ABSTRACT
The author starts this chapter with a story as a way of dramatising the gravity of some of the concerns that surround the development of Indigenous media and their relationship to representational practices in the dominant media, one of the key ways in which contemporary Indigenous cultures are 'interconnected' to a range of social worlds. In 1994 the international circulation and critical acclaim of the very successful Maori feature film Once Were Warriors marked a real watershed for the possibilities of Indigenous media productions to receive widespread acclaim and recognition on a world stage. The author briefly discusses two instances in which one can see how different frameworks for understanding globalisation, media, and culture are naturalised, operating daily as 'commonsense' in institutions in ways that marginalise Indigenous media (and other parallel activities) either as irrelevant, or to a position of dangerous intervention in the status quo.
