Indigenous Media and Postcolonial Pedagogy

Abstract

Indigeneity is an inherently political concept that is commonly culturally configured and connected to demands for social and environmental justice (Cameron et al. 2009, 2014). For many people who identify themselves, their families, communities, and ways of being as Indigenous, Indigeneity merits capitalization. The capital “I” signifies recognition of continuities such as heritage, territorial dispossession, and environmental practice, as well as more emergent global movements and international laws recognizing rights and responsibilities. But the conceptual category of I/indigeneity arose out of colonialist practices of representation and repression based on racialized social hierarchies. So formulations of indigeneity (without the capital I) also operate: historically, contemporaneously, and often—but not always—beyond Indigenous aegis.

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Introduction

Indigeneity is an inherently political concept that is commonly culturally configured and connected to demands for social and environmental justice (Cameron et al. 2009, 2014). For many people who identify themselves, their families, communities, and ways of being as Indigenous, Indigeneity merits capitalization. The capital “I” signifies recognition of continuities such as heritage, territorial dispossession, and environmental practice, as well as more emergent global movements and international laws recognizing rights and responsibilities. But the conceptual category of I/indigeneity arose out of colonialist practices of representation and repression based on racialized social hierarchies. So formulations of indigeneity (without the capital I) also operate: historically, contemporaneously, and often—but not always—beyond Indigenous aegis.

Images and ideas about Indigenous men, women and children abound in EuroAmerican humanities and arts. In the Americas, indigeneity figures prominently in national narratives of identity, usually as ghostly symbols, sometimes idyllic and other times horrific and abject. When synchronized with scientific explanations, such symbolism has helped fix formerly more fluid community relations into the categories operationalized by the colonial and then state institutions to structure territorial dispossession and the ‘development’ of a ‘disappearing people.’ Geographical imaginations of indigeneity also profitably brand commodities such as artwork, travel and entertainment experience, real estate, franchises, and tobacco. In response to these caricatures and economic opportunities, diverse Peoples have appropriated and reworked state and scholarly categories to identify communities, political struggles, and cultural heritage.

Most recently, historically marginalized social groups have rallied relatively new multimedia and broadband technologies to articulate alternative (to massive, commercial, hegemonic, ‘whitestream’) visualizations of the(ir) world (cf. Downing 2011; Rodriguez et al. 2010). This chapter suggests materials and strategies for teaching about the aims, content and production of Indigenous videos. How and by whom are video technologies accessed and used to mediate Indigenous geographies? How can Indigenous videos help decolonize geographic knowledge production? How about geographic curricula? With the concept of visual sovereignty this chapter emphasizes lessons that center the ways Indigenous media makers re/claim territory, place and agency in settler colonial spaces. Students are invited to explore how Indigenous videos help disrupt the colonialist hierarchies of knowledge production that have historically shaped both scholarly and popular knowledge about Indigenous geographies.

Decolonizing Indigenous Geographies

In pursuit of scholarly and commercial enterprise, explorers relied on the knowledge and experience of the diverse Peoples they encountered. But these white authors wrote their sources out of the texts and established their geographic authority (Barnett 1998). This colonialist tradition lingers. It conflates Indigenous peoples with notions of nature, which makes it hard to see them as agents of authoritative knowledge production (Willems-Braun 1997). Ample research demonstrates how legal and other institutional assumptions about expertise have hindered and continue to complicate Indigenous actors’ participation in technology-mediated geographic knowledge production in relation to land tenure, resource management, and government policy (e.g., Bravo and Triscott 2011; Sletto 2009; Wainwright and Bryan 2009; Hale 2006; Palmer and Rundstrom 2012).

