CRITICAL PHOTOJOURNALISM

Amber Bracken is a Canadian photographer based in Edmonton and covers assignments across the Alberta province and beyond. After getting her start as a staffer at the Edmonton Sun, she moved on to a freelance career in the pursuit of long-term projects. Select clients include National Geographic, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, BuzzFeed, The Wall Street Journal, Maclean's, and Canadian Geographic. 

The interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

JW: How did you get interested in Indigenous issues?

AB: There’s a long history answer, and also an immediate practical answer. The long history answer is that I've always cared about anything related to racial justice, being from a mixed race family. I could see really clearly how they were treated differently than me. And there's a long, complicated family story about how some lives went off the rails, and others, not so much, even though we're from the same family. Does that make sense? I sometimes feel like my family is a little study on what systemic racism does to us, you know? And it's not about the big forms of racism—it's the little things that ladder up to the big things.

JW: You mean the cumulative effects of microaggressions?

AB: Exactly—particularly with children—I think they can do a lot to derail people. So, I cared about racial justice and the ideas of fairness and justice. In Alberta, and particularly where I was growing up, you see a lot of injustice when it comes to Indigenous communities. Western Canada has a pretty high population of Indigenous people relative to other places in the country and Edmonton has around thirty percent, which is quite visible. I grew up witnessing a lot of the explicit and implicit racism around Indigenous people. So this is the long, background answer as to why I've always been interested in racial justice.

The short, pragmatic, situational answer was that I started volunteering at this art-based outreach for marginalized youth. They had music studios and held dancing lessons—any creative venture that the kids would be interested in. And when the kids showed up, they would have social workers there, bus tickets, food, and access to doctors. It's for kids who are under-cared for and the population they serve is almost entirely Indigenous, and it's not because they are specifically targeting Indigenous kids, it's just that that's who needs their services. I was ashamed of myself at how much I had not acknowledged this fact. I became really interested in what was going on with them—there's this whole population that was pretty much invisible to the general public. A lot of them are housing insecure, or they're in foster care, so you can walk down the street, but you don't see them sitting on the street, at least not the same way as you do in other places. They were, in a way, passing undetected to my eyes until I started meeting them and hearing their stories because of the arts outreach. A lot of the kids are rappers, and they were telling their own stories. I started spending time with them, and that was really my gateway into this work. 

I started a long term project with them with the idea that I was going to do something on the kids rapping, but that has totally changed shape. I think it's the right story, but I had the wrong name on it. What I've realized, or what we've worked out together, is that the story is actually about intergenerational trauma—as youth have not, themselves, attended residential schools, but they are experiencing a continuation of the impacts of colonization in Canada.

I stumbled into something that aligned with my interests, and then by working on it slowly, I gave myself time to learn about what I was actually doing. So, rather than just grabbing the surface story—which in retrospect I probably should have published something on the rappers—because it's so interesting—but by digging further into the surface story, and doing it slowly enough and staying long enough—that's where I think backyard storytelling shines. It gives you an opportunity to build relationships—real relationships—that you can return to and show up in people's universes on a regular enough basis. You can learn things that sometimes people are not particularily good at articulating about themselves. We all have those things—things that you don't even think to say out loud, because it's just part of our existence.

And I'm really grateful for the whole conversation around identity, and I think the most important or valuable piece to come out of that larger conversation is an impetus for people to have self-reflective moments before beginning a story—asking important questions like, “What's my relationship to this story? What's my background? What are the limitations of what I know? What are the limitations of my skill?” Just to have a moment to ask, before you dive in, “Is this the right story for me?” 

I tell a lot of stories in Indigenous communities, but what people don't see is there are a lot of stories that I don't tell in Indigenous communities, as well. Just because I have a body of work or a career that, so far, has taken me into different Indigenous communities, it doesn't mean that everything is for me. It’s step by step—every new story that I begin, or every new place that I go, there are boundaries on what's ok for me to talk about, and what's not ok for me to talk about. A big example for me within that community is that I don't feel it's my place to start unpacking things like lateral violence, because it's messy and potentially very hurtful. There are certain things that you do need lived experience to understand completely and that the missteps are potentially so damaging that I wouldn't necessarily venture into that myself. And so for me, the conversations around lateral violence are definitely one of those things because it's braided together. I don't know what value it adds for an outsider to come and say, like to point the finger of people in that way.