Laurence Butet-Roch

Abstract

Grounded in work with Aamjiwnaang First Nation—an Anishinabek community in Southern Ontario which sporadically appears in Canadian media due to its dangerous proximity to “Chemical Valley,” the country’s densest concentration of petrochemical manufacturing—this article proposes care for representational justice as central to engaged journalism. Such an orienting principle, which acknowledges the binds between representation as a civic and political right and representation as depiction, as how one is shown and made recognizable to the world, calls for a profound shift in journalistic practices, whereby reporters commit to identifying and heeding the representational desires of frontline communities. The research and results rely on methods of participatory visual discourse analysis. In Aamjiwnaang, participants articulated a vision of representational justice that calls for an equilibrium between portraying the real, multifaceted, and cumulative consequences of industrial pollution, on the one hand, and emphasizing the beauty of the local ecosystem and the strength of the community, on the other. Together, these frames contribute to shifting perceptions of the area as a sacrificial industrial wasteland to that of an environment deserving of protection. Importantly, while these explicit representational recommendations may inspire environmental reporting practices elsewhere, this paper emphasizes that they should not be applied indiscriminately—that is, without considering the specificities of each site. At its core, representational justice is deeply relational, and thus hinges on attuned, accountable, and reflexive collaborations.

Keywords: engaged journalism; environmental journalism; environmental justice; participatory research; photography; representational justice; visual studies

Résumé

S’appuyant sur un travail mené auprès de la Première Nation d’Aamjiwnaang — une communauté Anishinabek du sud de l’Ontario mentionnée dans les médias de façon intermittente en raison de sa proximité avec le plus dense pôle pétrochimique du pays — cet article propose le concept de justice représentationnelle comme essentiel au développement d’un journalisme d’engagement. Ce principe directeur, qui reconnaît les liens étroits entre la représentation comme droit civique et politique ainsi que la représentation en tant qu’image, soit la manière dont une personne ou bien une communauté est montrée et perçue par le public, exige une transformation profonde des pratiques journalistiques. Dans ce cadre, les journalistes sont appelés à identifier et à prendre en compte les désirs représentationelle des communautés en question. Pour ce faire, cet article propose une méthode d’analyse participative du discours visuel à travers laquelle, à Aamjiwnaang, les participants ont formulé une vision de la justice représentationelle qui prône un équilibre entre, d’une part, la représentation des conséquences réelles, multiples et cumulatives de la pollution industrielle et, d’autre part, la mise en valeur de la beauté de l’écosystème local et de la force de leur communauté. Si ces recommandations peuvent inspirer des pratiques de journalisme environnemental ailleurs, cet article souligne qu’elles ne doivent pas être appliquées sans discernement, c’est-à-dire sans tenir compte des spécificités de chaque site. La justice représentatiionelle est profondément relationnelle et repose donc sur des collaborations attentives, responsables et réflexives.

Mots-clés :  Études visuelles; journalisme d’engagement; journalisme environnemental; justice environnementale; justice représentationnelle; photographie; recherche participative

ARTICLE

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Beyond the fence-line: Care for representational justice in Aamjiwnaang First Nation

Laurence Butet-Roch

 

Introduction

When Anishnaabeg arrived to this land around the Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin, their relatives were waiting for them in the Gichigami-ziibi (Sea Rivers). You can still see some of them in the enormous rocks in the beds of the St. Clair River. The good seed manoomin (wild rice) was waiting for them too. The now dense forests were full of pollinators like as bineshiinyag (birds), apakwaanaajiinyag (bats), memengwaag (butterflies), and aamoog (bees), who were tending to mashkikiwan (medicines) like asemaa (tobacco) and ode’iminan (wild strawberries). For thousands of years, this land sustained animal life such as namewag (sturgeon), namebinag (suckers), ginebigoog (snakes), miskwaadesiwag (painted turtles), mikinaakwag (snapping turtles), migiziwag (golden eagles), giniwag (bald eagles)—all of whom are species at risk and face local extinction in Ontario, including on this land around the Nayaano-nibiimaang Gichigamiin. (Gray et al., 2019, para. 5)

In her description of Aamjiwnaang’s territory, community member Vanessa Gray begins with the water, including the river that borders her home, the St. Clair River. Just over 40 miles long, today it demarcates Michigan, United States, to the west and Ontario, Canada to the east, where the First Nation lines about a mile-long stretch of the shore. A mesmerizing teal in the summer sunlight, the water turns to a deep royal blue under the moonlight. From the river, Aamjiwnaang extends eastward. Over 250 households are strewn across a dozen roads separated by lush backwoods. However beautiful, this thriving ecosystem is seldom evoked when Aamjiwnaang appears in the news. Instead, the focus is on its neighbour: Chemical Valley. Located in Sarnia, Ontario, it is the country’s densest petrochemical manufacturing complex and accounts for 10 percent of the air pollutants emitted in the province (Ecojustice, 2019). The resulting health and environmental concerns elicit intermittent news interest. A total of 186 original articles were published on the subject matter over a 23-year period in local, provincial, and the Canadian Press. A large majority of these (122) were accompanied by at least one picture.^[1]

This paper attends to these images. Informed by Eve Tuck’s (2009) critique of damage-centered narratives, I interrogate the latent messaging of toxic images—photographs used to report on industrial pollution (Peeples, 2013). At the heart of this work is the desire to bear witness to the environmental harms caused by extractivism without further reinscribing frontline communities and habitats as expendable, a perspective that enables continued land dispossession and exposure of communities to harms.  Informed by Patrick Wolfe (2006) and J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (2016), I understand settler colonialism not as an historical event with contemporary reverberations, but as structures continually reinventing themselves to naturalize hierarchies capacitating exploitation. Both land dispossession and exposure to environmental harms are amongst these tactics. Per Liboiron (2021), pollution “is not a manifestation or a side effect of colonialism but is rather an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land” (p. 6) that appropriates land to carry on noxious activities for wealth accumulation.

