Why podcasting is an important step towards reconciliation in Canada.
Vol. 71 - Podcasts are revitalizing endangered Indigenous languages, but can they be saved in time?
Sge:no geh from the Haldimand Treaty! Happy Pod the North Tuesday!
In this issue:
Why podcasting is an important step towards reconciliation in Canada.
Canadian Indie: Elbows Up
True North Podcast Feature: MEDIA INDIGENA
8 new Canadian podcasts to check out!
What’s up with Radio-Canada’s podcast copyright threats?
BTW:
As of May 29, 2025, there are currently 37 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 35 First Nations communities across Canada.
Why podcasting is an important step towards reconciliation in Canada.
Podcasts are revitalizing endangered Indigenous languages, but can they be saved in time?
National Indigenous Peoples' Day is this upcoming summer solstice: Saturday June 21st. It’s a day to celebrate First Nations, Inuit, and Métis cultures, languages, and traditions. And just in time, the Words and Culture podcast is set to launch its eighth language of the series: Mi’kmaq.
Words and Culture is a seriously impressive project to come out of the Canadian podcasting ecosystem in recent years. It’s a notable exercise in language revitalization and an important case study for the state of Indigenous languages in Canada. It’s got an all-Indigenous team, and Kim Wheeler at the helm; a powerhouse audio producer, and Anishinaabe and Mohawk 60’s Scoop survivor.
The show features eight 6-episode-long language series’ (and counting), with each series often hosted by an Indigenous woman in media with a personal connection to it. I’ve been listening to my local Haudenosaunee series, hosted by January Rogers, and it’s had a pretty significant emotional impact on me already. It covers the many languages within The Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, their differences and cultural contexts, and what the local radio station on the Six Nations of the Grand River is doing to preserve them.
I talked with Kim, and the host of the latest Mi’kmaw series, Dr. Pamela Palmater, about creating the series, and why podcasting could be today’s most significant step towards language revitalization and reconciliation in Canada.
That is, if anyone wants to seriously support it.
It’s Kim Wheeler!
Kim Wheeler’s background in podcast production, and her desire to start the Words and Culture podcast, is partly shaped by her time at the CBC working on the radio program, Unreserved. “I was always pushing for them to find and hire Indigenous producers, and they always said they couldn't find any,” Kim told me. “There are a lot of Indigenous producers out there, you just have to know where to look.”
Dr. Pamela Palmater is a renowned lawyer, professor, and podcaster hailing from Ugpi'ganjig, a Miꞌkmaw First Nation. When Kim invited Pam to join the newest Words and Culture series, she couldn’t have been more flattered. “It's Kim Wheeler!” she told me. “She's everything! The thing that really sets Kim apart is that she's like, ‘who can I partner with? Who can I uplift? Who can I help promote? Who can I give opportunities to?’ [She] has her hands in all these amazing projects, always supporting Indigenous women in particular.”
Kim has collaboration at her core; a production style that’s hard to authentically come by in traditional media these days. “I see that Indigenous women haven't had enough of a voice in radio or on television,” Kim told me. “Christine Genier I knew immediately I wanted. She quit the CBC on air because of how things were being programmed, especially when it came to her nation.” That’s why each host that Kim taps into the series picks the topics and the people they talk to. “They know their nation the best,” Kim says. “If you have a host who's from that nation, guests are gonna be more open and trust them more than somebody who is parachuting in.”
“The point is to ask ‘what is the state of our Indigenous languages and why are some of us not fluent?” Kim told Pam in the beginning. “It's about the journey. It's about our relationship with the language, how people care about it, and how they relate to it.” Even before wrapping the series, Pam told me she’d become a “changed person” because of that journey.
Podcasting just makes sense.
With its second season on its way out (40 episodes and counting), there’s plenty of Words and Culture to catch up on for anyone who’s serious about learning more. In fact, podcasting could be one of the best places to start - it’s in our nature.
“To me, podcasting and languages, that's a marriage right there,” Pam told me. “How do we learn languages as a baby? Being talked to. You can hear the beauty in a language. Some are descriptive, some are very harshly spoken, some are soft. There's different intonations, some are verb based, some languages it doesn't always matter in what order you put the words. You can listen to it, you can absorb it, you can consider it in the context that it's offered. You can listen to the accent that fluent speakers might have, even if they're speaking in English. You only get that from audio.”
