Something New in the Air (review)

Lorna Roth's book, Something New in the Air, is about something new, but also something old: it details the First People's struggle to assert and protect their cultures. The topic is northern television's history, but the vehicle that carries it is social theory and politics. Every philosophical construct begins with an assumption. Roth postulates that whoever controls the airwaves controls the people. Historically, dictators have learned otherwise.

Roth interprets Aboriginal activism largely in light of Marxist revolutionary perspectives, including those of Paulo Friere, Andre Gunder Frank, and Paul Baran. Northern television evolved, she says, in a dynamic political milieu that began in June of 1969 when Jean Chrétien, then minister of Indian affairs, presented to Parliament the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, which Canadians have referred to as the White Paper on Indian Affairs. Native peoples vociferously opposed the proposals, which would have abolished the Indian Act, Aboriginal special status, and federal regulation. The protest, Roth says, marked 'the beginning of a new era in which aboriginal peoples became a highly visible and audible political presence within Canadian society.' Indeed, the protests were seminal, but the movement began far earlier.

For example, in June 1916, Haida chief Clealls (the Rev Dr Peter Kelly), Squamish chief Andrew Paull, and others founded the Allied Tribes of British Columbia to advocate vigorously for Aboriginal land rights. Also, Native communities as early as the 1880s protested that Aboriginal people had the right to elect chiefs in the Euro-Canadian way or to select them traditionally.

Perhaps Roth's timing follows from her book's topic, television. But, she primarily interprets northern Native broadcasting as political liberation: 'At what point did recognition of cultural diversity in broadcasting become critical to national development in Canada and elsewhere? ... When did First and Second World states begin to recognize their Third and Fourth World populations by giving them access to their own media resources? ... How have satellite mediated broadcasts into and out of Fourth World regions changed the national boundaries by which development has been traditionally defined and imagined?' Roth's questions are defensible, but to decode how she has structured the historical facts the reader must know her political interpretation. The book depicts broadcasting as a political instrument that could destroy or affirm Native sovereignty. But the paragraph's last sentence is 'doerless' and passive: it fails to say who has 'traditionally defined and imagined' community development.

Is it possible, once again, that others have defined for Aboriginal people what it means to be Aboriginal, traditional, and sovereign? However, politics notwithstanding, Roth's chronology and facts are lucid.

Her thesis evolves from northern television's early days in the 1950s. She then describes when and how Aboriginal people insisted they have a choice in the broadcasts. The book moves forward to show how communities asserted their rights to their own programming that would strengthen their cultures. Finally, Roth documents a still-evolving outcome, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.

The text is scholarly. It contains more than five hundred references, including researchers, authors, activists, and personal interviews. Roth's sources and advisers are both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. To put it simply, this is not just another non-Aboriginal book about Aboriginal people. Roth has shunned that inherent bias. As a textbook, Something New in the Air should prove immensely valuable.

Roth's three decades of experience establish her as an expert in her own right. She is not a Native voice, as are Olive Dickason, Basil Johnson, Duke Redbird, and Maria Campbell, but she remains accountable to the communities: 'As a non-native, Jewish "White" woman, I am by no means claiming to speak on behalf of First Peoples. Nor am I promoting their specific interests. What I am trying to do is to weave together the historical, the theoretical and the empirical, starting with a an emphasis of Northern broadcasting history and integrating the Southern experience only when Television and Northern Canada transformed into the Aboriginal...