Offered by Michelle McQuigge, BALANCE for Blind Adults.
May 12, 2026.
I’m Michelle McQuigge, CEO of BALANCE for Blind Adults, and I’m offering this month’s land acknowledgement.
I want to begin where BALANCE always does; by respectfully acknowledging that we’re meeting on the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. This land remains a home, gathering place, and travel route for many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples. Toronto is covered by Treaty 13, signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit, and by the Williams Treaties, signed with multiple Mississauga and Chippewa bands — treaties whose harms were formally apologized for, and partially settled, by Canada and Ontario in 2018. These lands are also covered by the Dish With One Spoon, a wampum covenant between the Anishinaabe, Mississaugas, and Haudenosaunee. It binds all who live here to share these lands and their resources peaceably, and with shared responsibility for keeping the dish full.
The theme this month is Indigenous media, and I want to use my time to reflect on a connection that has been sitting with me — between how Indigenous voices and blind voices have found their way into the media landscape. I’ll do it through a personal lens, because that’s the only honest one I have.
Before BALANCE, I was a reporter. And the journalist I most wanted to be was Connie Walker. Her podcast Finding Cleo was, for me, a working model of what serious accountability journalism could sound like when the form fits the story — when audio carries weight that print can’t. I dreamed of doing something like Finding Cleo on the issue of disabled people being warehoused, effectively, in long-term care facilities. That project never happened. I want to acknowledge that out loud, because it’s part of why I think about Indigenous media the way I do.
What I did witness was progress. When Indigenous delegations travelled to Rome to receive the Pope’s apology, The Canadian Press sent Brittany Hobson — an Indigenous reporter — to cover it. Months later, when the Pope visited Canada in person, she was one of only five Canadian journalists travelling with the papal press corps. On the return flight, she was the one who asked the Pope whether residential schools constituted genocide. He said yes. I was at CP at the time, and I was there to see those assignments go out. I want to be careful about how I describe what it felt like, because it wasn’t my apology to receive. But it felt like historic progress. The story being covered, and the journalist being trusted to cover it, finally aligned. That alignment is what Indigenous media at its best is doing — not asking permission from the print establishment to tell the story, but reshaping who tells it.
Mainstream media in this country was built on print and image. Newspapers, photography, television are formats that, by default, leave many people out. They marginalized Indigenous nations by reducing complex oral knowledge systems to footnotes in someone else’s account. They excluded blind people simply by being inaccessible at the surface level. Different exclusions, but they share a root: a culture that decided what knowledge counts and what form it should take.
I want to be careful here. Indigenous oral traditions are not an accessibility feature. They are sovereign knowledge systems, with their own protocols, authorities, and purposes that long predate this country. So when I notice that audio-first media has created room for Indigenous voices in a way print never did, I’m not equating that with the audio description track on a CBC drama. I’m saying Indigenous and disability communities have been served by a shift in what counts as legitimate media. When the form changed, voices that had been edited out for generations became accessible.
That doesn’t make our histories the same. It does mean we share a stake in protecting the spaces where voices that print pushed to the margins can be fully heard.
BALANCE’s work is grounded in inclusion, respect, empathy, trust, and independence. Everything we do is in service of a larger goal: empowering blind and partially sighted people to lead life on their own terms, within a society that welcomes and supports them. The Dish With One Spoon teaches that what we share — land, water, attention, public space — stays full only when responsibility for keeping it full is shared. A society that welcomes and supports its members is one where that responsibility doesn’t fall only on those most likely to be excluded.
In gratitude to those who first occupied these lands, I’ll close as BALANCE does: by hoping to honour and to forge new connections with all residents of Turtle Island and beyond.