The Media’s Representation of Cindy Gladue: An Analysis

Abstract

Cindy Gladue, a 36-year-old Cree Métis woman, was murdered in an Edmonton hotel bathroom in June 2011 while working as a sex worker. While much has been written about her death, the media’s news reporting has largely failed to adequately capture the nuances of Cindy’s death. This includes both the gravity of the individual crime perpetrated by Bradley Barton and the colonial gendered violences that made her death possible. Since Indigenous women are judged based on their post-mortem representation from the media, this essay analyses how the inadequate representation of Cindy Gladue’s murder contributes to the negative profilicity of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. This inadequate representation then allows for the continuation of gender-based harm. I use a Critical Discourse Analysis (van Dijk, 2015) framework to link discourses used in international, mainstream Canadian, and Indigenous news sources to the ongoing missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, two spirit plus (MMIWG2S+) crisis faced by Indigenous communities to situate and reassign responsibility for this gender-based violence