In addition to place-specific recommendations based on participatory research conducted with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, this paper proposes care for representational justice (Lewis, 2016, 2019) as central to news reporting. This orienting principle, which acknowledges the binds between representation as a civic and political right and representation as depiction, calls for profound shifts in journalistic practices.

My attention to toxic images is predicated on the recognition of the agential nature of photographs and of their material ramifications (Azoulay, 2019; Butler, 2016), as well as my personal experience as a settler-Québécois documentary photographer. I began covering Aamjiwnaang First Nation as a photojournalist in 2010, at the invitation of political scholar Sarah Marie Wiebe, who was writing about the inequities of the policy apparatus responsible for this environmental injustice (Wiebe, 2016). The reactions of the general public to my early pictures, which focused on the shocking proximity of industry to domestic and community spaces, opened my eyes to the limitations of this type of framing. While the photographs elicited outrage, they also often led to the suggestion of relocation as a solution. Why a form of redress that would ultimately amount to further land dispossession would eclipse calls for better environmental regulations led me to interrogate how pictures of toxic activities can simultaneously spark rupture and collusion with extractive logics. Following Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel (2021), by extractive logics, I refer to the ideologies and cultural discourses that underlie a mode of economic production that instrumentalizes nature, individuals and communities.

In the following sections, I begin by bringing together environmental reporting, representational justice and engaged journalism, demonstrating the necessity of community oversight to avoid perpetuating representational harms. I then describe one such avenue: a participatory visual discourse analysis designed with and conducted in Aamjiwnaang First Nation during which community members articulated how they would like to be depicted, before sharing the recommendations that emerged from these activities. Organized under three thematic headings: 1) showing impacts, 2) tending to all relations, and 3) honouring the Anishinabek way of life, each include descriptions of contributions made during the different sessions. All call for nuance and a renewed attention to relationships, from the ties that bind community members together and to the Land, to the exchanges between Aamjiwnaang and reporters. I conclude with a discussion of how this research, and representational justice as an orientation, work to challenge the epistemic authority of journalism, and why that is necessary in environmental reporting.

A generative three-way: environmental reporting, representational justice and engaged journalism

The visual landscape of environmental reporting

Environmental journalism is vast and storied, tending to the multiple variations and impacts of human interactions with nature. Since its development as a news beat in the 1960s, it has been increasingly dedicated to the coverage of environmental catastrophes and injustices (Neuzil, 2020), leading to debates about blurring lines with environmental advocacy (Vine, 2017; Bødker & Neverla, 2012) and, to a lesser degree, about the roles of images in raising public awareness. To date, existing analyses of photographs of environmental harms emphasize their equivocality. Chris Balaschak (2021) notes how such imagery at once, “humanizes environmental degradation, allowing us to see the ways in which the damage wrought by American industrialized capitalism altered both social and natural ecologies” (p. 3), yet often fails to provide “direct depiction of the cause of environmental and social harms” (p. 19). His assessment is complicated by the work of Teena Gabrielson (2019), who identified three tropes in visuals of environmental injustices. She notes the prevalence of the fence-line photo, which juxtaposes a domestic scene in the foreground with the polluting facility in the background; of the toxic portrait, for which individuals pose in front of the source of the contamination; and of the protest snapshot, which shows actions taken by community members seeking redress. In most of these, the offending industry is visible. However, to Balaschak’s point, they reveal little of the complicated assemblages responsible for making exposure to environmental harms tolerable. Further, recent research by Ivy Ashe and Kyser Lough (2024) highlights a different trend. In stories adopting the increasingly popular solution-journalism approach, which centers “responses to social problems, as well as the how and why of whether responses are successful” (Ashe & Lough, 2024, p. 43), only 12.6 percent of the images focused on the environmental problem being addressed, whereas 68 percent depicted the solutions. Even as some audience studies speak of the constructive response to this shift (Dahmen, Their & Walth, 2021), there is no firm consensus on which photographic style most effectively condemns extractivism and industrial pollution. In this discussion, little attention has been paid to how those whose stories are being told feel about their own depictions— a gap that representational justice and engaged journalism both seek to address.

Representational justice and engaged journalism

Writing about the power of photography, Ken Lum (2020) elucidates how “we learn to ‘see’ in particular ways that are dependent upon our place and time in the world. An example of this is what we see as qualifying as ‘beautiful’ or ‘horrific’” (p. 221). Such categorizations, which assign differential values to what is depicted, are far from innocuous, for they guide actions. In the simplest terms, to be marked as “beautiful” is to be worthy of protection, while to be construed as “horrific” is to be cast out. The latter is, in the words of Candis Callison and Mary Lynn Young (2020), a form of representational harm. Pictures are not, to reprise Mitchell (2005), “just world mirroring.” They “are a way of worldmaking” (p. xiv).

