Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada (review)

The scope of Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada is narrower than its title suggests; the collection focuses, for the most part, on the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN); the essays provide detailed, nuanced, and thoughtful analyses of the network from a variety of perspectives. Part I, ‘The Cultural History of Aboriginal Media in Canada,’ consists of an overview by Lorna Roth of the history of Indigenous television leading to the creation of APTN and discussion by Jennifer David of the importance of Indigenous-language programming in contemporary language acquisition. The essays in Part II, ‘APTN and Indigenous Screen Cultures,’ focus on more specific aspects of the network, including analyses of the journalism practices of the news shows, of audience demographics, of the complexities of programming choices, and of Moccasin Flats, a popular series on the network. These two sections, which form the heart of the book, are framed by an introductory essay by the editors providing an overview of Indigenous media studies and by a third section, ‘Transforming Technologies and Emerging Media Circuits,’ that places the specific studies of APTN in a larger context of Indigenous screen cultures in Canada.

Although the collection highlights the strengths of APTN as ‘the world’s first national network operated by Aboriginal people with predominantly Aboriginal content,’ the essays are not naively congratulatory; all point to both the positives and the negatives of the media they investigate, including APTN, and of the practices of Indigenous media studies. APTN faces the difficult task of balancing the pragmatic needs of any network that depends on audience and advertisers with the more idealistic mandates of the network philosophy. Marian Bredin notes ‘the conflicting audience needs for information or awareness and for entertainment’ and questions whether audience-building strategies might lead the network to neglect its cultural mandate. Jennifer David points not only to the ‘significant role’ APTN’s Indigenous-language programming plays in language preservation but also to the limited number of genres of that programming and to the difficulty that non-subtitled programs, which are most effective for language learners, have in attracting both viewing numbers and advertising dollars. Kerstin Knopf critiques the network for showing stereotypical representations of native people and culture in some of its purchased children’s programming and movies, and in some of the paid advertisements it accepts, at the same time that she praises the network’s decolonizing efforts in most of its programming. Like the APTN reporters who, as Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson notes, are often more critical of Aboriginal leadership than are those in the mainstream media, the scholars in this volume take the network seriously by taking it to task when necessary.

The third section of the book broadens the scope of the collection, moving beyond APTN and television to other screen genres. Doris Baltruschat examines the use of co-production strategies and new technologies through a case study of Isuma’s The Journals of Knud Rasmussen; Mike Patterson examines aboriginal forays into cyberspace, comparing native use of the new media to Plains Indians use of the horse as a way of turning an object brought by colonizers into a tool of decolonization; Yvonne Poitras Pratt provides a self-study of her role as aboriginal researcher and argues for the place of activist ethnography in media studies, emphasizing the importance of serving the communities that provide material for the research. Despite the strength of the individual papers in this section – I found Patterson’s and Pratt’s articles, along with Knopf’s, the most interesting in the collection – they fit somewhat awkwardly into what is otherwise a very focused volume. The collection would work better as a whole if the essays in this section related their ideas back to APTN in more detail, or if the focus on APTN was less pronounced in the rest of the volume.

Despite this one quibble about focus, this is an essential collection for scholars of Indigenous studies or of media studies in Canada. All...