Indigenous Media

Abstract

Indigenous media may be defined as forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication, including cultural preservation, cultural and artistic expression, political self-determination, and cultural sovereignty. Indigenous media overlap with, and are on a spectrum with, other types of minority-produced media, and quite often they share a kinship regarding many philosophical and political motivations. Indigenous media studies allow us access to the micro-processes of what Roland Robertson has famously called “glocalization”—in this case, the interpenetration of global media technologies with hyperlocal needs, creatively adapted to work within and sustain the local culture rather than to replace it or homogenize it, as some globalization theorists have long feared. The scope of indigenous media studies, a growing field of interdisciplinary scholarship, is quite broad and extensive. We first present some core literature in the emerging field of indigenous media studies, followed by a handful of illustrative case studies. In the second main section, we provide focused attention on works dealing with some specific media genres: film and video production, radio and television broadcasting, and the emerging field of indigenous digital media. Next, we divide the field by geographic and cultural regions and areas, looking at significant work being done in and about indigenous media in the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, Europe (including Russia and the Arctic North), Africa, and Asia. This Oxford Bibliographies article is partnered with that of the separate Oxford Bibliographies article “Native Americans,” and so we refer the reader to that article to avoid excessive duplication. In the spirit of much indigenous mediamaking, this was a collaborative production. The primary author, Pamela Wilson, wishes to thank her main collaborator, Joanna Hearne, who contributed expertise on North American indigenous media, particularly to the section on Indigenous Film and Video. Other significant contributors were Amalia Córdova on Latin America and Sabra Thorner on Australia.