Sovereign Screens

Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast

Kristin L. Dowell

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780803245389
• eBook ISBN: 9781496209726
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver, Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping Aboriginal media production including community media organizations and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of cultural policy and media institutions.

Kristin L. Dowell uses the concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal urban communities in which they work. She explores the ongoing debates within the community about what constitutes Aboriginal media, how this work intervenes in the national Canadian mediascape, and how filmmakers use technology in a wide range of genres—including experimental media—to recuperate cultural traditions and reimagine Aboriginal kinship and sociality. Analyzing the interactive relations between this social community and the media forms it produces, Sovereign Screens offers new insights into the on-screen and off-screen impacts of Aboriginal media.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Vancouver’s Aboriginal Media World
• 1. The Indigenous Media Arts Group
• 2. Canadian Cultural Policy and Aboriginal Media
• 3. Aboriginal Diversity On-Screen
• 4. Building Community Off-Screen
• 5. Cultural Protocol in Aboriginal Media
• 6. Visual Sovereignty in Aboriginal Experimental Media
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Filmmakers and Films
• Notes
• References
• Index