Naming and Portraying Indigenous peoples in the New Brunswick Press

Abstract

Speech conveys representations, carried by words, circulated through discourse and transmitted in media messages. Naming takes on particular importance in the construction of these representations, and marks the quality of a relationship. Representations of and relationships with the Aboriginal peoples of Canada are intimately related to the processes of categorization and stereotyping. What do people of European descent in New Brunswick call Aboriginal peoples in their press? What relationship quality does naming reveal? This paper seeks to answer these questions by analyzing articles in two New Brunswick newspapers between 1999 and 2019, l’Acadie Nouvelle and the Moncton Times and Transcript