This article examines the construction of an Aboriginal public sphere in eastern Canada, tracing flows of images, ideas, peoples and practices over cultural and geographical borders from the late 19th century to the present. Early Aboriginally authored newspapers, agricultural fairs and exhibits of ethnic difference provided important contexts for the cultural mediation of novel forms of Indigeneity. Aboriginal cultural producers constructed these contact zones by intermingling and resignifying key identifying elements of 'whiteness' and Indianness-social categories that were ordinarily polarly opposed. This syncretizing technique continues to underwrite contemporary social practice. I suggest that not unlike other mass-mediated Aboriginal cultural products, contemporary powwow performances might be instructively perceived as communicative strategies in so far as they engender a reinscription of the Aboriginal 'ideoscape'.
Aboriginal media offers a viable alternative to Aboriginal gang life largely because Native media employs the same principles for communication that inform Aboriginal gang practice. Rather than individual advancement, both aspire to bring people together in physical space. The history of constraints placed on Aboriginal peoples’ capacities to assemble in public is part of what informs the collectivizing goals of Aboriginal gangs and of Aboriginal communications agencies more generally. Both provide critically important contact zones, where diverse interest groups gather to negotiate, to perform and to exchange ideas about contemporary Aboriginality and Aboriginal youth experience. Media spaces, however, unlike gang turf, create pro-social discursive space for the discussion and contemplation of Aboriginal ways of engaging in the world. The Aboriginal films that circulate through the film festival circuit, for example, address themes that are sometimes difficult to discuss, such as bullying, solvent abuse and suicide.
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