Recognizing the centrality of photography in constructing our society, Sarah Lewis used the term representational justice to speak of “the transformative power of pictures to affect a new vision for the nation” (2016, p. 11). Such understanding is expressed by abolitionists Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, who sought to affirm their autonomy through self-directed portraits (Gates, 2019; Jones, 2020). It also drives the practice of Indigenous image-makers, practicing what Jolene Rickard (1995) has termed visual sovereignty. Learning from these visual practices, “what representational justice stresses is that to be seen as one wishes, rather than to be exposed to the gaze of the beholder, is a crucial step in being recognized as autonomous beings” (Butet-Roch, 2025, p. 20).

Hence, enacting representational justice as a corrective to representational harms calls for practices that are situated and reflexive, principles that also guide Callison and Young’s (2020) recommendations. They make clear that journalism has largely hidden behind its “good intentions,” and presumed “objective methods,” to avoid dealing with its role in sustaining extractive, colonial, and racist regimes. This research stems from a similar observation, namely the perils of the prevalent damage frames used in visual reporting of environmental injustice. It also follows their call for an introspective reckoning that would bring, in the words of Meenakshi Gigi Durham (1998) “a more engaged journalistic praxis—a praxis that recognizes and grapples with issues of ideological bias and the problems of alienation of socially marginalized groups from mainstream news coverage” (p. 118).

Having  worked as a photojournalist and covered the situation Aamjiwnaang First Nation faces, the research implicates me and my practice alongside that of my peers and professional community. In so doing, this work parallels that of Andrea D. Wenzel and Letrell Crittenden (2021), who posit community-centered journalism as an engaged journalism intervention to (re)build trust in media. While the research context and methods for engaging participants differ, our findings align. Like the residents of the historically Black Germantown neighborhood in Wenzel and Crittenden’s study, who “spoke of a desire for more constructive, less negative, coverage” and “of opportunities for media to work with communities to co-create coverage” (p. 2031), Aamjiwnaang community members expressed how incomplete and unbalanced the visual reporting of their environmental concerns felt. That said, despite all the similarities, it would be wise to avoid universalisation. The specific representational recommendations of Aamjiwnaang residents should not be taken as blanket guidelines to be applied indiscriminately to all news reporting of industrial pollution. At its core, representational justice is deeply relational and grounded, demanding that attention be paid to the specificities of each site and the desires of each community. Just as Wenzel and Crittenden conclude that adapting their process offers “some potential for building healthier relationships and local communication infrastructures” (p. 2038), this paper calls for the necessity of community engagement in media practices.

Re-mediating photographs: methodological notes

Evident in the language and practice of engaged journalism scholars is a praxis of care. In the context of environmental communication, such an orientation, argues Phaedra C. Pezzullo (2024), is transformative. Echoing Tuck’s (2009) criticism of damage-centered work, she points out that an exclusive focus on ecological crises is reactionary, limiting, exhausting, frustrating, and even toxic, and proposes the adoption of “care as a dialectic of crisis” (Pezzullo, 2024, p.1).  Such an approach, she specifies, is dedicated to “unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits. This means we not only have a duty to prevent harm, but also a duty to honor the people, places, and nonhuman species with which we share our world” (Pezzullo, 2017, p. 10). Building on her work, Julie Doyle (2024) lists attributes of care-driven climate communication: “To care is to imagine, feel or experience relational connections to/with another/others. To care is to take responsibility for those connections and to put them in/to practice. To care is to be attentive and reflexive” (p. 28). This orientation leads her to centre creativity, intentional collaboration and participative methods in her work. The research with Aamjiwnaang adopts similar ethos and methodologies, positioning representational justice as a relational practice that demands and fosters attentiveness, reflexivity and accountability.

Epistemological foundations: learning to listen

Dylan Robinson (2020) calls on researchers to develop listening practices that eschew settler colonial modalities that appropriate Indigenous works and knowledges. This drive for extraction/consumption, which he terms hungry listening, “consumes without awareness of how the consumption acts in relationship with those people, the lands, the waters who provide sustenance” (p. 53). Further, hungry listening isn’t merely about consuming everything it hears indiscriminately, but rather what is palatable, predisposing listeners to confirmation bias. Without being a direct response to Robinson’s work, Anja Kanngieser and Zoë Todd (2020) propose attunement as a form of listening that can resist hunger. They understand attunement as “cultivating close and generous attention” (p. 387).  In her dialogue with Todd, Kanngeiser, who like me is a settler researcher dedicated to decolonization, notes that, “more than just aural hearing, listening is a practice of sensing, attunement and noticing. Attunement means to bring into tune, to find resonances, or moments of intersection. It is a laborious, humbling and self-reflexive process” (Kanngieser & Todd, 2020, p. 390). Herein, attuning is a particular type of listening that profoundly implicates the listener. Kanngeiser continues: “Listening requires the listener to become aware of their own limitations and assumptions about place and land… Developing attunement means reckoning with this, and with being a guest, a trespasser and a colonizer” (ibid, p. 390).