From my perspective, Indigenous independent media is doing more for human rights than traditional media has in a long time. Pam says something that podcasts in particular have given to Indigenous issues is time and nuance. As a frequent panelist on TV and radio, she’s typically given only a few minutes to talk and has often worried that audiences may lack the context they need to properly understand where she’s coming from. That’s why she started her first podcast, Warrior Life. “Once I started talking to Native land defenders and water protectors, I was like, ‘this is how Warrior Life Podcast is gonna go’. It’s about lifting their voices and calls to action.”
When it comes to Words and Culture, both Kim and Pam agree that the show is for all of so-called Canada. “We're definitely making Words and Culture for anybody who is interested in knowing more about Indigenous peoples; who we are, how we think, what this land means to us,” says Kim. Anyone can tune in and learn a few words in an Indigenous language - and they should since not only are podcasts so accessible but, in my opinion, the topic around language is just so deeply fascinating. “It's not just about the language. It's the cultural context,” says Pam. “Even if you're not a big fan of learning about languages, it really is about learning the culture. What makes this whole podcast series so unique is there really is something for Indigenous people who are like, ‘oh man, can I ever learn the language,’ and looking for that reassurance and how to go about doing it. And then the non-Indigenous people who feel like they have an obligation to learn more. Reconciliation is about taking steps to learn more.”
The stakes for words and culture.
There are real stakes at play when it comes to knowing the language of the land you’re on. The majority of Indigenous languages in North America are currently at risk of extinction. “Some of our languages, there's less than a thousand Native speakers left,” Pam says. With so few Native speakers left, it gets more and more difficult for languages to be passed on through generations. “If residential schools said you couldn't speak, and then you're in 60’s scoop, adopted out, and not allowed to speak it, then you have multiple generations without.”
It’s only been in recent years that Native languages have started to turn up in the mainstream, with movies like Prey translated to Comanche, social media influencers like Kairyn Potts teaching Cree on TikTok, and video games, apps, books, and more. “It's not like the old days [where] you turn on the radio and it's like, ‘oh no, I missed that interview’. Podcasts you can listen to over and over and over and over again and the more you do, people are gonna learn more than they think they're gonna learn.”
Sure, it’s never too late to learn, but the clock is ticking on languages at the brink of dying out. That's why it’s so important that not only are people learning them, but initiatives to revitalize them are getting funded.
Funding Indigenous podcasts is low-hanging fruit.
Language revitalization can’t just happen on an individual level, there needs to be resources that support it on a mass scale. Those resources are long overdue, especially on a governmental level. “Language revitalization needs funding dollars,” says Kim. “It needs somebody like Kristi Lane Sinclair. She built a little home recording studio on Haida Gwaii and wants it to be a space where elders and language speakers can come and record in language - they can just show up at her place and do that.”
The stand out model for this is the Indigenous Screen Office’s Podcasting Program, a fund that doled out nearly a half a million dollars to Indigenous podcasts in the last two years (according to my own estimates based on public records). This is the most significant support for podcasts coming from any funding body in Canada, Indigenous podcasts or otherwise. The ISO’s support for Indigenous podcasters is playing a massive role in uplifting Indigenous voices into the mainstream. ISO funding support for the Matriarch Movement podcast’s new video series from Shayla Oulette Stonechild recently resulted in a screening at the ImagineNATIVE film festival, the first Indigenous film festival that could qualify a film for Oscar consideration.
“A huge shout out needs to go to the Indigenous Screen Office for actually being intentional about supporting Indigenous podcasters,” says Pam. “They get it. They get that there's different people who are accessing podcasts. They get the language aspect, they get the cultural, the oral learning. I mean, if you can't be in person, the next best thing is a podcast where you're engaging orally.”
Pam told me that outside of the ISO, she’s looked everywhere for podcast funding with many grants telling her “‘we fund Indigenous projects, not podcasts.’” It’s a familiar story in the Canadian podcasting ecosystem.
“We're in the digital era,” Pam says, “whether it's $1000 or $10,000, it would be great if we were getting the kind of support that radios are. We cannot do language education, revitalization, promotion, documentation, and protection without the resources. It simply can't be done. It's going to require a commitment from the federal government to make sure that we have as many language teachers as we need, all the resources that we need, all the curriculum, all the books, everything we need in order to engage in this. If a Mi’kmaw First Nation wants to change all the signs on reserve to English and Mi’kmaq, the resources should be there. It's Canada that spent hundreds of years doing everything they could to wipe out our language and culture. The least they can do is put as many resources as possible into our languages to try to save what we can.”