Although partial progress has been made in terms of including women in the field, there is no avoiding the fact that geography remains a white, English-speaking enterprise.¹ The President of the Association of American Geographers, Eric Sheppard, recently observed, “the proportion of African-American, Hispanic and American Indian students remains distressingly small.” He went on to note that, “[p]erversely, we are more successful recruiting African and Hispanic scholars from outside the U.S. than from within.” To change this situation, Sheppard suggests we diversify the “elite academic spaces” where geographers work. He notes that a key step toward this socio-cultural transformation is valuing “under-resourced communities, organizations, and activists” as research partners instead of study subjects (Sheppard 2012). Making space for broader participation in the production of knowledge has the potential to make geographic inquiry and pedagogy more relevant to the communities involved.²

Journals such as Geografiska Annaler, Geographical Research, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Journal of Cultural Geography, cultural geographies, and Cartographica recently published special issues focused on Indigenous geographies and featuring Indigenous authors (see Shaw et al. 2006; Johnson et al. 2007; Berry 2008; Sletto 2009; Louis et al. 2012; Larsen and Johnson 2012; Cameron et al. 2014). Indigenous scholarship richly informs recent reports on Indigenous geographies in Progress in Human Geography (Coombes et al. 2011a, 2012), as well as chapters focused on Indigeneity in disciplinary handbooks, companions, and guides (e.g., Coombes et al. 2011b; Cameron et al. 2009; Howitt and Suchet-Pearson 2003). A key characteristic of this academic work is the call to decolonize the production of Indigenous geographies.

Coombes et al. (2011b) argue that decolonizing geography requires a relational approach to knowledge production. Anti-essentialist and reflexive, a relational approach draws attention to the co-production of Indigenous geographies. This analytical angle draws on post-structural, postcolonial, and feminist traditions to resist the temptation to “treat Indigeneity as if it is a fixed and absolute construction.” It also “demands openness to shifts in the positionality of researchers.” A relational approach to geographic knowledge asks how the field of inquiry “contributes to, and is transformed by, engagement with Indigenous geographies” (Coombes et al. 2011b, 485). This question prompts reflection on selfhood and institutional relations. It asks that geographers “learn to recognize our own stories and the ways in which they sustain power relations,” and to figure out how to “give room for speaking back by those whose stories have been silenced” (Coombes et al. 2011b, 486).

Responding to the call to decolonize geography with a relational approach, this chapter proposes a postcolonial pedagogy that emphasizes how and why Indigenous videos “give room for speaking back.” First I more fully flesh-out a postcolonial approach to geographic pedagogy. Next I introduce the concept of visual sovereignty and suggest how to teach about it with resources that examine the influence of Hollywood, documentary and experimental cinema on the production of Indigenous films made in Canada. Afterward I recommend ways to introduce a different, but connected, form and process of Indigenous media—video indígena, which arose in southern Mexico at the end of the twentieth century. My recommendations dwell on the roles played by academic advocates and state agencies in the making, moving, and viewing of Indigenous video. Both the Canadian and the Mexican parts of this postcolonial pedagogy mobilize videos and related reading assignments to illustrate and foster discussion about the geographies of Indigenous media. The key lesson is that Indigenous videos help decolonize geographical imaginations by unsettling neo/colonialist hierarchies of geographic authority and authorship. They disrupt geopolitics of representation that position Indigenous peoples, places, and practices solely as subjects of study and state control.

Proposing a Postcolonial Purpose

Ample debate swirls around definitions of postcolonial and post-colonial. Rather than review these arguments, I describe how the concepts are operationalized here. A temporal notion of post-colonial that demarcates a time before or after European colonization is not very useful to me because my research has focused on the Americas, where direct colonial rule gave way centuries ago to still-present settler society rule and state-led internal colonialism. Instead I use postcolonial theory as a tool to critically intervene in the production of authoritative knowledge. Postcolonial scholars read with and against the grain to detect the agency of colonized peoples who are sometimes called subalterns. Their analyses of colonial and state archives confirm the oppression of subaltern populations while also noting the patchy nature of power. Neo/colonialist forces never were and are not monolithic or unchallenged; they confront(ed) friction all over the world (Tsing 2005).

In solidarity with anti-colonialist struggles, many postcolonial theorists strive to post, or leave behind, colonialist practices of representation that position subalterns as eternally passive and needy. But they also recognize the lingering value of colonialist categories of analysis and administration. These categories help identify, discuss, and—whenever possible—redress the cultural violence, inequitable political economies and devastated ecologies that have been initiated, legitimated, and sustained by neo/colonialist discursive practices. A postcolonial focus draws attention to intersections, appropriations, and interdependencies. This makes postcolonial theory especially useful for deconstructing how hegemonic imaginations of nations, states, and other communities—including the discipline of geography—selectively incorporate and exclude Indigenous peoples (and other marginalized populations, e.g., women).

