You may have heard of Poundmaker, the Indigenous chief who, through nonviolence, attempted to negotiate treaties with the Canadian government.
You probably haven’t heard of this Poundmaker: a few “alcoholic revolutionaries” in a dingy basement who wanted to create a newspaper that was more than just a student newspaper.
The story of Poundmaker begins with another student newspaper at the University of Alberta. This newspaper was called The Gateway. In the early 1970s, The Gateway was shifting its political stance farther and farther to the left. Political disagreement began to create substantial internal disagreement within the newspaper. In the spring of 1972, The Gateway appointed a new editor, bypassing the electoral process that many Gateway staffers believed in. This new editor also held beliefs that were opposed to those of the newspaper’s left-wing influences. Over the summer, the alienated gateway leftists started to plan out a new newspaper. This one would be ideologically accorded to their own beliefs. The potentially seceding staff put forth one final offer to the new editor to provide their services in return for staff democracy. Refusal finally prompted the disillusioned journalists to create their own publication.
On September 13th, 1972, Poundmaker published its first issue. Splayed across the front cover was an editorial entitled, “A Free and Democratic Student Press.” This article first explained why the newspaper came into being and second, informed its readers that The Gateway, at the request of the seceding staff, was kicked out of the Canadian University Press (CUP) and from the Youthstream Network (YN), two key organizations that provided advertising opportunities and solidarity among university student newspapers. Poundmaker had taken The Gateway’s place. The editorial boasted that Poundmaker would cost the students nothing (unlike The Gateway, they felt inclined to add). The editorial said, “If you’re interested in maintaining a free and democratic student newspaper on this campus and meeting a lot of burnt-out hippies and alcoholic revolutionaries, come and join us just a block off campus… We also have a well-stocked refrigerator.” So, born out of vindictiveness and separation, Poundmaker had come into being.
Poundmaker came on the University of Alberta newspaper scene with something to prove. In their first issue, they boasted that they were there to “strike fear into the hearts of student politicians and university bureaucrats alike.” It was in this manner that the Poundmaker got underway. In that first issue, they began to show how this newspaper would operate over the next three years of its existence. An entire page in that first issue was devoted to a boycott of Kraft, a company quickly monopolizing the dairy industry in Canada. Poundmaker, in an effort to support small-scale dairy farmers, provided a list of alternatives to Kraft for readers interested in participating in the boycott. At this stage, Poundmaker also sought to display the talents of students with a monthly student poetry section.
However, it was in Poundmaker’s third issue that they really started to reveal their unique outlook. The entire front page was devoted to what was called the “Poundmaker Manifesto.” The manifesto declared that objectivity in journalism was fundamentally impossible, and any publication that tried to convince you of its objectivity was fooling you. Poundmaker was, rather than trying to be perfectly objective, wanted to be upfront about its ideology. Reading Poundmaker, even though you knew that they were not going to give you an unbiased account of exactly what happened, at least you would know where they were coming from. The article gestures to the Edmonton Journal, the city’s main local newspaper. The Journal, Poundmaker argued, pretended to be objective; in reality, however, it took money from donors who were implicated in the capitalist system. It was then reasonable, Poundmaker argued, to expect the Journal to land on pro-capitalist narratives.
Throughout its first term in publication, Poundmaker fended off criticism in its editorial section; for example, one reader complained about the lack of objectivity in Poundmaker‘s pages. Dryly, the newspaper entitled this letter “blush.” But Poundmaker continued to fight for what they believed was right. Among other things, it spoke up for foreign students who were experiencing racism on campus, instructed students to stick up for their right to student health services, and published two pages discussing the consolidation of the communist revolution in Chile.
All the while, the newspaper maintained clarity about its inner workings. In the last issue before Christmas in 1972, it levelled with readers, telling them that they predicted a decline in advertising revenue in the second semester of the term. They also told readers that they had moved to a new basement, one that was equally dingy.
On February 1st, 1973, The Gateway decided it should set the record straight. Apparently, Poundmaker had approached the CUP after hearing that some CUP newspapers were still exchanging issues with The Gateway. Poundmaker asked for solidarity among the CUP. They wanted The Gateway shut out. On the same page, The Gateway featured an editorial discussing the impacts of each newspaper: “The Gateway often stops too soon; Poundmaker, on the other hand, often begins with assumptions presented as a priori truths.” A 1976 Gateway article pointed out that The Gateway had been hollowed of its most competent staffers, most of whom left for Poundmaker. But in 1973, The Gateway argued that neither the Poundmaker-attempted Kraft boycott nor The Gateway’s own stories had prompted any action among the student body.
The very next week, Poundmaker struck back. The paper published a news article claiming that The Gateway was $3000 over budget. At the end of the article, the reporter wrote: “Meanwhile, Poundmaker is continuing to publish on advertising revenue alone on a total budget much smaller than The Gateway’s deficit.” The newspapers’ rivalry was at its peak.
