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. 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. The concept of indigenous media could be extended to First World alternative media, like AIDS activist video.
Fourth Cinema explores issues that are associated with indigenous communities. Fourth Cinema takes the camera away from First Cinema, which is the camera that is associated with the gaze of the colonizer. The use of Fourth Cinema allows for the communities to rightly represent themselves, without the gaze of First Cinema. Which allows for better representation for Indigenous communities. Fourth Cinema incorporates the community that is being represented on screen, by incorporating the community in the production process. Behind the camera, or in front of the camera. However a film is not Fourth Cinema just because it has Indigenous characters, what makes it Fourth Cinema is that the representation is for the community by the community.

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, 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.
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. 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 and Terence Turner, and the indigenous series by Māori producer Barry Barclay 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.
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, Jennifer Deger's exploration of the media technology movement in the Australian Yolngu community in 2006, and Michael Robert Evans's ethnographic research on the Canadian Inuit community Igloolik in 2008, etc. are all development of high reference value since the 21st century. 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.

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.
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.
  • 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.
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.