Indigenous media

Indigenous media can reference film, video, music, digital art, and sound produced and created by and for indigenous people. It refers to the use of communication tools, pathways, and outlets by indigenous peoples for their own political and cultural purposes.

Definition

Indigenous media is the use of modern media techniques by indigenous peoples, also called Fourth World peoples. Indigenous media helps communities in their fight against cultural extinction, economic and ecological decline, and forced displacement.^[1] Most often in the field of indigenous media, the creators of the media are also the consumers, together with the neighboring communities. Sometimes the media is also received by institutions and film festivals located far away from the production location, like the American Indian Film Festival. The production is usually locally based, low budget, and small scale, but it can also be sponsored by different support groups and governments.^[2]:34–35 The concept of indigenous media could be extended to First World alternative media, like AIDS activist video.^[3]

History

The research of indigenous media and the international indigenous movement in the process of globalization develop in parallel. In the second half of the 20th century, United Nations agencies, including the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP), led the movement. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a declaration aimed at protecting the rights of indigenous peoples in 2007.

The theoretical development of indigenous media research first occurred in anthropology in 1980. It was accompanied by a critical research method that diverged from post-colonialism and post-structuralism. The newer method attempted to minimize the power imbalance between the researcher and the researched. Leading up to this, ethnographic films that gave photographic techniques to locals can be traced back as far as the Navajo Project in 1960. The project was the pioneering work of Sol Worth and John Adair, to which the origin of a new anthropological language and style of ethnography can be attributed.^[4][5]

However, the indigenous media movement was not a significant phenomenon for another decade. The widely recognized start of the new media movement was a collaboration between American anthropologist Eric Michaels and Australia’s Warlpiri Aboriginal Broadcasting.^[6][7][8] This new type of collaborative anthropological project exemplified a change from a simple observation of the life of the indigenous people to a cultural record by the indigenous people themselves. Following the Warlpiri project, the Brazilian Kayapó village project of Vincent Carelli^[9] and Terence Turner,^[10][11][12] and the indigenous series by Māori producer Barry Barclay^[13][14] in New Zealand, have been important milestones in the development of indigenous media.

However, it was Faye Ginsburg, an American anthropologist, who laid the theoretical foundation for the study of indigenous media. Her research in 1991 expounded the Faustian dilemma between technology and tribal life and inspired later indigenous media researchers.^[15]

Sami family in Finland, 1936

The important theories of recent indigenous media studies have highlighted the dynamic relationship between local indigenous communities and their countries and globalization. Lorna Roth's research on the discourse rights of Canadian indigenous groups in 2005,^[16] Jennifer Deger's exploration of the media technology movement in the Australian Yolngu community in 2006,^[17] and Michael Robert Evans's ethnographic research on the Canadian Inuit community Igloolik in 2008,^[18] etc. are all development of high reference value since the 21st century.^[19] The idea that the media is a foreign power that affects the indigenous people is no longer accurate, now that indigenous people are working in media within all creative industries as an individual, collective or nationally which impacts the media as we know it.^[20]

Theories and concepts

• Fourth cinema

It has origins in New Zealand, created by Barry Barclay, because he experienced that his films did not fit in to first, second or third cinema. The goal of fourth cinema is to give an accurate and dignified representation of an indigenous people, by having indigenous film-makers who will frame the indigenous people with an indigenous world-view.^[21]

• De-colonial literary theory
• Indigenous ontology

This theory involves several foundational concepts, such as: 1) expansive concepts of time, 2) interdependence with all matter on earth and in the universe and 3) multiple dimensions of reality.^[22]

• Aboriginal Theory

Aboriginal theory indicates a theory of acquiring knowledge through ethnographic methods, in which the stimulation of established goals and outputs, as well as the communication between the indigenous people and the environment in which they exist, is minimized.^[23]

• Indigenous Sociology
• Indigenous librarianship

Indigenous librarianship theoretically study how knowledge, concepts, and the organization, management and practice based on these concepts are shaped and integrated through the cultural customs, empirical conditions and political aspirations of indigenous societies or communities.^[24]