In Poundmaker’s first summer, the newspaper’s focus began to shift. An editorial stated that while their university news coverage was important, Poundmaker really took pride in the way they exposed their readers to “universal” topics. They announced that in the coming months, they would become a community newspaper “in the most general sense.” Throughout the summer, these promises came into being. Only two or three pages across the four issues we have access to from that summer are devoted to university-related news. In 1978, The Gateway’s Tom Barrett published “The Making of Poundmaker,” a history of the U of A’s second newspaper. Barrett tracked the paper’s development, noting that the newspaper quit reporting on university sports and stopped referring to itself as a “newspaper of the Students of the University of Alberta.” The trend of an increasing focus on city, regional, and even national and international news continued through the next school year. Increasingly, it featured international and national-level news. In February 1974, Poundmaker apologized for their inability to cover local issues in depth.
The cause of their inability to cover local issues, the student newspaper claimed, was their lack of staff and underfunding. These issues were consistent themes in Poundmaker, dating back to their first Christmas issue, where they projected a drop in advertising revenue in the winter semester, requiring them to find more volunteers to lighten the workload and donations from readers. As stated in their manifesto, Poundmaker was committed to complete self-sufficiency, thereby keeping their newspaper free from outside influence. While ideologically sound, this promise left them chronically short on cash. In February 1974, however, the problem had reached its lowest point yet: Poundmaker devoted the entire back cover to a plea for help, saying that they needed help if they were to get local news up and running again.
February 1974 would prove to be one of the final issues available on the online database I have used. The last one, from April of 1974, informed readers that they had no choice but to begin charging for their publication in the coming summer. They assured that Poundmaker was worth far more than the twenty-five-cent asking price. After this, Poundmaker drops out of view.
That’s where Tom Barrett and his 1978 article, “The Making of Poundmaker,” really comes in. Seemingly, Barrett had access to the post-April issues. That same spring, Poundmaker fully gave up its position as a university newspaper, leaving the CUP and YN. Poundmaker dragged drama wherever it went; in one of the spring issues, the newspaper jokingly pretended that the American Evangelical radio personality, Garner Ted Armstrong, had endorsed Poundmaker. It appears that Armstrong’s camp threatened legal action against the staff should they mention Armstrong’s name again. In the next months, Poundmaker’s staff actually went to court; Barratt, corroborated by an article in the Lethbridge Herald, reports that the Alberta government charged Poundmaker with “counselling the criminal offence of theft.” Poundmaker had parodied an advertisement in the Edmonton Journal, which advised people not to shoplift. Poundmaker, ostensibly seeing how ridiculous the advertisement was, copied the Journal’s phrasing to suggest that people should shoplift, because “Property is Theft.” This characteristically Poundmaker joke had provoked the wrath of the Alberta government. Luckily for Poundmaker’s staffers, the Herald confirms on October 29th, 1974, that the province acquitted the student newspaper.
Despite their legal victory, by the end of 1974, Poundmaker’s difficulties had compounded. The loss of campus advertising had proved critical for a paper already struggling for funding and manpower. In January 1975, Poundmaker published its final issue.
Its legacy would live on, however. In a Gateway article from 1979, we get our last mention of Poundmaker in the online archives. A newly appointed Gateway editor, lamenting that his paper had “gone soft in its old age,” recalled Poundmaker as the feisty challenger to the status quo that he wanted The Gateway to become. Poundmaker’s precedent showed that student papers should “stimulate thought and action by more than just fascists, Bible-thumping lunatics, communists, and lunatic columnists.” Post-mortem, Poundmaker had become an ideal.
Today, the story of Poundmaker is just as pertinent as it was to The Gateway’s editor in 1979. Journalism, especially journalism that is critical of power structures, is one of our last tools to push back against the authoritarianism that is creeping into the “free world.” Poundmaker’s financial struggles remind us that the tool that is journalism is not free, but requires the labour and daring of those who bring it to us. In return, quite frankly, we have to pay for their services – so do exactly that! Find a journalist who is working to bring people the facts about our complex world and figure out how to support them. And for those who are so inclined, get involved in student journalism! It is more powerful than one might think; Poundmaker’s reach (an interview with the leader of the Communist Party of Canada, the attention of a big-shot American radio host, the scrutiny of the Alberta government) shows us how much student journalists can achieve. I’m not putting Poundmaker on a pedestal – they were petty, vindictive, and definitely full of themselves – but they did get their message out there. Say your piece.
For this project, I used the University of Alberta’s database called Peel’s Prairie Provinces. The entire archive is available for free on the Internet Archive or at https://www.library.ualberta.ca/peel.
