22-2 Aboriginal Media, Aboriginal Control

The U'wa Struggle for Resguardo Unico

"Without the land there is no life...The land provides food, drink, shelter, everything. It continues sustaining us. The earth gives us good understanding and wisdom, intelligence, and a deep history and a good path to follow." Berito Kubaruwa, President U'wa Traditional Authority With over 5000 members, the U'wa are an indigenous people that live in northeastern Columbia among the foothills of…

The Great Land Grab: What Every Australian Should Know About Wik, Mabo and the Ten-Point Plan

Victoria, South Medbourne: Hyland House. 1997. xii+141 pp., notes, bibliography, index, map, interviews, two appendices. Paper, AU$14.95, ISBN 1-86447-031-3. Prior to October 1998, Australians will go to the ballot box to decide the fate of the Native Title Act. Described by some commentators as the single greatest breakthrough in Australian race relations this century, the Act brings legislative…

Talking the Talk on Indigenous Radio

Thirty years ago, indigenous peoples throughout the world had little, if any, opportunity to hear their languages over the radio. Majority cultures dominated the airwaves and most nations saw little value in supporting indigenous cultures in any form. But the late 1960s proved to be a time of social upheaval throughout much of the Western world and various minority groups began to stake their…

SPECIAL PROJECTS UPDATE: The Garifuna Journey; A Collaborative Archive and Documentary Video Project

"We the Garifuna are among the people who have been studied the most in Belize and perhaps even in all of Central America. Our cultural and intellectual property are collected by outsiders, dissertations and other works are produced by social scientists and others, and we gain nothing from it. Of course it is not by accident that we do not usually benefit from all this because it is hardly ever…

Seeing Ourselves, Being Ourselves: Broadcasting Aboriginal Television in Canada

Imagine waking up one morning to discover you can no logner understand the world around you. Imagine turning on the radio or the television, only to hear the news reported in a foreign language. Imagine hearing your children suddenly speak a strange tongue. Imagine your friends and colleagues discussing issues and events you know nothing about. Imagine trying to communicate. Imagine how…

NOTES from the FIELD: Turkana Women's Organization; A Key to Cultural Survival

Mama Kenyatta is a respected local elder and women's leader among the Turkana people of Isiolo, in central Kenya. Founder of an all-Turkana women's group in 1992, Mama Kenyatta works for the self-improvement of local women and families and for pride in Turkana cultural heritage and traditions. One of her grave concerns, besides constantly making ends meet, is that the young are losing the…

NOTES from the FIELD: San Jorge's Struggle; A Guatemalan Village Blocks a Planned Luxury Resort

When Jorge found me, I was having coffee with a friend in the lakeside town of Panajachel, Guatemala. Jorge was panting, having peddled a fast mile on his bike from the nearby village of San Jorge de la Laguna or `Saint George by the Lake.' "Hurry, they're going to hurt people," he pleaded. Four days into a tense land dispute and occupation, the military had finally arrived. There are ten Mayan…

Media and the Preservation of Culture in Africa

The colonial expansion of European states in Africa was usually accompanied by missionary efforts to proliferate Christianity and European civilization. A kind of benevolent tutelage of the `inferior native' populations occurred that was particularly well-illustrated in Rudyard Kipling's The White Man's Burden. The direct consequences of the colonial expansion ranged from genocide that wiped out…

Introduction: Media and Aboriginal Culture; An Evolving Relationship

When print and electronic media first entered Indian Country, they came as part of a wave of Western cultural influences that exerted strong assimilating pressures on Aboriginal communities. Such metaphors as `neutron bomb television' and `cultural nerve gas' captured this negative influence and the corrosive impact of mainstream media on Aboriginal culture. In the spirit of adaptation, many…

Indigenous Peoples and Media Ethics in Canada

Canada is the world leader in indigenous communications. The news media produced by or in consultation with indigenous people represent a broad spectrum of services in Canada -- from small-scale projects such as community radio and newsletters, to the pan-arctic, satellite-transmitted broadcast services of Television Northern Canada (TVNC). The effectiveness of news media can be seen in the…

Indigenous Journalists: Two Provocative Provinces, Worlds Apart

The problems of indigenous journalists in the South Pacific and those of Native Alaskans are surprisingly similar, yet there are also marked differences. A comparison of these two remote journalistic provinces is provocative and may provide insight for better coping with extremes in the fight for self-determination in remote areas. Originally, indigenous people of both regions had diverse…

Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land, and Reform in Southeastern Siberia

Those transfixed by the 1929 ethnographic classic by Shirokogorof, Social Organization of the Northern Tungus, will be brought up to date by Fondahl's work. First of all, the Tungus are now called the Evenki, that part of Siberia has become Northern Transbaykalia, and extrinsic cultural forces have taken an increasing toll on traditional lifeways based on reindeer herding and hunting. Seven…

Electronic Smoke Signals: Native American Radio in the United States

Native Americans in the United States are using radio to preserve traditional languages and cultures. For years, electronic mass media were seen as villains in the struggle to preserve indigenous cultures in the U.S. Distant radio and television signals bombarded indigenous communities, overwhelming fragile languages and cultures. Native American children listened to Western radio and television…

Cultural Survival in the Media

In America, we worry and argue a great deal about the effects of television in our homes and in our society. We fear that it distorts our elections, glamorizes violence, and all too often subverts the values that we cherish. Above all, we are uneasy about the insidious power of the media to influence us in spite of ourselves. Imagine then how indigenous minorities feel, in the United States and…

Cultural Survival in the CLASSROOM

The Curriculum Resource Program (CRP) at Cultural Survival is working with the Beaver Country Day School in Newton, Massachusetts. Students will learn and teach each other about the uniqueness of Buddhist ideals and beliefs in Tibet, and the subsequent political and religious constructions of the country. The unit will focus on the strength and survival of Tibetan culture before and since the…

Community Radio in India

While Indian radio is shifting from a government monopoly to a highly-commercialized broadcasting network, citizens' groups are also demanding that the media be democratized. Imagine a country which has 18 officially-recognized languages and a total of 1652 mother tongues in a country nearly a billion strong and spread over an area of 3.2 million square kilometers -- that's India. Given its…