ABSTRACT
Media production by indigenous peoples includes journalism, radio, film, video, cable television and the world wide web and can be considered an important means of political and cultural empowerment that counters long-standing practices of othering indigeneity or rendering it invisible in Western mediascapes. A powerful ideologeme of indigenous communication – as compared with other kinds of ethnic media – is the Western imaginary’s view of indigenous culture as belonging to a primordial state of temporal otherness, a view which is either romantic and idealized or racialized and primitivizing. The historical struggle of indigenous peoples to overcome marginalization in Western mediascapes goes back to a time when the hegemonic culture was predominantly a culture of writing and print media. Turner’s studies of Kayapo media culture also show that the tribe’s understanding of media communication differs considerably from Western media use when it comes to video production.
