I encountered journalism on the day I came to understand the word "community."

It was my first assignment as a student photojournalist and I was behind the barricades in Quebec at what became known as the Oka Crisis. It was the summer of 1990, and the news media were watching the military showdown between the Canadian armed forces and a Mohawk community.

The confrontation involved plans to expand a municipal golf course onto an ancient Mohawk burial ground. This standoff, which some consider Canada's Wounded Knee, lasted two and a half months. When it was over, so much had changed, including the political balance between First Nations and the federal government.

As the day turned to dusk, it was clear that I would remain at the standoff through the night. A few members of the Mohawk Warrior Society had pulled up plastic lawn chairs around a rabbit-eared television directly behind the barricade of overturned police vehicles and large branches. They were watching the evening news. They invited me to join them, and when I did I saw that Alanis Obomsawin, a First Nations Abenaki documentary filmmaker, was there to document this crisis through her own eyes for the National Film Board of Canada.

One hundred meters down the road and behind the barricades, military guns were aimed in the community's direction and ready to be fired. Army helicopters buzzed above. Like the military, the Warriors had weapons. But there were unarmed women and children present as well.

As I watched TV with the Warriors, I came to realize how divergent the mainstream representation of this armed conflict was from what I was witnessing. That evening I heard about unresolved land claims and the abuse of power through the centuries as non-Natives encroached on First Nations lands. There were among the mainstream media some well-established members who expressed views about this mistreatment--a view I shared. Later, they were accused of Stockholm syndrome.

That evening I became committed to and certain of the value of the independent and community-centered making of media. During the intervening decades a tsunami of this kind of storytelling became central to the digital democratization of media. But for me that night crystallized the connections among media making and democracy, journalism and documentary, citizenship and community.

Digital Media and Community

Taking place, as my epiphany did, at the dawn of digital media, I became aware early on of its revolutionary potential.

A few months later, in March 1991, TV viewers in Los Angeles had witnessed one of the first modern acts of citizen journalism. When George Holliday heard police sirens and a commotion outside his bedroom window, he went to the balcony of his high-rise...