ABSTRACT
Media production by indigenous peoples includes journalism, radio, film, video, cable television and the world wide web and can be considered an important means of political and cultural empowerment that counters long-standing practices of othering indigeneity or rendering it invisible in Western mediascapes (→ Silencing, III/19). In this entry, we define indigenous media production as a set of social and cultural practices in which indigenous self-identification plays a decisive role, and which offer distinctive traits with respect to aesthetics, content or epistemologies. Referred to also as “indigenous media” (Ginsburg 1997; Leuthold 1998; Wilson and Stewart 2008) or “indigenous-run media” (Alia 2010, 4), claims that those media differ in any essential respect from Western media, however, have proved questionable. As indigenous media production in the Americas has been growing rapidly in terms of quantity, variety, and professionalism, it cannot be regarded as a media ghetto where solely indigenous media activists address their respective indigenous communities. Rather, it is evident that a host of different actors (some, but not all of whom are indigenous) participate in the production, circulation and consumption of indigenous media practices and in the training of indigenous media activists (→ Media Participation, III/36; Media Consumption, III/34). The resulting media practices may involve intracultural communication or deliberately address a wider audience. Any reductionist account based on a restrictive understanding of “authenticity” risks excluding a substantial part of the phenomenon. In this sense, Indigenous media production cannot be separated from social mediations in the Western mediascape (cf. Appadurai 1997), but it also shows how much cultural difference and resistance to assimilation is socially permissible.