Informed by these deconstructions, postcolonial geographers work toward reconfiguring the field of geography in terms of demographics, epistemologies, and ontologies. Similar to recent work concerned with Indigenous geographies described earlier, postcolonial geography aims “to decolonize the production of geographical knowledge both in and beyond the academy” (Blunt and McEwan 2002, 1). One way to work toward this goal is a postcolonial pedagogy. A postcolonial pedagogy historicizes today’s educational institutions and dominant knowledge production practices; it “gives the present a past” (Kanu 2006, 8–16). Postcolonial visual pedagogy invites students to examine visibility as well as knowledge and power (Jones 2011). It aims to foster a critical media literacy that looks for and listens to voices speaking from marginalized standpoints “in order to gain multiple perspectives on issues and phenomena that appear as common sense” (Kellner and Share 2005, 371). Because they amplify historically marginalized voices, Indigenous media are ideal resources for working toward this goal of decolonizing curricula and the production of authoritative geographic knowledge more generally.

I use Indigenous videos in the classroom to challenge the ways academic discourse obscures ontological pluralism (Howitt and Suchet-Pearson 2003). Indigenous videos provide a glimpse of different ontologies—i.e., culturally- and place-specific ways of conceptualizing existence. Learning to recognize and respect ontological difference encourages students “to account for the ways colonial power has shaped their approaches to knowledge production while inscribing the process of self-production” (Kincheloe 2006, 184). These are not easy lessons. Prompting students to reflect on their self-production is an emotional as well as intellectual intervention. It tasks individuals with situating themselves and their education within uneven power dynamics, ambiguous identities, and shifting relations. Postcolonial pedagogy troubles categories of difference that we tend to take for granted (Brydon 2004). Such “pedagogy of discomfort” may be disorienting, but it is also invaluable. It connects privilege to disadvantage and suggests students have an obligation to listen to and learn from the testimonies of those who have been historically and violently marginalized (Boler 1999).

In the following section, I propose a 16-week semester-long course designed to operationalize a postcolonial visual pedagogy centered on Indigenous media geographies. I have not yet had the opportunity to teach this precise course. But more than 15 years of using Indigenous videos to teach geography informs its structure and aims (see Smith 2002, 2006). The course objectives are shaped by the fact that I have mostly taught medium-sized geography classes at big state universities in the U.S.A. where the student body is overwhelmingly white. I strive to get my students to notice who is and who is not involved in the production of authoritative geographic knowledge, and to ask why uneven participation exists. Asking such “why questions” helps white students think about how repositioning their analytical perspective offers insight into how structural violence and cultural continuities not only shape Indigenous geographies, but also geographic (and other forms of) education, and indeed their own lives (Sleeter 1995).

Teaching with and About Indigenous Videos

In what follows, I describe a 16-week semester-long course designed to operationalize a postcolonial visual pedagogy centered on Indigenous media geographies. The class features two parts, both of which include an array of video screenings and reading assignments (see Table 25.1). The first part focuses on Canada and the second on Mexico. Although each part could stand on its own, incorporating elements of both will allow for a regional comparison of Indigenous media geographies. It will also highlight the transborder entanglements that connect the media makers and productions from both regions. Instructors can adjust the amount of material assigned according to educational level (e.g. upper- and lower-level undergraduate or graduate).

Table 25.1 Resources for teaching with and about Indigenous video

Confronting the ‘Reel Injun’ with ‘Reservation Reelism’

One way to begin a classroom conversation about the importance of Indigenous videos is to review the ways in which Indigenous peoples have been portrayed in Hollywood cinema. Numerous books detail the stereotypes reified in film, but films addressing these issues are especially effective for conveying such critical lessons. Students might first watch the imperfect, but still useful, BBC Four “All American” program titled Chris Hall’s Inventing the Indian. Broadcast in 2012, this hour and half long documentary puts the irascible American comedian Rich Hall in dialogue with Dallas Goldtooth, a Mdewakanton Dakota and Diné filmmaker who is a member of the comedy troupe the 1491s.³ Together Hall and Goldtooth deconstruct literary and cinematic representations of American Indians, ridicule racist tropes, highlight how Indigenous actors have subverted them, and (among other things) underscore Native diversity in the face of absurdly essentialist assumptions about the Peoples now called Indians.

