Indigenous Media: Currents of Engagement
Authors: Dowell Kristin , Thorner Sabra , Zamorano Gabriela 
Published: May 2023

This bibliography is organized around the question of how media are integral to contemporary productions of Indigenous sovereignty in local, state-based, and transnational contexts. Media, defined here as collaborative forms of communication and expression, include film, television, video, radio, and, increasingly, art, photography, archiving, digital technologies, journalism, and other vernacular forms. Indigenous sovereignty refers to the distinctiveness of Indigenous peoples in relation to their actively maintained modes of being in the world, including both an embodied sense of connectedness to kin, community, and lands, as well as histories of dispossession and legacies of settler colonialism. Since the early 1990s, anthropologists, in collaboration with Indigenous scholars, makers, producers, artists, and curators, have been exploring how media-making is a form of cultural and political activism. Building on extensive previous work in this area, this annotated bibliography foregrounds key works produced within the last ten-plus years, primarily from Latin America, North America, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and the Pacific. We focus on audiovisual media because our own experiences have been grounded in these forms—precisely because of their popularity and accessibility, their potential to be recontextualized, and their immersive power. At the same time, we suggest that the expanding uses of digital technologies productively blur the boundaries between diverse media, and our work here attempts to honor the innovations we have witnessed on these fronts. Rather than organizing sections according to specific media forms or geographical regions, we instead write against the grain to think critically about similarities as well as differences across our respective fields. Utilizing a curatorial approach, we chose to work on “currents of engagement,” namely, core themes and conversations that Indigenous media-makers are dynamically and deeply engaged with. Like the media and the media-makers with and about whom we write, our collaborative work on this annotated bibliography seeks to challenge existing frames. This approach calls attention to how Indigenous media and scholarship circulate within and beyond national and regional boundaries, and highlights differences of infrastructure, funding, institutional resources, and cultural policy. Our focus on visual sovereignty involves reflecting on how Indigenous peoples are building collective visions of the future through diverse media, while also confronting past colonial violence through reimagining and intervening in the archives. We emphasize storytelling as a form of Indigenous knowledge production that counters the marginalization and erasure of women in dominant narratives. Finally, we conclude with a section that maps out recent resources for further research. The dynamic field of global Indigenous media is always expanding, and there are many films and publications that were released after the completion of our thinking- and writing-together, yet before the online publication of this work. We encourage students and scholars to write about these, and we look forward to witnessing and engaging with the continuing creativity, inventiveness, and activism in future work by Indigenous media-makers. All three authors contributed equally to this work; and we thank Alberto Flores for his research assistance at the end of this project.