Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

Awakening the ‘Voice of the Forest’ • 79
be some time before they would begin to actively participate in the
project. A few weeks later, in August of 2008, the station was proposed
and discussed at a community meeting and the idea was widely supported,
especially among the community’s elders.
With regards to the legality of establishing a station on the reserve,
we decided that the station would have to be pirate. The Canadian
Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) requires
that all radio stations apply for a permit to begin transmitting, including
low-power FM stations. However, the permitting process is long,
expensive and is designed for stations that have access to large amounts
of funding. In some areas of Canada, issues of frequency scarcity have
led the CRTC to crack down on pirate stations and make it harder
for low-power stations to obtain permits. Frequency scarcity refers to
when the full spectrum (or close to it) of usable FM frequencies in an
area are occupied, and is often an issue in urban areas where there
are many radio stations. Up in Barriere Lake, however, car radios pick
up mostly fuzz on the FM dial and one or two weak French-language
AM stations. Furthermore, First Nations communities have protections
under Section 35 of the Canadian Constitution, which guarantees
them aboriginal rights. Aboriginal rights are loosely defined but
include rights to land, rights to hunt, religious rights, among many
others, although the government contests whether aboriginal rights
include the right to self-governance. Over the last two decades many
radio stations have been established on reserves throughout Canada,
and those that cannot access a CRTC permit have claimed protection
under Section 35.
Throughout the following fall, we held a few training sessions in the
community, and in Montréal we rounded up funds for equipment. At
community training sessions, we discussed the types of programming
the community would like to have, worked on creating station IDs —
short, prerecorded clips that tell the listener what station they are hearing
— and practiced speaking and reading into the microphone. It was
at one of these early training sessions that we came up with a name in
Algonquin for the radio, which ended up being a much more difficult
process than we had imagined. Although there is a word in Algonquin
for radio (nodaktcigen), it refers to the actual listening device, or the
building that might house a station, but not the more abstract concept
of a radio station itself. There was also a debate as to whether the station
would be named for Barriere Lake, or Rapid Lake. Rapid Lake is