelling project is also just really making people aware of what it does. And of course, when people come to survivors, most of the time, the discussion is: oh, you have a responsibility to educate. So, telling your story of trauma has a responsibility, yes, to educate others and so that others can be able to know. So, the blame of, like saving the world is essentially now placed on…
Gathara
It's placed on one person.
Otiende
…placed on you, whether you tell your story or not. And those are some of the things that we stop journalists from doing. And we get a lot of requests from journalists who are just like: get me a survivor. Oh, we have this story of trafficking that is now making rounds in the news, and we were wondering if you have three or four survivors who can narrate their stories. And my response is always, no, I don't. Because…like, yeah, it's very simple, no, I don't. We don't sit somewhere with survivors waiting for journalists to come so that they can tell their stories. That's not what they do, right? And also just the retelling of story, people, the thing that survivors, especially of trauma, are told is that: oh, retelling your trauma helps you heal. For some people, it does. It does, like it might be a way for them to actually recover from that trauma, but part of what we talk about, especially at Azadi, is also your responsibility to your audience, because people don't think about what trauma does to us when we are consistently hearing it, leave alone the person who's gone through it. When you're consistently hearing the same thing, you numb yourself. You're also traumatising your own audience. So, the reason why right now, we are numb and we feel powerless about so many things, is about the impact of trauma that we've gotten from listening to every single worst thing that is happening in the world, and now we feel completely powerless when essentially we actually have the power to act and do certain things. I really think the idea of guidelines is extremely important. The idea of saying, these are the boundaries. And also, if you want to do it right, this is how you get a more wholesome story.
Gathara
No, I like that you included in storytelling, not just journalists, but humanitarians, NGOs, researchers, you know, so pretty much everybody who talks about this, and that it is extractive of knowledge. I'm interested in this idea of trauma porn, and the ubiquity of trauma, of showing it all the time, of reducing people to pretty much the worst thing that ever happened to them, is that what you mean by trauma porn, this idea that all the coverage is based on this bad thing that happened to you?
Otiende
Yes, and I want to clarify that trauma porn is very, very specific to certain communities. We love consuming trauma about Indigenous people, Black people, like anything that is not white, people enjoy watching trauma happening, to consume trauma stories about people who are not white, because that's the demand that is out there is that our story is a story of trauma, our story is a story of pain, our story is a story of, we are always victims, right. We are consistently victims, and only a particular culture comes to save us.
Gathara
Right. If you look at national coverage of places like Gaza and you compare it for example, with Ukraine, there is this expectation of the performance of trauma of, they've got to show us their bodies, you know, their death. It has to be a public death in a way that, for example, nobody is looking for pictures of dead babies in Ukraine. For us to be expected to sympathise or empathise with families that lost people in Israel, for example, we don't require to be shown the bodies, but there seems to be a different standard when it comes to places like Gaza. Kelsie, if I may ask, how does this link up with what you talk about trauma-informed reporting?
Kilawna Marchand
Yeah, trauma porn itself is very rampant in how our narratives are structured. And really it comes from this sense of centring, of voyeurism, a sense of voyeurism over agency, giving voice without giving control, and sensationalising our pain where it's packaged as content without human dignity, and our human dignity is then reduced.
Gathara
I think part of it is seeing people as complete human beings with communities. So, you're not just a refugee, you're not being reduced to just this one thing that happened to you, and that then comes to define your existence, that you've got moments of joy, even in the worst of circumstances, people find joy, you know, you still hear of people getting married in places like Gaza, taking care of their kids, taking care of pets, you know. So, my thinking is, and I'm interested to hear what you make of this is that journalists have to learn and humanitarians as well - I mean, everybody who...storytellers about in these situations - have to learn that they are dealing with whole human beings, and to honour that, and to honour the community that exists there, and to see themselves in relation with that community before you actually start speaking, before you actually think you can tell a story. I don't know whether that…how that sits with what you're saying.
Kilawna Marchand
Yeah, I like it because again, like another coyote move at IndigiNews where we had this plan where we were like: okay, we're gonna hire white journalists or non-Indigenous journalists, and we are going to train them in our way and responsibility of storytelling. And then our plan was: and then we're going to send them out into the world, let them go into their newsrooms and start to infiltrate and be the ones to, you know, to be the ones that are doing that, because that - as we know, white people listen to white people. And so, you know, our little coyote psychological game there, that's what we did. And it was beautiful. That's how we start to move things is teaching people how to engage with us, that we're not to be feared. Our stories are worth telling, and that they're beautiful, and there's so much depth. So yeah, that's one of the things that we've done to try to shift the industry in that way.
