ABSTRACT
Although Indigenous peoples have been disenfranchised by the settler colonialism of the various nation-states whose hegemony they have had to suffer, including within the “Third World,” they have been a ubiquitous presence in the cinema, although usually as objects of negative and positive stereotypes. In general, indigenous people have been represented by others; only recently have they begun to represent themselves in film and across the mediatic spectrum. As a Brazilian indigenista notes, indigenous people have functioned as a canvas upon which Brazilian official culture paints “with bold strokes” its own troubles and unresolved tensions. 1 Indians have been demonized in the Hollywood frontier Western, romanticized in German Indianer films, allegorized in Cinema Novo films, simultaneously paternalized and valorized in independent American cinema, and mystically exalted in Australian “outback” films. But the indigenous world is “filming back” with gusto. The burgeoning world-wide movement of “indigenous media” refers to the use of audio-visual technology (camcorders, VCRs, digital cameras) to foreground the stories, values, and perspective of indigenous peoples. Within “indigenous media,” the producers are themselves the receivers, along with neighboring communities and, occasionally, distant cultural institutions or festivals such as the “Native American” or “indigenous nations” or “first nations” film festivals held in many parts of the world. For anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, indigenous media serve as self-conscious modes of cultural production, which uses media for “internal and external communication, for self-determination, and for resistance to outside cultural domination.” 2
