About Wawatay News

Wawatay News

Overview

Wawatay News is an Indigenous newspaper published in Sioux Lookout, Ontario, for the First Nations of Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) and the wider Indigenous population of northern Ontario. It appears in print as a tabloid — currently monthly, according to the society's own December 2025 description of its services — and online as Wawatay News Online, the continuously updated news site at wawataynews.ca. The paper's name in Oji-Cree is Waawaate Aajimowinan (ᐙᐙᐦᑌ ᐋᒋᒧᐎᓇᐣ), and it publishes in English and in the Indigenous languages of the region, Ojibway, Oji-Cree and Cree. Publishing since 1974, it is one of the oldest Indigenous newspapers in Canada.

Wawatay News is the print and online news arm of the Wawatay Communications Society, the Sioux Lookout–based Indigenous media organization that also operates the Wawatay Radio Network and Wawatay TV. It is nevertheless a distinct outlet in its own right, with its own history, format, publication cycle and editorial staff: the newspaper predates the radio network by a decade, and the society's website is the newspaper's site, carrying its reporting under the Wawatay News name. This profile covers the newspaper and its online edition; the radio service is profiled separately.

History

The newspaper grew out of a newsletter called Keesis, begun in 1972 as the people of the Nishnawbe Aski region set out to build their own communications system. Elders in the northern First Nations wanted a publication of their own, and when the Wawatay Native Communications Society was formed in 1974, the newsletter developed into the Wawatay News newspaper. The society took its name from the word wawatay, northern lights (aurora borealis) in the Cree and Ojibway languages. The paper's first editor was Patricia Ningewance Nadeau of Lac Seul First Nation, who went on to become a prominent Ojibwe language teacher and author.

Through the 1970s and 1980s the paper was part of a generation of Indigenous publications supported under the federal Native Communications Program. When Ottawa cut funding to Indigenous newspapers around the start of the 1990s, many of those papers folded; an academic survey of Aboriginal newspapers in the Canadian Journal of Communication counted Wawatay News among only five of the twelve program-funded publications that survived. A contemporary account from that period describes Wawatay News as a semi-monthly tabloid working hard to stay alive on a small advertising market centred on Sioux Lookout and Dryden, and notes its continuity of staff and strong editorial record against non-Indigenous competition. Reference sources have long described the paper as semi-monthly, although the society's own descriptions at different times have also called it weekly or bi-weekly; its frequency has varied over the decades.

By the late 1990s the paper was edited by Jody Porter, and its pages mixed staff reporting with contributions faxed and sent in from communities across the north — including a weekly column, Under the Northern Sky, contributed from the James Bay coast beginning in 1998. In 2003 the society created a digital archive to preserve its decades of print and broadcast material, and in 2007 it launched Wawatay News Online, giving the newspaper a web edition that has since become its most frequently updated form. In 2013 the society's partnership with Journalists for Human Rights, training community-based Indigenous reporters across northern Ontario, won the Canadian Ethnic Media Association's Innovation Award.

The paper's survival has not been uninterrupted. In November 2014 the society stopped services amid financial difficulty, the newspaper's staff were laid off, and for a time the paper did not publish; the society restructured in 2015 and restored its services. The society's own current description of its work, published in December 2025, again lists a monthly newspaper among the services it distributes, alongside daily radio programming and its multimedia website, and its online edition has published dated news reporting through 2025 and into 2026.

Programming and Content

Wawatay News reports on the life of the Nishnawbe Aski communities: chief and council elections and nomination meetings, tribal council and NAN assemblies, health and education, housing and infrastructure, hunting, fishing and hockey, and the land and resource questions that dominate northern politics. Its online reporting in the summer of 2025, for example, followed the grassroots First Nation youth movements that walked from Timmins to Queen's Park in Toronto and rallied in Ottawa against Ontario's Bill 5 and the federal Bill C-5, with staff coverage from Mattagami, Attawapiskat and the other James Bay and NAN communities along the way; in March 2026 it was reporting community sports, including the Attawapiskat First Nation women's hockey team winning its category at the Rupert River Cup in Waskaganish, Quebec. Columns and opinion are a longstanding part of the mix — the Under the Northern Sky column, contributed to the paper since the 1990s, continues to appear in its blogs and columns section — alongside community announcements, photographs submitted from the communities, and material in Indigenous languages, including its Oji-Cree masthead name.