Attunement is thus inherently relational. The listener must be aware of their positionality and attendant biases to acknowledge how and what they can hear. Therefore, resisting a settler colonial mode of listening is an ongoing and shifting endeavour that demands constant self-reflexivity, openness, and fluidity. Rather than follow a set protocol, it is unique to each situation. It requires being particularly attuned to the community where the research takes place. In this respect, Kanngeiser and Todd (2020) call on researchers to resist the universalizing “case study” approach prevalent in Western academia which instrumentalizes places. Instead, they encourage us to move towards a “kin study” model, which recognizes that “one place cannot stand in for another, as each place is formed through ongoing reciprocal relations” (p. 386).

In the context of my work with Aamjiwnaang First Nation, this understanding of the interconnections between place, people, ontologies, and epistemologies brings up site-specific considerations. First, I could not have conducted this research anywhere but in Aamjiwnaang for it is rooted in the community’s deep connections to their Land and how these connections are transformed by industrial pollution. Second, the work is predicated on my own ongoing relationships with members of the First Nation and professional experience reporting on their environmental concerns. As research that implicates my professional work, it doesn’t only strive to embody attuned practices through its research methods; rather,  it is itself part of the attunement process. And, finally, the recommendations that emerged from the participatory visual discourse analysis are intimately tied to the context in which they transpired. This is not to say that they cannot inspire discussions about how to report on different instances of environmental injustice, but that these should not be applied indiscriminately elsewhere.  If anything, this work advocates for developing unique, attuned, thorough, and community-engaged discourse analysis in each context of environmental injustice in order for frontline communities to determine the terms of their representation.

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Figure 1
Aamjiwnaang community members participating in the elaborated images workshop. Photograph by author (2023)

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With the ethos of attunement in mind, as well as principles of Participation Action Research (PAR) and Indigenous Research Methods (IRM) (Gubrium et al., 2015; Kovach, 2021; Lenette, 2022; McGregor et al; 2018), and following Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s well-established research protocol, beginning in 2020, I engaged in a series of discussions about the orientation for this research project with the Environment Committee and the Youth Council of Aamjiwnaang First Nation and with Elder Mike Plain. Through these conversations, we honed the project’s objectives and design, a process which eventually led to signing a memorandum of understanding that outlines the expectations and our respective responsibilities.^[2] Since suggestions of intergenerational community activities were met with more enthusiasm than any other proposed method, I drew from multiple inspirations within and outside academia to propose open and flexible creative workshops. Ultimately, we developed a participatory approach to visual discourse analysis in three-parts.

Part 1: Elaborated images

First, in July 2023 we held an elaborated images workshop, a method drawn from my previous analysis, conducted alongside Deanna Del Vecchio (Butet-Roch & Del Vecchio, 2024),  of the collaborative works of socially engaged photographers who had asked the people they photographed to write or draw on their pictures (see Figure 1). As a type of photo elicitation that creates a layered visual record, this visual research method “can enable researchers to emphasise polyphony, show refusal, support truth-telling, contribute to the restoration of relationships, and imagine alternative futures” (Butet-Roch & Del Vecchio, 2024, p.732). These are objectives of what Celeste Pedri-Spade (2017) identifies as a decolonial praxis in image-making. As outlined in the article, when using this method, researchers must carefully consider 1) the images to be intervened upon, including where they are sourced from and the selection process; 2) the workshop’s practical logistics, from the setting to the format of the interventions and the facilitation; and 3) crediting practices. For this present project, these decisions were made with the community advisory committee. Based on my preliminary survey of relevant images of Aamjiwnaang published in news articles (see footnote 1), I was charged with choosing prominent examples of the different tropes observed: pictures of signs or industrial infrastructures; fence-line photos; snapshots of incidents; and depictions of community activities. The workshop took place in the art room of the community centre at midday on a Saturday, July 15, 2023 over two-hours. The workshop began with an opening prayer by Elder Mike Plain, followed by a short presentation of the research project, and concluded with a sharing circle. We also made sure to provide food and beverages made by the community’s Traveling Seniors group throughout the session as a way for participants to take a break if they needed to as much as providing sustenance. This format was replicated for all three activities. When it came time to intervene upon the images, I split the twelve individuals present into four groups of three based on where they were sitting. Participants were recruited through community outreach, word-of-mouth, and snowball method. While the workshop was open to all age groups, participants were all over 18-year-old.

To start, I handed each group a 16×20 print of one of the images belonging to the “sign” category and gave them fifteen minutes to elaborate on it using acrylic paint markers and pens. No two groups worked on the same photographs, though they were interacting with images of the same genre. We repeated this four times. For each cycle, I asked participants to consider what they appreciated about the photograph, what they didn’t, what they would like to see more of, and what they felt was missing. Many participants commented on the messaging of the images. Yet, just as many addressed the environmental injustice itself, writing about their experience with pollution. Such richness suggests that the method can be used for different types of inquiry, not just for the purpose of a visual discourse analysis committed to representational justice. Finally, while all the participants repeatedly indicated that they want to be credited by their full name for their contributions (and continue to)^[3], no one kept a record of which images they worked on, or which comments they made. Hence, a communal decision was made to have a collective crediting mechanism.

