Telling Indigenous Women’s Stories – Why the Coverage Needs to Go Further
"This isn’t another poor Indian story, is it?”
It’s been over 10 years, but I still remember the shock I felt hearing those words from my producer. It was 2005 and I worked at a national current affairs show, and had just pitched my first story on a missing Indigenous woman. A girl I knew from back home in Saskatchewan had disappeared. Her name was Amber Redman and she was 19. Amber was on a volleyball team that I coached when I was in university. I didn’t know her well, but I remember she was a shy, sweet girl.
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Enter 30. Newly separated from my common law boyfriend. Quit my job managing a yoga studio run by highly nurturing, supportive women. Joined a fitness company run by three men with athletic backgrounds. Relationship gone, steady paycheque disappeared, denested from my daily support system that I had called my family. Instability at its finest. As I entered this new territory, I was forced to not only find my voice within a new, male-dominated work environment, but also to tear down the old version of who I thought I was and rebuild from scratch. 
Like so many girls who grew up with Barbies and princesses for role models, I not only had trouble accepting my own body, but being accepted by others. I was teased in kindergarten for being chubby, because, even at this young age, children knew that it was bad to be fat.
