Producing Sovereignty
The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada
Producing Sovereignty considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in media technologies and infrastructure—that enabled the proliferation of Indigenous media across Canada in the early 1990s. Paying particular attention to media culture institutions that Indigenous media makers engaged, including lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies, Karrmen Crey offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.
In the early 1990s, Indigenous media experienced a boom across Canada, resulting in a vast landscape of film, TV, and digital media. Coinciding with a resurgence of Indigenous political activism, Indigenous media highlighted issues around sovereignty and Indigenous rights for broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in media technologies and infrastructure—that enabled this proliferation.
Exploring the wide field of media culture institutions, Crey pays particular attention to those that Indigenous media makers engaged during this cultural moment, including state film agencies, arts organizations, and provincial broadcasters. Producing Sovereignty ranges from the formation of the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance in the early 1990s and its partnership with the Banff Centre for the Arts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 2016 production of Highway of Tears (an immersive 360-degree short film directed by Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson), examining works by Indigenous creators along the way.
Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. She models institutional analysis to interpret Indigenous media, a framework that looks at how Indigenous media makers critically intervene in the representational conventions and media genres used by different institutions, transforming them to make them meaningful to Indigenous perspectives. Through its refusal to treat Indigenous media simply as a set of cultural aesthetics, Producing Sovereignty offers a revealing media history of this cultural moment.
Contents
Introduction: Indigenous Politics, the State, and Media Institutions in Canada
1. Prairie Voices: Doug Cuthand, Provincial Television, and the National Film Board of Canada
2. The Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance: Negotiating Indigenous Self-Government in the Arts
3. Programming Indigeneity: Indigenous Television Production in the Era of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network
4. Indigenous Documentaries and Academic Research Institutions: Navajo Talking Picture and Cry Rock
5. Resisting Colonial Relations in Virtual Reality: Highway of Tears
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
