UBC j-school alum Jodie Martinson was the keynote speaker at our welcome event for the first-year students and launching the start of the new school year. Jodie gave a heartfelt presentation on September 6, inspiring many of the new students to emulate her spirit, curiosity and tenacity. Here is her address to the students:
Three years ago I was sitting exactly where you are now. It was an election season; there was a federal one and a municipal one coming up.
And I was horribly uninformed about almost everything, except for one thing: the Alberta oil sands.
For one of our first assignments, our teachers organized a very exciting election event. It was a debate between four prominent Vancouver candidates for each of the major federal parties. We’d watch the debate, then we would have the rest of the day to file our story, on a deadline, just like a regular newsroom.
The debate the school organized was a newsworthy event in its own right because of the big name candidates. So, if I remember correctly, CBC sent a camera, our moderator was a columnist for the Vancouver Sun and there were lots of other reporters in the room.
It was up to US to ask the questions. Smart, intelligent, informed questions. And one of those questions from one of my esteemed first year j-school colleagues was:
“If you were an animal, what kind of animal would you be?”
What a soft question, right?
Well, the joke was on me.
When it got to the NDP candidate he narrated a recent trip through the Western Passage by ship, then he waxed poetic about the demise of the polar bear. Then out of nowhere he said: “That’s why we have to shut down the tar sands.”
My heart skipped a beat.
Dealing with the story
I am an Albertan, a Calgarian, I did a fourth grade presentation on oil with a map of Alberta that had little lights on it in all the parts of Alberta that have oil reserves. I know my oil and gas.
Add to that that I had just finished my first movie. That movie was called To The Tar Sands. I biked alongside about 20 young environmentalists and filmed their trip across Alberta as they advocated against the tar sands.
I knew that those words the NDP candidate had just uttered, shut down the tar sands, were newsworthy. They were at odds with the position that every federal party had taken on the oil sands.
In fact, I knew what he said was explosive, because, climate change or not, shutting down the tar sands would mean lots of people would lose their jobs all across the country because of how important they are to Canada’s economy.
So I squirmed in my seat. What to do? News was happening in front of my face! I passed a note to Kathryn Gretsinger who passed a note to the moderator. He asked the NDP candidate for a clarification.
He repeated: We need to shut down the tar sands.
That triggered a reaction in the room. The reporters who had come to see the debate had found their story. The debate ended.
And I found myself locked in my office on the third floor, writing an article for the Vancouver Sun. Unlike a lot of you, I’m more of a radio/video person. I had never written for a real newspaper. I was scared to death, felt totally out of my league, and still didn’t really get the concept of a newspaper “lede.” Don’t worry if you don’t either, trust me, you will soon enough.
But, first I had to have an identity crisis!
You see, on the heels of releasing a documentary film where several of the main characters carry placards that read “Shut down the tar sands.” I had just put myself in a position where I have to call out a local politician for saying the same thing.
Who am I? What do I want to be in the world? Why does my first newspaper story ever have to be about the tar sands.
After much anguish, I did my best to write the story. I pointed out how important the oil sands are for our economy. How even moderate environmental groups don’t call for a complete shut down of the tar sands.
The Vancouver Sun ran their columnist’s story about it on the front page and gave me attribution credit.
Later, I had a drink at the school pub with others from my class. Everyone else chatted casually. They were fine from the experience. I felt like I had sold my soul.
But that was the beginning of an important lesson I learned: Objectivity is not as crazy as it sounds. It’s a practice. It’s a way of thinking you have to exercise every day. It’s the most important thing to have in your toolkit as a journalist.
Except for one other thing that is more important. It can’t be taught, your humanity.
When we first talked about being “objective” in journalism school, I didn’t get what that meant. For me, it sounded like being a “machine.” Was I supposed to give up all my own convictions? I’m an opinionated person. I want to agree or disagree.
I wondered how I would ever be able to reconcile my opinionated self with the practice of journalism. Where did I, the human being with lots of convictions about making the world a better place fit in the world of journalism. Did I have to become a machine to do it?
Telling stories
Later that year, I went to Uganda with a professor from UBC,Dr. Erin Baines, who works across the street at the Liu Institute. She and I have partnered for three years on a project to learn and tell the stories of a group of very unique women in Northern Uganda.
Northern Uganda suffered through about a quarter century of war between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is lead by a really illusive and enigmatic guy called Joseph Kony who is still very much active massacring in some of the worst parts of East Africa.