Someone learning an Indigenous language is sure to see an important, anti-colonial shift in their worldview. “It changes the way their mind works. Some languages don't have genders for example. Speaking and knowing your language changes how you relate to everything; from the water to the trees, to sustenance to our relationships.” For Indigenous peoples, she says, “it changes because you are learning about it in the way that your ancestors did. [It is] in our blood memory, our DNA.” Knowing these nuances can make a world of difference when it comes to how somebody might, in turn, view Indigenous people.
“My understanding is that there are just around 60 language families, and then from those 60 languages you start to break it down into different dialects,” Kim explained to me. “But Haida, they're a ‘language isolate’, which means there's no other language like theirs in the world. If there's no other language like theirs in the world, their worldview is gonna be vastly different than the worldview of the Cree or the Anishinaabe.”
It’s time for Canada to listen up and pay out.
Learning about, or how to speak, a new language shouldn’t be a daunting idea, in fact it’s normalized pretty much everywhere outside of so-called North America. “In other countries, not even rich countries, kids are going to school and they're learning five languages,” Pam says. “You're making that child smarter and more able to engage with the world. But you've gotta put the resources into it. Our ancestors passed it down. Our elders fought to preserve it, and are now passing it on to people who are in the business of educating and documenting so that we have our language forever in history. Whether it's little kids picture books, whether it's books on the orthography, whether it's podcasts, apps, all of those things are so, so important to actually get it down, have it for posterity for our future generations. So far, billions go into preserving the French language and a drop goes into all of the indigenous languages. To me, that's a real crime.”
While we wait for the government to make meaningful changes in resources, be sure to binge your local language episodes of Words and Culture this summer, or any episodes that interest you. Learn how to say “hello” and “thank you” at the very least. Check whose land you’re on, and become part of a movement that helps bring back the original languages of Turtle Island.
What Pam is listening to these days:
A very special thanks to Kim Wheeler and Dr. Pamela Palmater for their guidance on this piece — I’m forever grateful to you both.
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Check out this Canadian Indie: Elbows Up
A podcast for Canada, in a dangerous new world.
The global order is shifting under our feet. Our best friend might become an enemy. It’s a psychic shock, and a threat to our sovereignty that demands a response. It's also an opportunity. So, what are we going to do about it? Longtime journalist and podcast host Jordan Heath-Rawlings (The Big Story, The Gravy Train) examines this strange new world and gives Canadians real work we can take on right now, individually and as a country, to emerge from the chaos strong and free. This isn't a show about picking a fight. It's a show about being ready for one.
True North Podcast Feature: MEDIA INDIGENA
Indigenous current affairs.
A weekly roundtable about Indigenous issues and events in Canada and beyond.
What’s going on in Canada’s podcast ecosystem:
New Releases [8 new shows]:
May 20, 2025 — Radio icon, Gill Deacon, has launched a brand new podcast, A Love Affair with the Unknown. The show examines the possibilities that come from uncertainty through conversations with people with compelling stories about the unknown.
May 22, 2025 — The fourth season of Knockabout Media’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood North is out now! This time, the anthology series dives into the heart and humour of one of Canada's most beloved sons: John Candy. New episodes drop every other Thursday throughout the summer.
May 25, 2025 — Season 3 of The Black Canadian Creators podcast is here! The show celebrates the bold, inspiring, and diverse voices shaping Canada’s creative scene, joining Sherley Joseph for real, unfiltered conversations with groundbreaking Black Canadian creatives—from podcasters and filmmakers to digital storytellers and cultural innovators. The first episode back features Sandy Hudson for an urgent and truth-filled conversation about redefining safety, power, and public priorities.
May 26, 2025 — Invisible Institutions has launched its second season! The documentary podcast explores the past and present of institutions for people labelled with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Canada.
May 27, 2025 — Telus Storyhive has launched the First Frame video podcast, a show designed to train and support new and emerging Canadian and Indigenous content creators exploring filmmaking, digital content, live streaming or video podcasting.
June 3, 2025 — Matter is the new show from host, Tanya Fraser, for purpose driven entrepreneurs, heart centre leaders, and curious minds who want to live better and work smarter. The first episode features an interivew with World-renowned Mentalist, Wayne Hoffman.
June 4, 2025 — The Outlaw Ocean from CBC Podcasts has returned with its second season. In four new investigations, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ian Urbina takes a high-risk reporting trip to Libya (where the team was held up at gunpoint) to a groundbreaking three-parter on China, the undisputed superpower of the seas.