Gathara
Sophie, Kelsie mentioned consent and communities being able to give consent for their stories. I know you've talked a lot about what true consent looks like. So, within the context of these spaces where trauma has happened, and to some extent people might be disempowered or might feel pressure. What does true, real ability to agree to have your story told look like, and is it something that you see generally practiced?
Otiende
I don't think it's something that it's generally practiced because true consent requires editorial power, right? A journalist is not going to come and actually say that they don't have power in certain situations. Yet, true consent actually requires you to actually say exactly how much power you have in the outcome of the story. And if this is a story within a story, I need you to tell me what the bigger story is, and where my story fits, right? Because, the main story could be about anti-migration policies, right? And I don't know that. I'm against anti-migration policies, yet somehow my story is used as a case study within the context of an anti-migration story, right. So, I think it's small things like that, that for me, also I question around like consent. If you're talking about like development partners, and you're talking about NGOs, and you're talking about researchers, it's an NGO saying: you know, your story will be used for fundraising ten years after we've collected it. It will still probably be running in our articles, and we'll use it for fundraising. When we do that cocktail event and we talk about your story, we'll actually use your pictures. So, I think it's become so important to empower, especially survivors, with the knowledge of everything. It's like, this story is going to be used in this way. And I wanted to go back to something that Kelsie said and it's something that we don't recognise, it's in stories that you are first dehumanised, that someone disconnects you, someone others you, and then all of a sudden, now everybody else can be able to say: all survivors of trafficking are like that, all Black people are like that, all Indigenous people are like that. Because there's a pattern of ten stories that they collected that actually prove that all five people are there, and most of us haven't consented to that.
Gathara
Right.
Otiende
We haven't consented to being part of that pattern. So, we give guidelines on what actually an ethical consent looks like. And we say: you have to sign an ethical consent form. It says that you have to give information about the story. You have to tell us who's paying for the story, because that's also important. Sometimes, then it determines how it's going to show up. You have to say how long the story will be active and how long if, for example, it's an NGO, how long will the story be used, will be in circulation. If it will be in circulation in perpetuity, then you should be able to say that, and then someone can be able to understand, and then you have to say, how you - who is collecting this story - is going to benefit from it.
Gathara
Right.
Otiende
How are you going to benefit from it? If the Pulitzer Prize comes, it's you who's getting it. I'm not getting it.
Kilawna Marchand
It’s such a great conversation. I don't go to journalism awards for this very reason. They are the most unsafe place I've ever been in my entire life. I've been to one, and I swore I would never go back again. I was absolutely disgusted to see the reality of how our trauma is celebrated over drinks like it was mind-blowing. I cannot sit beside anybody who is like, absolutely sloshed out of their mind, high-fiving that they won an award about my people's story and pain. I walked out. I was so upset, because that's my family that you're talking about, and that you won awards about, and so, I refuse to be a part of that.
Gathara
Beyond awards and stuff, what do these journalists owe the communities they report on? What's their debt, if you will?
Kilawna Marchand
You know, if journalism is truly a public service, then the first duty is to the people whose stories that they are responsible to carry, and not the platforms that amplify them. This is why we must go to independent journalism and community-led storytelling, where it's the community telling their own stories. I just don't think that there is any role for people who are looking to be extractive, without reciprocity, without community accountability, without understanding what community accountability is, that it means showing up later on. In journalism training and formal training, they tell you, even after a story is over, you're not allowed to have a relationship with that community, people, whatever the collective is, that you must maintain distance. For us, that's just so fake, right? That's showing up to be that extractive person that we know you to be. And so, no, the relationship must continue, and it doesn't just stop there.
Gathara
Sophie, you've spoken in other interviews I've seen about the violence, I guess you'd say, of people not being paid for giving their expertise, giving their experiences, talking about, especially in these situations where they will sit in conferences with NGO people who are, everybody there is being paid, except you whose story is actually being told. Do you see the same when it comes to journalism itself, that somebody comes, takes a story, go, gets paid for it. But doesn't actually…
Otiende
Yes!
Gathara
I mean, we say it's unethical to pay your sources…
Otiende
Yes!
Gathara
But if they are the ones giving you the story, shouldn't they also be paid?