He is wanted by the ICC, and if you read about the guy on the New York Times or BBC, you’d be amazed at how little we know about him.
It seemed to Erin and I that there was a way to really get inside the LRA, a group of people who were totally overlooked by the international community who had lots of insider scoops to share about Joseph Kony.
The women who were forced to be his wives or wives to his top commanders. And no one was really asking them questions or realizing the amazing amount of information they had.
So we wanted to learn from this group of women. The skeletons of their stories were similar. They were abducted when they were little girls, forced to marry top commanders in the LRA, and managed to escape with children who in many cases look like their rebel fathers.
But they are women who have learned what parts of their story to share and what parts can get them in trouble with the authorities.They’ve learned what parts pull on the heart strings – and purse strings – of mzungus, of white people, and can recite those parts verbatim. They’ve learned to shut up because remembering hurts.
We got a group of them together and we were doing big group interviews about their experiences. And it was amazing, and we were learning all sorts of stuff. But it still felt like they were bottling a lot inside.
Erin had read about this interview method called body maps. So we asked the women to get into groups of two. We all laid big sheets of paper out on the floor, and we asked the women to trace an outline of their bodies, then draw pictures of their scars, the parts of their bodies that hold stories for them.
Erin and I did the same.
After it was over, we came together as a group to present our body maps. Erin and I went first. We talked about the Canadian woman: maybe she has a lot of education in her brain, but maybe she’s been raped, maybe she even has HIV, or other STDs. I was too gutless to get too close to my own story.
But still, that moment was a game changer. That little bit of our own humanity, a glimpse where they saw us and our fears and worries about the world. It changed everything.
Many of the women got up and spoke about the violence they had survived with such candor, we were blown away. But more than that, they started to share themselves.
Finally, one of them said to us: “We didn’t think women in Canada knew about rape or AIDS. We didn’t want to hurt you by telling you about our suffering.”
Bringing us closer
Since then, I’ve spent almost three years working on a documentary film about one of the women who was in that group and her kids. I wish I could tell you everything I know about her right now, because the life she has lived is absolutely incredible. Her life shows that the truth really is stranger than fiction…and more full of light and darkness and all the complex shades in between.
I want to show you a little clip from some of the raw footage I shot this year, and you’ll see that she is sharing stories with me that don’t always cast her in the brightest light.
There are so many great quotes and ideas about why storytelling matters. You’ll come across lots of them in the next two years, and have some really beautiful lectures from the professors in front of you, all of whom live to story-tell. Then, your first few days in a local newsroom will feel strange, because you’ll be asked to do a story about an animal hoarder with 44 cats.
But the beautiful quotes you will have heard about storytelling still apply. Stories are what bring us together.
The women I’ve come to know in Uganda had never told their stories to anyone when I met them. Not to each other. Not to the army officials who held them in jail to get intelligence from them. Not to their children when they came home from school asking if it was true that their daddy is one of the most hated men in Africa.
But when they narrated their story, when they told their story, something changed for them.
It was the little things. One woman said she stood up for herself when she was bullied at the water pump by another woman who called her a rebel. On bad days when their traumatic memories would rear up, they would say things to each other like, well, you’re story is nothing. So-and-so was raped too and she got AIDs. And it helped them.
It’s as if by narrating their life’s stories to date, they’ve become the authors of their futures. Not that their problems disappeared.
Their challenges are staggering: chronic poverty, lots of kids and men with no money to share but STIs for everyone, stigma that greets them literally on every corner, families and a government who have rejected them because of what they did when they were part of the LRA.
But sharing their stories has made them feel less alone. And if through telling our stories, any story, we feel less alone, then I believe that is the beginning of a better future for all of us in this great project we call human civilization. By sharing our stories, we become a community with shared understandings.
And as the storytellers, we get to be the people who become changed by the people, politicians or survivors of war, who are willing to hold their lives up as examples of what it means to be a human being amongst other human beings and nature.
So good luck with this chapter of your lives’ stories.
About Jodie
Jodie Martinson is an Emmy award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. Her first documentary film was To The Tar Sands. The film was done on a shoestring budget off of the back of a bicycle. It screened to a sold-out crowd at the Calgary International Film Festival and was officially selected for the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Vancouver.
Jodie’s current project is a documentary film set in Uganda about women who were wives to the top commanders in the Lord’s Resistance Army. The film’s working title is First Lady, Rebel War.