Part 2: Participatory dissemination

The elaborated image workshop was followed the next day by a participatory dissemination session. This method “engages research participants in the interpretation of preliminary findings and, through arts-based methods, leads to the co-production of visual outputs and research communication for diversified audiences, especially those beyond solely academic readers” (Valli, 2021 p. 26). This approach to knowledge mobilization keeps with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2004) reminder that for Indigenous Research Methods “sharing” is “a responsibility of research” that must serve community goals (p. 88). In Aamjiwnaang, the participatory dissemination session adapted Valli’s (2021) suggestion to set up a workshop in two parts. The first consisted in an “exhibition” displaying the “research findings,” in this case the elaborated images, to use as inspiration. The second was time to produce dissemination materials. I laid all sixteen photos at the center of the tables so that the participants could see what others drew and wrote during the previous day’s elaborated images workshop. People milled around the workspace, commenting on the interventions using post-its. Some also added a few more elements to some of the prints. I then provided crafting supplies and encouraged them to imagine the best ways to share their representational recommendations and push for their implementation. Most participants opted to work on their own, though they frequently solicited the advice of their peers, and the split was even between those who wanted to speak to photojournalists and those who directed their work at the community’s leadership structure. This second workshop did not yield completed documents ready to be distributed. Instead, the activity proved to be another opportunity for Aamjiwnaang participants to further articulate their concerns with how they are photographed. The broad scope of the prompt meant that ideation went beyond the making of a dissemination object, such as a poster, pamphlet or guide, to thinking about different initiatives such as the creation of a community photo bank. The latter, participants explained, could be an efficient way to increase the number of images showcasing the beauty of the territory, since many of them take pictures of the animals and plants that continue to thrive on their lands. In making this suggestion, Aamjiwnaang residents were reaffirming how disappointed they were by the lack of representation of nature.

Part 3: Community peer review

A month later, we convened a community peer review of all research outputs. Initially, I had planned to have participants review the public outreach documents conceived during the participatory dissemination workshop with the intent of having them approved for distribution. Instead, I used this opportunity to strengthen the community oversight of this research project, by checking with participants whether what I took notice of and wanted to amplify through my writing aligned with their concerns, priorities, and desires (Liboiron et al., 2018). I presented my list of key findings which I organized under the headings 1) what I noticed you wrote/drew 2) what you seemed to appreciate about the images 3) what you seemed to dislike in the images 4) what you said you’d like to see more of in the images, and 5) what you suggested be done about it. After listening to their immediate impressions, I encouraged them to respond to four prompts split onto four Bristol boards: 1) list your priorities 2) what are the findings you agree most with 3) what are the findings you agree the least with, and 4) what should the next steps be. Here again, the request for more positive depictions of the community was front and center, with post-its reading “recognition of Resiliency of the People of Aamjiwnaang,” “show what Aamjiwnaang looks like,” and “The Beauty of the Land,” placed on the “priorities” board. Amongst these was also the message “Don’t want to be portrayed as victims.” While previous contributions during the other two workshops expressed unease at the lack of representation of community initiatives, this was the first time that framings of victimhood were explicitly criticized. Admittedly, especially in the context of this project, participatory dissemination and community peer review appear quite similar. If the former is usually focused on devising and designing knowledge mobilization strategies and the latter on discussing the merits of the findings, the line remains murky. Participatory dissemination activities often also work to validate results. Community peer review can lead to conversation about what to communicate, to whom, and how.

Limitations

The structure of the activities aimed to position me as a guest listener: I am called to witness what is happening in the room, knowing full well that not all remarks are addressed to me or intended for the research project. That being said, at the same time I must also recognize that my very presence, atop of how I structure and facilitate the workshops, also affects the nature of the contributions. I’m both an opening, creating space for discussions around a given topic, and a barrier, foreclosing certain exchanges that are not for me to record or hear. In photography or in research, the act of witnessing, whether through pointing a camera, starting a recorder or taking out a notebook, changes the atmosphere. Hence, the importance of longstanding relationships, reflexivity, and community accountability (Nutton et al., 2020). Through this tri-partite experience, I realized the benefits of conceiving of participatory visual discourse analysis as an iterative practice that offers multiple opportunities for participants to voice, reiterate, and clarify their stance on the photographs. It is to this desired way of seeing that I now turn.

Representational desires: impacts, nature and community

In what follows, to demonstrate the potential of a participatory approach to visual discourse analysis and highlight the insights gained from adopting a representational justice orientation, I detail the three main representational recommendations that transpired through the research project. These were arrived at by making a list of the nature and recurrence of the different interventions. Three main themes emerged: clarifying the manifestations and impacts of Chemical Valley; reinscribing nature into the scenes depicted; and affirming community values and beliefs. These themes were then compared to the more explicit demands made through the documents produced during the participatory dissemination workshop, showing a high degree of congruence. These findings were then presented back to the participants, at a community peer review where they made clear that the threefold representational recommendations accurately translated their concerns, priorities and desires.