• Indigenous Epistemologies and Pedagogies
• Holism
• Indigenous Technological Sovereignty or Tecno-Sovereignty

Notable people within indigenous media

• John Adair (1913–1997), American anthropologist, known for his 1972 book, Through Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology, in collaboration with Sol Worth^[25][26]
• Barry Barclay
• Marian Bredin
• Debbie Brisebois
• Vincent Carelli
• Corinn Columpar, Canadian academic; Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at University of Toronto; author, Unsettling Sights: The Fourth World on Film (2010) ^[27]
• Jennifer Deger
• Michael Robert Evans
• Daniel Fisher, Australian cultural anthropologist; academic, University of California, Berkeley; author, 2016 book, The Voice and Its Doubles: Media and Music in Northern Australia^[28]
• Faye Ginsburg
• Kevin Glynn New Zealand media and cultural studies academic; known for analyses of media and cultural views of Māori activism, including that of Tame Iti ^[29]
• Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson (Ziggy Hafsteinsson), Icelandic anthropologist of media
• John Hartley, British-Australian academic and researcher in cultural studies; anthropologist of media; researcher at Curtin University's Indigenous Culture and Digital Technologies program
• Kate Hennessy, Canadian anthropologist; video artist^[30]
• Jeff Himpele
• Candace Hopkins
• Zacharias Kunuk
• Peter Limbrick
• Eric Michaels
• Mario Murillo
• Sari Pietikäinen
• Michelle Raheja
• Lorna Roth
• Freya Schiwy
• Beverly Singer
• Katarina Soukoup
• Terence Turner (1935–2015), anthropologist and ethnographer; activist with Kayapo community from central Brazil^[31]
• Richard Wilson, Canadian and Hwlitsum First Nation artist^[32]
• Houston Wood
• Sol Worth (1922 – 1977), American painter; scholar of visual communication and visual anthropology; co-author with John Adair^[26]

Examples of indigenous media

• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
• Different Lenses
• Four Sheets to the Wind
• Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance
• The Journals of Knud Rasmussen

See also

• Alternative media
• Ethnographic film
• Post-colonialism
• Post-structuralism
• American Indian Film Festival
• Indigenous peoples

References

Further reading

• Belotti, Francesca (June 2020). "Are the indigenous media community media? Experiences of native peoples' media practices in Argentina". Ethnicities 20 (3): 383–407. doi:10.1177/1468796818810006. 
• Burrows, Elizabeth (November 2018). "Indigenous media producers' perspectives on objectivity, balancing community responsibilities and journalistic obligations". Media, Culture & Society 40 (8): 1117–1134. doi:10.1177/0163443718764807. 
• Dowell, Kristin (June 2006). "Indigenous Media Gone Global: Strengthening Indigenous Identity On- and Offscreen at the First Nations \ First Features Film Showcase". American Anthropologist 108 (2): 376–384. doi:10.1525/aa.2006.108.2.376. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3804799. 
• Lempert, William (21 May 2018). "Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction". Cultural Anthropology 33 (2): 173–179. doi:10.14506/ca33.2.01. 
• McCallum, Kerry; Waller, Lisa (November 2013). "Indigenous Media Practice". Media International Australia 149 (1): 67–69. doi:10.1177/1329878X1314900108. 
• Pack, Sam (October 2000). "Indigenous media then and now: Situating the Navajo film project". Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (3): 273–286. doi:10.1080/10509200009361497. 
• Wilson, Pam; Stewart, Michelle, eds (2008). Global Indigenous media: Cultures, poetics, and politics. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv11cw78p. ISBN 978-0822343080. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11cw78p. 
• Wilson, Pam (2015). "Indigenous Media: Linking the Local, Translocal, Global and Virtual". in Mains, Susan P; Cupples, Julie; Lukinbeal, Chris. Mediated geographies and geographies of media. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 367–383. doi:10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_22. ISBN 978-94-017-9969-0. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312863422. 

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