Canada’s first triumph at the Vancouver Olympics

  Jim Van Horne, the sports broadcaster, has been making trips to Winnipeg where he’s been teaching an unlikely group of people how to cover the Vancouver Olympics.

   They have no television experience, most of them, but when the Vancouver opening ceremony starts in February, they will be in a Winnipeg studio announcing the event.

   And that’s where they’ll be working for the next 17 days of the Winter Games – anchoring coverage and providing play by play in languages that will include Cree, Mohawk, Inuktituk, Ojibway and Mi’kmaq.

   The Olympics were created to inspire a nation’s pride, but there is another reason for Canadians to be proud of these Games. For the first time ever, the domestic broadcast will include full network coverage in aboriginal languages.

   “This has never been done before for any indigenous peoples around this world,” Jean LaRose, the chief executive officer of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), said. “And, it’s the first ever for aboriginal people in Canada. What we’re doing is creating an industry that doesn’t exist.”

   The story started before the television rights to the Vancouver Games were awarded. CTV’s broadcast partner, Rogers Media, was preparing a presentation to the International Olympic Committee that featured ethnic telecasts on Omni TV, when a light went on. Why not include telecasts for Canada’s indigenous people on APTN?

  The initial plan was to provide coverage of only the opening and closing ceremony. But after the CTV-Rogers Olympic consortium won the TV rights, APTN pushed for more content.

  “We tried to coax CTV to do a bit more, but it didn’t quite work,” LaRose said. “They felt, I think, that at the time they didn’t have the capacity to do more.

  “But when Keith Pelley was brought in (to head the TV consortium), we had a couple of telephone conversations and he sort of got intrigued by the concept.

  “Keith pushed it to Rick Brace (CTV’s president of sports and business planning) and both of them became really strong champions of this initiative.”

   The result is a full schedule of coverage. APTN, which has North, East, West and HDTV feeds, will air 12 to 16 hours of content daily, in seven and perhaps eight languages including English and French. The opening and closing ceremonies, as well as major events will be simulcast live in three aboriginal languages, with additional languages used for programming on a daily basis.

  APTN hired Doug Howe, a veteran Olympic TV producer, to run the operation. During the CBC’s 2008 Olympic telecasts, Howe discussed the project with Van Horne, who was also in Beijing for the CBC. Van Horne was intrigued and agreed to train the would-be announcers and broadcasters.

   Van Horne, who teaches broadcasting in Toronto, first met the group during the past summer. He wasn’t sure what sort of reception he would receive. Most of them were elders in their community, 40 to 60 years of age.

   “They looked at me with great skepticism,” Van Horne said. “They knew who I was and all the rest, but they were wondering, what is this guy doing here? And what’s he going to do?”

  Van Horne got to work teaching them the basics, but during a follow-up seminar two weeks ago in Winnipeg he also reminded them of just who their audience will be.

  “They were approaching it as they were doing an English language telecast,” Van Horne said. “We got into this pretty heavily. I said, listen, you’re not talking to a white man. You’re talking to your brothers and sisters, aboriginals. And you have to tell them stories that they can relate to.

  “It’s not necessary to have the white man accept you, because the white man is not going to understand a word you’re saying. You have to talk to your people and your culture.”

  Van Horne will return to the APTN studios in February to mentor the broadcasters during the Games coverage.

  From the perspective of APTN, the hope is that the broadcasts will stimulate interest among aboriginals in their languages. In some communities, an indigenous language is spoken by only 10 per cent of the population. They’re slowly disappearing.

   “The goal behind this initiative is to create a sense of pride among our young people so they realize there is a place for their language,” LaRose said. “We want them to understand that it can be used at the world stage and there’s nothing wrong with speaking it, as well as English or French.”

  Van Horne says the significance of the assignment is not lost on the aboriginal broadcasters.

  “They understand what they are doing and they realize this is history in the making.”