“The Bubble:” Showing impacts

On an image of a set of smokestacks appearing through the trees, one of the participants drew a large white circle, which they dubbed “the bubble” (Figure 2), and wrote: “One caption reads Aamjiwnaang is ‘largely encircled’ yet this doesn’t capture how much industry actually surrounds us, an overhead view would show just how trapped we are inside the industry bubble.” Two other people echoed this sentiment, adding their thoughts at the bottom: “So sad that this is considered as normal views for Aamjiwnaang members” and “Just a Glimpse, a Sneak peak of the area that surrounds Aamjiwnaang” (emphasis and spelling from the original). Comments such as these denote a certain appreciation for how the visual representation of the environmental issues in Chemical Valley stress the omnipresence of the petrochemical plants. Yet, the language also points to the limitations of such a view. Mirroring their concerns with the cumulative impacts of pollutants (Wiebe, 2016), workshop participants made it known that they feel uneasy with images that single out one plant, or show “just a glimpse.” Their annotations highlight the need to show the sheer scale of the petrochemical manufacturing complex, which extends on all sides of Aamjiwnaang.

Further, while participants recognized that the camera cannot capture the toxic particles that float in the air or their smell, they also wanted photographs to be more explicit about the presence of contaminants. The elaborations of an image of the Shell facilities that sit behind where Talfourd Creek meets the St. Clair River (Figure 3) are particularly telling. The photograph was taken on a sunny day. The refinery appears still. This impression of serenity is exactly what the participants set out to rectify by adding multiple elements pointing out the plant’s environmental impacts. A mean monster face was drawn on the water tower beside the Shell logo. Smoke was added to many of the stacks. Oil drips from one of the pipeline clusters to the left of the photograph, pooling in the creek, creating what one annotation deems “toxic waters” and killing a turtle and a fish, small figures added to the stream but already pronounced “dead.” If all this wasn’t clear enough, written explanations abound. With multiple arrows pointing to the oil sludge, one participant indicated how “poison” is “flowing into our community,” while another stressed that the situation pictured should be read as evidence of “environmental racism 100%.”

Throughout the three workshops, participants maintained that for their reality to be understood by the public, it is not sufficient to show the facilities and their proximity to community spaces; their impacts need to be more visible. In a prototype of a pamphlet aimed at reporters, one instruction read: “Understand what the members of Aamjiwnaang are going through during Industrial Accidents.” And, another demand suggested that: “If you’re investigated [sic] a leak or spill, take a photo of the incident instead of the company.” Later, during the community peer review, multiple participants asked that the media stray from representing industrial infrastructure through what one of them called a “beautifying lens,” alluding to frames such as Figure 2 and 3; that they “use image of actual releases:” and that they show “the high flaring that can be seen from miles away.” All this because, as one of them noted, “most often we hear and we see what the plants tell us. So, we need pictures that show what we’re really up against.”

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Figure 2
Elaborations by Aamjiwnaang community members. Original photograph by David Chidley (2017) published in the Toronto Star (see McIntosh, 2017a, p. A26; McIntosh, 2017c, p. A15)

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Figure 3
Elaborations by Aamjiwnaang community members. Photograph by David Chidley (2017) published in the Toronto Star (see McIntosh, 2017b, p.A1)

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“Nibi gaagigezhewan:” Tending to all relations

Besides wanting photographs to keep industry accountable for their pollution, Aamjiwnaang community members repeatedly expressed their desire to see nature feature more prominently. In his closing remarks after the first workshop, Elder Mike Plain reflected: “These are mostly representation of industry, not of community,” before adding, “We maintained green space for hundreds of years; and Aamjiwnaang is still that” (Plain, personal communication, July 15, 2023).

The regard for all that is living is expressed in many of the elaborated images. For instance, on a typical example of a fence-line photograph, a bird welcomes the viewer to Aamjiwnaang, becoming a community ambassador. Participants also enlivened the image by drawing pink and blue flowers on the lone shrub, adding budding leaves to the naked tree, and sketching green shoots on the ground. Trees sprout in the background, covering the smokestacks (see Figure 4). As they reinscribed nature into this scene, participants are making clear their holistic and interdependent view of the environment they live in. One of them, during the participatory dissemination workshop, summed it up: “We see life; they [industry] see something to be exploited.” A conversation quickly followed this comment. One participant remembered that “we used to have green space, but it’s dying now. It’s depleted.” Another added that “the bush is becoming stressed,” recalling the oak savannah that used to cover the area.

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Figure 4
Photograph by author (2023). Aamjiwnaang community members participating in the elaborated images workshop

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Such thinking is what inspired Aamjiwnaang community members to demand more images that attend to nature, including showing the effects that Chemical Valley has on it. To this effect, in a pamphlet produced during the participatory dissemination workshop, one participant urges reporters to “know that there are many impacts on the different chemical releases to the air, land, water, people and wildlife in the area.” These consequences are evoked explicitly through the annotations in Figure 3, where “toxic waters” are responsible for the death of fish and turtles highlighting both the importance of the stream and of the species that rely on it.

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Figure 5
Photograph by author (2023). Images elaborated on by Aamjiwnaang community members are displayed ahead of the participatory dissemination activity

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Focusing on Nature also serves to remind community members and the larger public of Aamjiwnaang’s beauty, a reality that tends to be overlooked in the news coverage focusing on local environmental and health concerns. In response to the bleak depiction of Talfourd Creek (see Figure 5), a participant wrote that it “doesn’t highlight the beauty of the creek, why it is important for us that it’s protected.” This sentence articulates what the drawings show. The water’s liveliness is symbolized through blue marks mimicking its flow, and its life-sustaining power is emphasized by the addition of four animals. The Anishinaabemowin words “nibi gaagigezhewan,” which translates loosely to “water, we love you,” follow the curvature of the stream. Compared to the original, the elaborated image breathes life, while also underlining that lives are endangered, fragile, and dependent on the health of the waters.