Otiende
No, I think it's good that you've said that there's this idea of: it's unethical to pay communities. That's why I agree with Kelsie, community-led storytelling is the answer, because then all these things that we are trying to fight then end up not being an issue, right. Because if one of us wins, all of us have won. If this person benefits, then that benefit goes to the whole community. If you are going to come and just extract, I think you owe us, you owe us payment, because you are, essentially, you are picking something and you're going to get something out of it. Initially, when I started speaking about storytelling and survival, I went to conferences, and one day I realised, all the people that I was sitting with were being paid, like were being paid. We have no problem paying experts for speaking. We should be honest about who we have a problem paying. Right now, the Obamas, the Clintons, all these people, are going around and every time they stand on stage, they're not doing it for free…
Gathara
No, they’re not.
Otiende
They're not doing it for free. Why are we making it seem that when communities actually then ask for the same honour you give everybody else, there's something unethical about that? If we're being honest, we don't like paying poor people for their stories. We don't like paying communities for their stories. There are certain people we like paying for their stories because we don't consider that an expertise. How many people do you know, you are someone who knows enough storytellers, they are paid.
Gathara
Yeah, exactly.
Otiende
Yet, all of a sudden, when someone from the community says: okay, this is my speaking rate, it's become something very controversial, or we do not have a budget, or it's unethical, or it's all these things. Have a budget. If you're going to tell a story that is not from your community, please have a budget, especially if it's a traumatic story. You need to have a budget to cover the impact of that story being out, in case there's actually a negative impact. That's the cost that Kelsie has been talking about, like, what is truly the cost of extracting a story from a community? And that's what we are saying, if you're going to treat storytelling as an enterprise, as a business, then I think it is fair for us to go through it and say: these are the costs, this is the impact, and this is the budget.
Gathara
Okay. I have one final question for both of you, trying to think looking forward. Is it possible to move away from this extractive format towards co-creating stories with communities, honouring their ownership of these stories and working in ways that are ethical and un-extractive. What would be your top advice on how people who want to behave ethically can go about it? Kelsie?
Kilawna Marchand
I don't know. I think, yes, it's possible, but are people willing to do the work, and is the system willing to make the shift? You know, the journalist has to do a lot of footwork. You have to relationship-build. You have to have constant consent. Consent doesn't start with just: can I tell your story? It starts throughout the whole process, up to publish, and even afterwards. Are you willing to stay connected to the people and the story and the impacts? Are you willing to follow cultural protocols? Are you willing to go to bat for us in the editorial process? And then, are those systems willing to shift? Are they willing to give up power and control? Are you willing to give up, you know, your platform and space for us to tell our own story? And not a lot will. And so, I don't see journalism ever actually shifting in that sense. I don't see it making the full shift it needs to, you know, you are in this alone as a journalist when you are going up against your editors, and journalism being such an oversaturated industry with journalists, they'll just fire you, and so, you don't have much power in the situation to make those huge shifts. But then we say, don't stay in the places that you're not honoured, that you as a human being who is willing to do the good work isn't honoured. So there's two parts of it: it's on the journalist, and it's also on the system and on the deeper the conversation. I think the shift that we can see is more community-led storytelling.
Gathara
All right. Sophie, is there a way of moving forward in a better, more ethical way?
Otiende
I'm with Kelsie. I don't know, but the reality is that if you think about the role that storytelling has played in communities consistently, it's something that has always been there, right? I think it's the introduction of storytelling as an enterprise as a result of capitalism that's the problem, right? So, are we willing to let go of storytelling as an enterprise, for me, should be the question. Because I don't think storytelling as an enterprise can be reformed. I think it's possible for us to go back to storytelling as a way of archiving, as a way, I think that's redeemable, that's possible. That's what is already being done by Indigenous community in community-led storytelling. But the problem is, we don't like that. We like big news. We like flashy billboards, right? And that’s storytelling as an enterprise. I can firmly say I don't think storytelling as an enterprise can be reformed.
Gathara
…Can be saved. Sophie Otiende, Kelsie Kilawna, really, really appreciate you guys talking to us here at Decolonise How? Thanks a lot.
Kilawna Marchand
Thank you for having.
Otiende
Thank you.
Gathara
Thank you for listening to Decolonise How? a podcast from The New Humanitarian that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.
This episode was produced and edited by Freddie Boswell and Levi Sharpe.
Coming up on Decolonise How?
Martin Scott
We'd speak to journalists and they would say to us, well, some things are just not newsworthy. Why don't you cover the Central African Republic, for example? Well, I'm afraid it's just not news. That's the answer they would give to us. And as far as I'm concerned, that's just not good enough.
Gathara
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I’m Patrick Gathara. Thanks for listening.