First Peoples' Media (Canada)

Canadian Indigenous media evolved with a distinct relationship to social movements and activism. From the time of their conception in the 1960s and 1970s, First Peoples' media, policies promoting cultural and communication rights, and participatory community development were yoked together. This established a crucial connection between communications and politics in First Nations' self-assertion. In order to gain territorial, political, and economic power through negotiating constitutional treaties with the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, Indigenous leaders recognized early on how powerful the tools of communications would be in furthering their interests. Consequently, many became engaged in politics soon after having held positions of responsibility in media. This entry describes the evolution of First Peoples' media, its programming, and its impact throughout Canada.

[Page 200]Indirectly influenced by the grounded documentary film approach of John Grierson, first National Film Board (NFB) commissioner in the 1940s and 1950s, the success and showcasing of two NFB film production workshops on Baffin Island in the early 1970s triggered the self-organization of many media projects for First Peoples. Simultaneously, Telesat's Anik Satellite became operational in 1973, offering live television from southern Canada and improved telecommunication services to those living in northern and remote regions.

Anik A, the NFB experience, and an experimental Anik-B intercommunity video/audio project Inukshuk (1978–1981) soon demonstrated to Canadian funding agencies that accessible communications infrastructures to link isolated communities would make good economic, cultural, and political sense. Ordinary citizens could appropriate the satellite's technical potential to communicate their own (inter)cultural, sociopolitical, and economic development goals within and beyond their own territories. Their publicly mediated voices could contribute to their constituency groups' politicization. The politics of communications and the communication of politics were seen to be integrally tied together in the development of First Peoples' media.

Northern media activists proceeded through several stages. After the Inukshuk project's positive evaluation in 1981, 13 regional Native Communications Societies (NCSs) emerged, all acknowledged in 1983 in a Northern Broadcasting policy framework. The policy's implementation vehicle—Northern Native Broadcast Access Program—provided financial support for the weekly production of 20 hours of radio and 5 of television in northern Indigenous languages.

After this, NCS leaders banded together to demand consistent funding and distribution capacity under their own control. Several of them applied for and received licenses from the Canadian Radio-TelevisionTelecommunications Commission (CRTC; Canada's regulatory agency) to become network broadcasters. From 1983 to 1986, federally funded programming from the NCSs was intraregional, with minor exceptions of occasional “outside” contract work.

In the late 1980s, Northern Native Broadcasting, Yukon, took the bold initiative to move beyond the cultural, territorial, and political borderlines to negotiate a contract for a half-hour program Nedaa (Your Eye on the Yukon) on public broadcasting's Newsworld service. This had the long-range consequence of opening small spaces for Aboriginal broadcasting within mainstream Canadian media and of stimulating debate over how to build cross-cultural alignments for political, social, and cultural activist purposes.

Funding Northern Canada broadcasting was not a problem by the end of the 1980s; the challenge was exhibition. A major federal lobbying strategy was undertaken, and Television Northern Canada (TVNC) was established as a pan-Northern distribution service in 1991, the year in which communications access rights for Aboriginal peoples were enshrined in Canada's Broadcasting Act. TVNC became the vehicle through which First Peoples would publicly represent their Northern perspectives.

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