Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction

Visual Anthropology Review, 2023

The following dialogue—with Indigenous filmmakers and anthropologists Dr. Angelo Baca (Diné/Hopi), Teresa Martinez-Chavez (Zapotec), Dr. Teresa Montoya (Diné), and Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka ʻŌiwi)—charts the ethical protocols and decisions undertaken in the production of documentary films with and within Indigenous communities. These films underscore the significance of prioritizing culturally specific protocols about knowledge production and its attendant impacts on media circulation. Each filmmaker considers the broader colonial legacies that have shaped various representations of Indigenous life and what refusing certain media conventions, such as digital distribution, might mean for theorizing Indigenous media practices in broader anticolonial frameworks.

Sociologia & Antropologia

This article covers a wide range of projects from the earliest epistemological challenges posed by video experiments in remote Central Australia in the 1980s to the emergence of indigenous filmmaking as an intervention into both the Australian national imaginary and the idea of world cinema. It also addresses the political activism that led to the creation of four national indigenous television stations in the early 21st century: Aboriginal People's Television Network in Canada; National Indigenous Television in Australia; Maori TV in New Zealand; and Taiwan Indigenous Television in Taiwan); and considers what the digital age might mean for indigenous people worldwide employing great technological as well as political creativity.

Canadian Journal of Films Studies, 2020

In the passage we have chosen as our epigraph, Ojibwe writer, broadcaster, and producer Jesse Wente refers to the “New Wave” of Indigenous cinema “in an effort to explain the global coalescing of Indigenous artists finding new expression in cinema over the past decade and a half.”2 Wente is the director of film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and has been heading up Canada’s Indigenous Screen Office since it was established in 2018, with the goal of providing concrete ways to support the “narrative sovereignty”3 of Canada’s First Peoples. The perspective he describes coincides with the methodological and philosophical principles outlined by Barry Barclay (Ngāti Apa and Pāhekā), the Māori film director, philosopher, and writer who originated the concept of “Fourth Cinema.”4 Wente describes today’s Indigenous cinema as characterized by an organic evolution in constant interaction with the many realities, local and transnational, of First Peoples individuals, families, and communities. It is a movement made up of artists who are motivated by similar concerns working on projects that interconnect, a movement driven by festivals that function as places for gathering, exchange, and dissemination. This resolutely engaged and transnational Indigenous film movement must be understood in all of its various aspects.

SOUTHERN …, 1998

HAU : Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2023

Over the last fifty years, First Nations media-makers in North America have been mobilizing to gain broader coverage of their concerns by creating their own media representing Indigenous actions protecting their land and sovereignty. Blockades, often paired with occupations, have proved a particularly effective mode of resisttance for Indigenous peoples to counter ongoing settler-colonial pressures, in particular extractive infrastructure and real estate projects that violate Indigenous protocols around sacred sites, land, and traditions as well as treaty rights. However, during these actions that impede the flow of commerce and capital across settler-colonial infrastructures, Indigenous communities have not always been able to represent their motives in these struggles directly. Mainstream news broadcasts rarely include the necessary explanation and historical foregrounding of settler-colonial land grabs, destruction of lifeways and cultural practices, and the policies regulating Native lives when these actions occur. The interventions of Indigenous media-makers have offered important alternatives to hegemonic projects of Indigenous erasure.

Transmotion, 2019

This article seeks both to communicate a sense of the vibrancy and diversity of Indigenous new media artworks and projects, and to “frame” them within the context of the particular transnational networks of friendship and support into which they are born and in which they circulate. It is my contention that Indigenous new media arts have particularly flourished across the parts of the “Anglo-world” (Belich) that are the result of the early waves of British settler colonialism, most notably in countries such as Canada, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the United States. The article explores the conditions that make such global Indigenous networks across the British (post)colonial settler world possible, before moving on to study in more detail works by Hymhenteqhous Mizhekay Odayin/Turtle Heart, Skawennati, Ruben Anton Komangapik, Lisa Reihana, William Ray Wilson, and Lily Hibberd and Curtis Taylor, amongst others. It concludes with an analysis of the exhibition of Indigenous new...

Humanities

Asserting the right to meaningful representation, challenging the epistemological and methodological expansion of global corporate capitalism and its impacts on Indigenous Peoples’ territories and cultures, aligns with the implementation of global treaties and conventions that are part of key international laws regarding issues of climate change, biodiversity conservation, education, global health, human rights, and sustainable development. Indigenous Peoples have been consistently excluded from nation state visions of modernity and development, which continues to limit their full participation in global sustainable development initiatives and their meaningful representation therein. Increasing the visibility of this struggle is imperative for Indigenous Peoples, particularly around the strategic areas in which the implementation of global sustainable development treaties, policies, and goals continues to affect their rights. This article inquires whether Indigenous Peoples’ emancip...

ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 2024

This article examines prefigurative politics within a heterotopic parallel present activated by the contributions of the anarchist video collective sub.Media. Activists seeking to ‘plug into’ the resistance can find information, inspiration, and motivation by engaging with sub.Media’s video originals and remixes. They are part of a vital activist ecosystem that encourages participation in prefigurative relationship building fomenting shared anti-authoritarian values. Through their connections with Indigenous and activist communities, sub.Media demonstrates how Indigenous warriors and anarchists may combine forces to mobilise generative resistance to colonialism in the thrust of Indigenous resurgence.

This article proposes that settler communities cannot teach or understand our shared intercultural history without listening to ideas presented by Indigenous communities about their own history in lands currently occupied by modern nation-states. This history enables us to understand the power of the ethnographic gaze and its relation to The Doctrine of Discovery (1493), which extinguished Indigenous rights to lands and resources, rights later transferred to the modern nation-states through the legal notion of " eminent domain ". These rights include the ownership of intangibles such as the image and storytelling through photography and film. Maori scholars Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Barry Barclay and Merata Mita are cited on knowledge production, copyright and image sovereignty to decolonise our understanding of the right to self-representation. The study includes a brief analysis of films that help deco-lonise an ethnographic gaze at these relationships, particularly the Brazilian documentary " O Mestre e o Divino " by Tiago Cam-pos Torre (2013).

Development in Practice Vol 19. No. 4-5 2009