In Indigenous Media in Mexico, Erica Cusi Wortham explores the use of video among indigenous peoples in Mexico as an important component of their social and political activism. Funded by the federal government as part of its "pluriculturalist" policy of the 1990s, video indígena programs became social processes through which indigenous communities in Oaxaca and Chiapas engendered alternative public spheres and aligned themselves with local and regional autonomy movements.

Drawing on her in-depth ethnographic research among indigenous mediamakers in Mexico, Wortham traces their shifting relationship with Mexican cultural agencies; situates their work within a broader, hemispheric network of indigenous media producers; and complicates the notion of a unified, homogeneous indigenous identity. Her analysis of projects from community-based media initiatives in Oaxaca to the transnational Chiapas Media Project highlights variations in cultural identity and autonomy based on specific histories of marginalization, accommodation, and resistance.

Exploring how Indigenous media has flourished across Canada from the 1990s to the present

 

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 to broader audiences in Canada. In Producing Sovereignty, Karrmen Crey considers the conditions—social movements, state policy, and evolutions in technology—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, provincial broadcasters, and more. 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—highlighting works by Indigenous creators along the way and situating Indigenous media within contexts that pay close attention to the role of media-producing institutions.

 

Importantly, Crey focuses on institutions with limited scholarly attention, shifting beyond the work of the National Film Board of Canada to explore lesser-known institutions such as educational broadcasters and independent production companies that create programming for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. 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.