insideWaterloo was a local independent media initiative that amplified Black, Indigenous, and Racialized voices and excluded stories in Waterloo Region, Ontario. We worked with a community of writers and artists to tell investigative, critical, and personal stories in a variety of ways (e.g., long-form, podcasts, photo essays, data visualization).Stories were developed through journalistic mentorship. We didn’t choose our writers because of their journalistic experience; we supported historically excluded voices to tell the stories of their community free from the systemic oppression of mainstream media. This was narrative sovereignty in action: stories told by the community in the community’s own voice.Our commitment to decolonizing language:• Our stories sometimes included multilingual narratives, encompassing what Western linguistics might classify as dialects.We understood that as a diverse region with immigrant communities represented, the story might not be authentically told in Canadian English.• We honoured identity above colonial language and grammar rules.• We acknowledged that the violence of colonialism had led to precolonial languages developing different linguistic arcs as communities were destroyed.• As colonization is ongoing, so is the erasure of language; wherever possible, we endeavoured to act as an archive for languages at risk of extinction.

Funded by the Canadian government through the Local Journalism Initiative.