ABSTRACT
The burgeoning world-wide movement of “indigenous media” refers to the use of audio-visual technology to foreground the stories, values, and perspective of indigenous peoples. Indigenous media fits awkwardly into categories like World, Transnational, and Global, because it is simultaneously “in default” and “in excess” of such categories. A hallmark of some aboriginal people’s television network productions is an irreverent humor that one finds in much of the indigenous world. One of the most prolific of the indigenous-media movements is Video in the Villages in Brazil, which since 1986 has been affirming indigenous cultural identity and supporting indigenous struggles to protect territorial and cultural patrimonies. For indigenous peoples the issues are less of inclusion and citizenship than simply of sovereignty and land. In both the US and Australia, settlers butted up against indigenous peoples as part of what Glissant calls, in contrast with the “circular nomadism” of indigenous peoples, the “straight-arrow” nomadism of conquest.”