According to participants, the rationale for focusing more on beauty is twofold. For starters, it is a more accurate representation of reality: Aamjiwnaang is beautiful. At the end of the first day, Neesa Nahmabin explained her drawings, many of which were animals and plants: “I would like to see more of what Aamjiwnaang has to offer….But nobody knows; nobody knows the beauty and the parts of the community that brings us together” (N. Nahmabin, personal communication, July 15, 2023). Second, calling attention to the territory’s vitality offers a much-needed counter-narrative. As historian Traci Brynne Voyles (2015) describes, much of extractivism’s justification rests on marking land as already wasted. Therefore, resisting a discourse that gives the impression that the area is “all [petrochemical manufacturing] plants” by showing the liveliness of the fauna and flora of Aamjiwnaang is crucial.

“Ancestral Knowledge Lives Forever:” Honouring the Anishinabek way of life

Inspired by the conversations she had with her peers, Lynn Rosales returned to the first photograph she was handed out to write “our history is more than industry.” She then proceeded to draw four spectres with long braids in black on top of the name “Aamjiwnaang” and identified them as ancestors by inscribing: “Ancestral knowledge lives forever.” Her elaboration stresses the longevity of Aamjiwnaang, which existed long before Chemical Valley, and honours her Anishinabek heritage, how it is tied to the Land and how it binds her to the territory. This strong connection to place is often evoked as a reason why Aamjiwnaang is so meaningful. After lighting sage at the end of our first session, Elder Mike Plain spoke of this attachment:

This is the place where we grew up; where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers grew up; from the time that Chief Young Gull came down this way and said ‘this is the place we’re going to live forever.’ These words are probably ingrained within our blood. It’s blood memory why we live here, why we stay here, why we love it here. (M. Plain, personal communication, July 15, 2023)

Translating this embodied connection visually is paramount to participants who responded more positively to images of community events. For example, on a photograph of three young girls and a woman smudging during a water walk in 2014,^[4] a participant who on other images had drawn frowning faces, put a smiling one. Others commented that it shows “love, honour & respect for Mother Earth;” evokes “unity and Sacred Space;” and is evidence that “spirit is still there, Creator is still with us.”^[5] Atop, someone shared that here they see “community, despite the destruction” (Figure 6). The brighter tone of the elaborations indicates that participants welcomed them as accurate and desirable representation of their lives and community. Further, it brought a moment of levity and pride to the workshop, which until then had mostly prompted the participants to speak about the ills. Everyone began recalling stories from the water walk and recounting other similar initiatives, shifting their attention to what the community has been doing rather than what it is living through. Eventually, they made clear that such a refocusing is among the changes they’d like to see in the reporting on their environmental concerns. This was articulated most explicitly at the community peer review. Answers left under the questions “what’s missing?” and “what are your top 3 priorities?” echoed each other. To the first, participants responded: “success stories,” “powwow + positive photos,” and “spiritual connection.” To the second, they listed “bring positive images of community,” and “recognition of resiliency of the people of Aamjiwnaang.” One person used this opportunity to stress that they didn’t want the community to be portrayed as a victim. With all of these suggestions, Aamjiwnaang residents are resisting the perception that they are powerless and emphasizing Lynn Rosales’ message that their “history is more than industry.” They believe it is crucial that their strength, past and present, be conveyed to the public. Without it, reporting is incomplete and disempowering.

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Figure 6
Elaborations by Aamjiwnaang community members. Original photograph by Laurence Butet-Roch published in Maisonneuve (see Butet-Roch, 2019, p.51)

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Adopting a representational justice orientation: implications for engaged environmental reporting

Elder Mike Plain, who participated in all three workshops and listened carefully to what had been shared during them, was the last to speak at our final session:

I’m happy to have been part of this discussion….The pictures we looked at portray a lot of negativities, but the negativities are true. It is also true that this is a beautiful place. If the pictures also showed our trees and our lives, that we are a happy community, that we live the best life we can even with what we face every day, that would be good. I want the truth, not the half-truths (M. Plain, personal communication, August 26, 2023)

For him, the half-truths are twofold. On the one hand, “half-truths” implicate all that industry hides, or tries to. On the other hand, “half-truths” is the expression he used to speak of the media’s reports about the community and its health and environmental concerns. Overall, he felt that the focus was too much on damage, not enough on strengths. Bonnie Plain concurred:

You can see what the general media wants to portray. It’s like they’re covering the lies of industry and none of the actual incidents are being shown to the public. It’s like our story is not being portrayed at all; except in the few images that show how we’re still fighting to preserve our way and liveliness.” (B. Plain, personal communication, August 26, 2023)

To resist “half-truths,” as Mike Plain and other community members made clear, means finding an equilibrium between portraying the negative reality of industrial pollution and emphasizing the beauty and strength of the First Nation. Mike Plain’s language of “half-truths” is reminiscent of Callison and Young’s (2020). Under the heading “Power and Partial Truths,” they highlight how

journalism legitimizes, amplifies, and reinforces some experts, views, and perceptions of events and problems in the world—and their potential range of solutions—over other experts, views, and perceptions even while they obscure how it is they arrived at their own perceptions. (Callison & Young, 2020, p. 10)