A defining feature of the paper is that much of its reporting originates in the communities themselves, through community correspondents and contributors filing from places that southern news organizations rarely reach. The society has deliberately built that capacity, including through the Indigenous Reporters Program run with Journalists for Human Rights, which trained local freelance journalists in NAN communities to research and sell print and radio stories told from a First Nation perspective. The society's publisher profile credits Wawatay with journalism honours including an OCNA Best Editorial award.

Audience and Reach

The newspaper's territory is the vast NAN region of northern Ontario — the society's membership is the 49 First Nation communities of Nishnawbe Aski Nation — together with other Treaty and northern Ontario communities. According to Wawatay, the print paper is distributed free to the residents of 93 First Nations in Northern Ontario, is also sold through newsstand dealers in other northern communities, and offers subscriptions to readers outside its general circulation territory. The society puts the paper's circulation at 9,300 copies with a reading audience of over 58,000 Aboriginal people; a current publisher directory describes the monthly paper as distributed to more than 40 First Nations communities and to Indigenous residents of northern Ontario towns and cities. In Sioux Lookout itself, the paper is one of the town's two community newspapers, alongside the Sioux Lookout Bulletin. For many remote, fly-in First Nations — where the paper arrives as one of the few regular outside publications written from a First Nation perspective — it functions as a primary source of regional news.

Digital Presence

Wawatay News Online, launched in 2007, is the newspaper's digital edition and the society's principal website, at wawataynews.ca. The site publishes news on a rolling basis in sections that include community news, sports and blogs-columns, carries staff and contributor bylines from across the north, and hosts back issues of the print paper — a York University research guide notes print back issues from 2013 onward available through the site. The society's digital archive project, established in 2003, preserves its historical print and broadcast material. Because the society's radio and television services have no separate public website, wawataynews.ca also serves as the organization's general web home, but the site is branded and organized as the newspaper: its dated 2025 and 2026 items — from August 2025 coverage of First Nation elections and youth protests to a December 2025 society posting and March 2026 sports reporting — appear as Wawatay News articles.

Ownership and Organisation

Wawatay News is owned and published by the Wawatay Communications Society — also styled the Wawatay Native Communications Society — a self-governing, not-for-profit Indigenous organization incorporated in 1974 and controlled by its board of directors. The society describes itself as an independent, community-driven Indigenous organization; its membership is the 49 First Nation communities of Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which formally adopted its mandate and mission at an annual general membership meeting on May 5–6, 2004: to use appropriate technologies to meet the communication needs of people of Indigenous ancestry in northern Ontario, preserving, maintaining and enhancing Indigenous languages and culture. The society's general office is in Sioux Lookout, with bureaus in Timmins and Thunder Bay. Alongside the newspaper it operates the Wawatay Radio Network and the Wahsa distance-education radio service, and produces television programming through Wawatay TV for broadcast on APTN; it also provides translation and interpretation services. The society's December 2025 recruitment of a chief executive officer, conducted through the newspaper's website, is a further sign of the organization — and the paper — in active operation.

Contact and Availability

The print edition of Wawatay News is a tabloid distributed free across the First Nations of Nishnawbe Aski Nation and northern Ontario, with newsstand sales in other northern communities and subscriptions available outside the circulation territory; Wawatay News Online is published continuously at wawataynews.ca. The society's general office is at 16 5th Avenue, Sioux Lookout, Ontario, P8T 1B7, and business directories list its telephone as +1 807-737-2263.