June 12, 2025 — Group Chat is the latest podcast to come from the Samara Centre for Democracy. Following the success of their chart-topping show Humans of the House, this new show features a wide range of active citizens, like political leaders, journalists and lawyers, for discussions that try to make sense of this moment of democratic uncertainty.
You oughta know…
This week, the Sonar Network is headed to New York for the Tribeca Film Festival to premiere their new show StanLand! Some of the notable names on the show include Bobby Moynihan, Rhea Seehorn, John Waters and Jon Hamm, and the show is set to launch shortly after the festival. I, for one, cannot WAIT!
As reported by Podnews, a lawyer acting on behalf of Radio-Canada has recently threatened podcast app, Podcast Addict, stating that having Radio-Canada podcasts on the platform is illegal copyright. The threats are strange and feel misguided for sure, but for three years Radio-Canada podcasts (or balados) have been mostly ‘exclusively’ available on their OHdio app.
As mentioned in an April 2024 issue of Pod the North, Radio-Canada is one of the main producers of podcasts in the province of Quebec, and it means a lot of Quebecers use it as their go-to app as if it was Spotify or Apple. Its hard to say why Radio-Canada wants this chokehold on Quebecois podcasts as a public broadcaster, but it the OHdio app is currently the simplest way for Quebecers to find local content compared to regular podcast apps, where French is French. Until mainstream podcasting apps can figure out how to filter for “Quebecois”, I imagine this fight isn’t going away anytime soon.
Another interesting note on this:
A number of Canadian projects have recently been recognized by the New York Festivals Radio Awards, including CBC/Radio-Canada being named Broadcaster of the year! Podcast winners included; CBC’s Front Burner and PlayMe, Extradition: The Search for Huseyin Celil from TVO and Innerspeak, and Cited Media’s The Rationality Wars.
One last note on CBC, they’re still accepting pitches until the end of June! CBC Podcasts is currently looking for pitches from a variety of production partners, including in-house teams, independent producers and production companies, and co-productions with other media. To submit your pitch, please use this Google Form. The deadline for submissions is June 30, 2025 at 11:59PM ET. This call for pitches is specifically for the following umbrella feeds:
Uncover - The best in true crime.
Personally - Gripping memoirs.
Split Screen - Inside the unsettling and captivating world of entertainment and pop culture.
Understood - Four episode seasons on the seismic shifts changing our world in politics, society, technology and culture.
Registration is now open for the 20th Annual People’s Choice Podcast Awards, until July 1st! The awards have also updated the rules for 2025, and you can register for as many categories as you want.
Have you got something to say around the theme of podcasts and “threats”? Good Tape, the audio magazine, has put out its third call for pitches for it’s upcoming issue. Of course, I’ve already jumped on a pitch about how 51st State rhetoric is growing on podcasts and feeding into podcasts as a dangerous new-age propaganda machine. Submit your writing, art pitches, or sponsor inquiries by June 30th!
JAR Audio has announced the finalists for the 2025 Emerging Women in Podcasting Pilot Competition, with the winner set to be announced next week! Finalists include: Stella Shengjia, Libby Liburd, Erin Edwards, Dana Wiker, Dee McCrorey, Cailynn Birts, and Briana Brownell.
Events:
June 14, 2025 — [CALGARY, AB] The third edition of Unrigged and Harbinger’s Progressive Publics conference is back and in Alberta for a five panel symposium at Mount-Royal University. The event features folks from Briarpatch, The Progress Report, Parkland Institute, The Alberta Worker, CJSW 90.9FM, Calgary Climate Hub, Press Progress and more, plus a special Alberta Advantage live show the night before, June 13th from 6-9PM. Admission is free!
July 26, 2025 — [MONTREAL, QC] Post-Tribeca, StanLand is also set present a live script read at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal! Get your tickets!
September 19-20, 2025 — [CALGARY, AB] Passes are now available for PodSummit YYC 2025. Catch over 15 sessions, from keynotes and panels, to workshops and live podcasts, and one hell of a party! Get your passes now!
Good Reads:
Podcasters Digest | Podcasting is more than content—it’s context
Big Extra Podcast | Too Hot for OnlyFans?
Adweek | Podcasting and Influencers Are on a Collision Course — Who Will Win?
Steve Goldstein | Five takeaways about the blurring lines of podcasting
Just Joe (who came home with us 9 years ago today!)…
Thanks for supporting Pod the North, I’ll be back in your inbox in two weeks!
Kattie
BSKY: @podthenorth.bsky.social | IN: @podthenorth
