Framing Land Governance Issues in Indigenous and Settler Media within Canada

This comparative study examines how the framing of Indigenous land governance issues—such as resource extraction activities on Indigenous territory and treaty negotiation—in Indigenous media differs from that in corporate news. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis were applied to 66 news texts published in 2018 in large corporate newspapers, such as the National Post, and small Indigenous news outlets, such as Eagle Feather News. Researchers found that Indigenous media connected land governance issues to contemporary issues, such as racism and control over child welfare, as well as historical colonialism and Indigenous-Settler relations, while corporate news generally excluded any discussion of these contextual factors. While the main news frame in the Indigenous press was Indigenous people were not consulted, the dominant frame in corporate news was Indigenous peoples have already been adequately consulted. Corporate news discourse valorized Indigenous traditional territory solely based on its presumed “economic value.” By contrast, Indigenous publications offered a counternarrative, one that positioned land and the rest of the natural environment as something that has absolute value, and as indivisible from all living things, including people.

Indigenous Language Media, Communication, and Sickle Cell Disorder

The importance of health communication and information cannot be over emphasized especially with issues related to sickle cell disorder. Sickle cell disorder, common among Africans, has a lot of myths and misconceptions tied to it, so this chapter unearths and explores how indigenous communication can facilitate learning and understanding of the disorder majorly in rural areas and some urban areas where knowledge of the disorder is assessed low using the focus group discussion. It also reveals the importance of incorporating indigenous language and communication techniques in increasing awareness and eradicating stereotypes as regards sickle cell disorder. The findings of this chapter reflect that misinformation occurs due to lack of proper understanding of language used in sickle cell health communication-related issues. Hence, this chapter proposes that health education about the concept of SCD should be executed majorly in indigenous languages and through the indigenous media platforms.

Celebrating Indigenous National Cinemas and Narrative Sovereignty through the Creation of Kin Theory, an Indigenous Media Makers Database

Indigenous peoples have been misrepresented and underrepresented in media since the dawn of cinema, but they have never stopped telling their own stories and enacting agency. It is past time to recognize them on their own terms. To facilitate that, academics, activists, and industry partners can fund, hire, teach, and share more Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) led projects. The uniqueness of 2020 with COVID-19, Black Lives Matter and human rights movements, and the move online by many academics and organizations have deepened conversations about systemic inequities, such as those in media industries. To address the often-heard film industry excuse, “I don’t know anyone of color to hire,” the Nia Tero Foundation has created Kin Theory, an Indigenous media makers database, that is having a dynamic, year-long launch in 2021.

Indigenous Media and Social Media Convergence: Adaptation of Storytelling on Twitter, SoundCloud and YouTube

Storytelling is ordinarily trivialised as an antiquated oramedia genre, and of less significance in Zimbabwean mainstream media and communication studies, hence it is understudied. Recent studies largely take a literary gaze on storytelling, and do not theorise it from an indigenous media viewpoint or appreciate its convergence with social media. Drawing on concepts of media convergence and the digital public sphere, this netnographic study examines the adaptation of storytelling on Twitter, SoundCloud and YouTube, focusing on patterns of production, delivery, participation, language forms, reception and audiences. The article shows inventive re-embodiment and adaptation of storytelling on online spaces, that is, the endurance and remaking of indigenous media in the context of new media and communication technologies. The manifestation of the folktale narrative style on social media exhibits the rise of a secondary form of orality recreated, reproduced and applied in the digital form and on social media. While digital and social media are perceived as threatening the continued existence of indigenous media, this article attests social media as breathing spaces for indigenous media.

Influence of African Indigenous language media in COVID-19 digital health messaging

COVID-19 pandemic era has further energized humans to consider their health more than before, especially in the digital age when they experience a deluge of health information. This study, therefore, examined COVID-19 digital sources, health message types and how the use of African Indigenous language media enhanced people’s utilization of coronavirus health messages. Using an online questionnaire and in-depth interview data collection methods, respondents received preventive COVID-19 health messages on social distancing and personal hygiene from mostly interactive digital sources, which hardly infused African Indigenous language media in the health message. However, African Indigenous languages motivated respondents to utilize COVID-19 messages, though people still spread COVID-19 fake news through Indigenous media. Nonetheless, integrating African Indigenous language media into digital health communication can confer credibility on information sources. Still, there is a need to fight the use of digital media to spread fake news.

Building Global Indigenous Media Networks: Envisioning Sustainable and Regenerative Futures around Indigenous Peoples’ Meaningful Representation

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’ emancipatory appropriation of media means from a transnational perspective that breaks their regional enclosure can contribute to decolonize the world. More specifically, it questions how a new Indigenous global media network would contribute to decolonize the relations between Indigenous Peoples and nation states. A wider mapping of Indigeneity that decolonizes sustainable development becomes critical in order to formally document the efforts of Indigenous Peoples to reconstruct and restore their epistemic and material relations. This article questions how an Indigenous global media network around new nexus research can benefit Indigenous Peoples, and make visible the incorporation of the recommendations and principles from international law emanated from the self-determined voices of Indigenous leaders, experts, and policy makers to decolonize global sustainable development goals.

Can an indigenous media model enrol wider non-Indigenous audiences in alternative perspectives to the ‘mainstream’

This paper offers a theoretical model to analyse an example of Indigenous media through an Indigenous lens and discusses its potential to increase audiences in other alternative media. Adapted from New Zealand Māori filmmaker and philosopher Barry Barclay’s idea of the ‘fourth cinema’ and a metaphorical ‘communications marae’, 1 the model has been applied to New Zealand’s Indigenous broadcaster, Māori Television. This article discusses the model and suggests that the ‘communications marae’ has the potential to be used by non-mainstream media providers to, not only address their own audiences, but also to enrol wider communities in alternative perspectives to the ‘mainstream’. Research has demonstrated how Indigenous broadcasting can serve its own audience while also attracting wider, non-Indigenous audiences. However, this paper’s focus is a case study of migrants engaging with Māori Television because it is migrants who frequently operate outside of established power relationships and represent an often unrecognised niche audience segment in mainstream media. The model demonstrates the potential pedagogical role of the broadcaster and how its content can make a positive difference to migrants’ lives and attitudes towards Indigenous people through its ability to counter the, often negative, representations of Indigeneity in mainstream media. Outside of Māori Television, migrants have limited access to an Indigenous perspective on the nation’s issues and concerns, which calls into question both democracy and migrants’ ability to engage in civic society. Migrants need information to negotiate and weigh up important tensions and polarities, to understand multiple perspectives inherent to democratic living and to evaluate issues of social justice and to solve problems based on the principles of equity. Indigenous media, as in all alternative media, has a role to play in questioning or challenging accepted thinking and to present counter hegemonic discourses to all citizens in participatory democratic societies.