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  • Coyote’s WayMissy Whiteman’s Indigenous New Media
  • Angelica Lawson (bio)

Shortly after accepting a position as an assistant professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, I was invited to meet with a dozen international professors as part of a panel on Indigenous film. I was happy to be a part of this panel of Indigenous filmmakers, since I had just moved to the Twin Cities and was looking forward to meeting other Native Americans involved in film. We met with the international professors for over two hours, and what struck me most about this exchange was the assumption on the part of the professors that the young up-and-coming American Indian filmmakers would want to eventually work in Hollywood or in mainstream film. There was a lot of murmuring at the table as the women were shaking their heads. Finally, Arapaho-Kickapoo media artist Missy Whiteman spoke up and explained that this was generally not a goal. No one at the table wanted to work in Hollywood, and in fact they saw themselves as working against the decades of stereotypical Native American representation Hollywood had produced.

The women filmmakers’ main point of resistance was feeling they would have to give up their autonomy to work in Hollywood. As Joanna Hearne points out in the introduction to this special issue, “The structures of traditional film production are notoriously discriminatory, overwhelmingly organizing men into positions of creative control . . . [whereas] digital platforms for aesthetic production and activism . . . are far more open to Indigenous women.” All present at this meeting claimed to prefer to work in new media in order to reach larger audiences and in Whiteman’s case specifically to reach Native youth through this medium. The Indigenous women’s articulation of the importance of media sovereignty became the topic of conversation. Included in this discussion was an emphasis on the importance of giving back to their [End Page 100] communities, educating and positively influencing Native youth, and expressing the values and ethics of Indigenous peoples through new media. The women highlighted the significance of new media in being able to achieve these goals, since new media is primarily digital and often made accessible online. Digital media is a much more affordable medium to work with, compared to traditional film, and can be made available through the Internet, circumventing the often prohibitive costs of traditional distribution, especially for independent artists.

Affordability and accessibility are part of the appeal for Indigenous media makers like Missy Whiteman who in particular want to reach Native youth. Working in new media allows Indigenous media makers to be in complete control of their artistic productions. This control is the very definition of media sovereignty. According to Elise Marubbio and Eric Buffalohead in Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching and Theory, “Both cinema of sovereignty and visual sovereignty are aspects of media sovereignty: the act of controlling the camera and refocusing the lens to promote indigenous agency in the media process and in their own image construction” (10). Indeed, definitions of media sovereignty began to form with Jolene Rickard’s essay on sovereignty and visual arts and has been expanded on by numerous scholars over the years to encompass “cultural sovereignty” as applied to Native filmmaking (Singer), representational cinema of sovereignty in documentary filmmaking (Lewis), and visual sovereignty (Raheja, Reservation Reelism).

Self-representation in the media by Indigenous people the world over has been an exciting movement, empowering the people who have historically been rendered savage or invisible in most films and documentaries. With the surge in new media creation by Indigenous people we see not only more accurate historical and contemporary representation of the people but also counternarratives that intervene in colonial oppressive histories and serve as activist documents to be shared with audiences worldwide. New media provides an affordable and creative outlet for Indigenous artists to intervene in dominant national narratives and to exert visual sovereignty. As Michelle Raheja states, “The visual, particularly film, video, and new media, is a germinal and exciting site for exploring how sovereignty is a creative act of self-representation that has the potential to both undermine stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and to strengthen the ‘intellectual...

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