As a corrective, they call for a brand of engaged journalism that is performed by systems journalists who are deeply aware of “their role and position in a set of complex global systems” (p. 8). The research conducted with Aamjiwnaang First Nation falls within that purview. Centering representational justice offers an example of how one might proceed to grow that consciousness and the knowledge that can come from it. In voicing their desire for balance between images of community and of pollution, Aamjiwnaang residents articulate their specific vision of representational justice, and demand that journalists adopt more engaged practices. As Lynn Rosales puts it, “The media needs to develop a different lens that is not informed by colonialism and that is rooted in kindness. They should come talk to us before they put the stories out and we should be able to vet the photos (L. Rosales, personal communication, August 26, 2023).

This approach requires, as Callison and Young advocate, to rethink journalism’s relationship with objectivity. This tenet has long positioned journalists as epistemic authorities, able to make “impartial” judgments about the issues they cover (Schudson & Anderson, 2009) while denying, in the North American context, “their subjectivity and their locatedness as a white-dominated profession” with roots in settler colonialism and market capitalism (Callison & Young, 2020, p. 26). This refusal to acknowledge the influence of one’s positionality and of the métier’s genesis, in turn, leads to an insensitivity to the “harm they have done to peoples and environment” (p. 24). In contrast, a representational justice orientation opens space to replace objectivity with accountability, and epistemic authority with community oversight. In the process, new storylines and new perspectives are brought to the fore. For instance, in the context of Aamjiwnaang, participatory visual discourse analysis highlights how pictures of industrial infrastructures often fail to properly communicate the impacts of petrochemical manufacturing on the health of the environment and the community, while simultaneously cementing the impression of the area as an industrial wasteland. Instead, participants want articles to be illustrated by a combination of images that explicitly show pollution and photos that focus on the vitality of the community and local ecosystem. These recommendations align with recent studies on visual environmental solution-journalism or care-driven environmental communication. Both note how reporting that exclusively focuses on crises or problems elicits “feelings of isolation, cynicism, depletion, impatience” (Pezzullo 2024, p.1). This congruence suggests that the community oversight pushed forth by representational justice does not, as proponents of objectivity maintain, impede contemporary environmental journalism’s commitment to raise public awareness of environmental issues. Rather, care for representational justice has the potential to assist in developing modes of storytelling that at once engage the audience and honour the experiences and knowledges of those in front of the lens.

To carry out this promise, since representational justice is relational and place-based, further research is needed to develop a variety of methods that will enable different groups to make their representational desires known. Hence, while the visual guidelines proposed by Aamjiwnaang community members may spur reflections on the photographs used to report on other instances of industrial pollution and its consequences on frontline communities, they are not universal directives. Further, to be operationalized, representational justice also needs to contend with the mechanisms within the media industry that elevate certain images as icons while obscuring others. Doing so would require conducting institutional ethnographies, or paraethnographies (see Callison & Young, 2020), of news outlets, complete with interviews of the different actors involved in visual narrative decision-making. Developing an understanding of how and why certain images are preferred by news publications is crucial to devising strategies that would compel newsrooms to revisit their representational practices.

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Laurence Butet-Roch (PhD Environmental Studies) is an environmental media scholar, photographer, and writer. She is currently pursuing her inquiry into the entanglements of the politics of visibility, representational justice, and petroculture as a post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Email: laurence.butet-roch@mcgill.ca

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^[1]   The survey, conducted by the author, covers articles released between September 14, 1999, and December 31, 2022. To be included, articles had to explicitly center Aamjiwnaang’s environmental reality and concerns, and be original, informational, and substantial.

^[2]   The MOU outlined the objectives and scope of the research, as well as my responsibilities, and accountability procedures. Importantly, a community advisory committee was established, composed of a representative from the Environment Committee, the Youth Council and an. Additionally, this project received ethics approval from York University, certificate #2023-123.

^[3]   Following principles of informed and ongoing consent, participants signed consent forms that were distributed and discussed during each of the three workshops. These forms make clear that one can participate in the different workshops but withhold all or part of their contributions from the research. Subsequently, participants received a personalized list which they could (and still can) edit, anonymize and/or redact. I held a community peer review in August 2023 and a community share-back session in September 2024, both of which were designed to show how the contributions are being contextualised, analysed and used, and to provide further opportunities to edit, anonymize and/or redact any or all of their contributions. Participants are also individually asked for their permission to have their contributions used for every new publication, a process that involves sharing a draft of the article, discussing its purpose and reviewing the instances where their contributions are mentioned.

^[4]    Residents of Aamjiwnaang, Bkejwanong, and Aazhoodena and a handful of allies walked or paddled from one First Nation to the next. The roughly 120km journey was intended to raise awareness about the health of the local waters.

^[5]   All of these interventions also speak about the importance community members place on spirituality. The positive reaction to this image can thus equally be interpreted as evidence of their desire to see that aspect of the Anishinabek way of life depicted in news media. It is also important to consider which aspects of their culture is acceptable to record photographically, for some ceremonies are not to be photographed. Neither the people I photographed smudging nor any of the workshop participants opposed the capture of this moment.