The BBC’s Inventing the Indian serves as a gateway vehicle that sparks useful discussion about the geopolitics of representation with university students who may have never considered such things before. In my experience, many students find Hall’s deadpan, rambling monologues accessible and amusing. They also enjoy how Goldtooth’s superb sense of timing and calm, but sharp, humor often serve as a fine foil to Hall’s fuming tirades about injustice. Laughing helps students learn to recognize the violence of mobilizing images of Others as symbols. Yet not all students will appreciate all of the humor; sometimes it approaches “bro humor,” which is quick to demean and dismiss. For instance, at one point Hall rants about the pop star Miley Cyrus’s “dream catcher” tattoo and declares a desire to punch her. Collectively “unpacking” this and other scenes from this program can inform life-changing lessons that sensitize all sorts of students to the trouble with popular representations of Indigenous peoples (and women).

I recommend following Inventing the Indian with Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond’s 2009 film Reel Injun: On the Trail of the Hollywood Indian. Designed as a road movie, this documentary follows Diamond as he drives a “rez car” from his community Waskaganish, Quebec on the James Bay coast in northern Canada across the U.S. to Hollywood. He searches for and unsettles the mythical images of Native peoples that he and other Indigenous people encounter regularly. Humor also plays a key role in this film. Diamond and other Native filmmakers locate, laugh at and lament the lens through which they and other Indigenous peoples are so commonly seen. The ‘Reel Injun’ is the image of an Indian who lives in a tepee and races across the prairie on his war pony that came to dominate cinema and globally shape geographical imaginations about the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Film clips, travel footage and interviews with Tribal Elders and activists, filmmakers, actors, and scholars reveal the origins of this cinematic illusion and illustrate some of its impacts. Indigenous filmmakers note how they once pined to be “The Cowboy” because he always wins. Meanwhile non-Indigenous peoples enjoyed countless films featuring Indians, often played “The Nobel Injun” in films, and started longing to be “The Groovy Injun” in the late 1960s. As an antidote to the Reel Injun, the final portion of Reel Injun celebrates how a “Renaissance” of Native cinema speaks back to and/or ignores Hollywood typecasting with more human and geographically specific representations of Indigenous families, communities, and nations. The concluding scene of Reel Injun features Ojibway film critic Jesse Wente on the verge of tears as he describes the innovations and importance of the critically acclaimed 2001 Inuit feature film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner.

Viewing and discussing Inventing the Indian and Reel Injun prepares students to engage with Michelle Raheja’s book Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film. Raheja’s book does many things. It examines Native Americans’ historical involvement in and influence on the earliest days of Hollywood cinema. It emphasizes the invisibility of Native American women in cinema historiography. And then it highlights how contemporary Native American performers make marginalized individuals (and by extension, communities) more visible by creatively retelling their stories. Raheja underscores how these efforts necessarily confront “a representational field that has already been defined by the dominant culture and often does not reflect the lived experiences of people who have lived most of their lives in Native American communities” (Raheja 2010, 143). And she theorizes contemporary Indigenous films as a response to this necessity by drawing on Edward Soja’s operationalization of Henri Lefevre’s “trialectics of space” to disrupt the binary between the real and the reel. With Soja’s overlapping trio of social spaces (perceived, conceived, and lived) she describes how film serves as “the virtual reservation” that mediates Indigeneity. Recognizing the reservation as a place that can be seen as both homeland and an embodiment of genocidal intentions, Raheja describes the virtual reservation “as a recombinant, fluid re-reading of space that exists within and in between geographical territory; the past, present, and future; the Internet; film; everyday lived experience; the possible, and other such sites of Indigenous production and practice” (Raheja 2010, 150). Through the lens of the virtual reservation, Indigenous films look like a third space that rejuvenates cultural autonomy and reworks geographical imaginations.

Raheja argues Indigenous films create fertile ground for representing and reproducing sovereignty. The concept of sovereignty is paradoxical. For many Indigenous peoples it describes how and why place-centered communities live in relation to other communities, both human and non-human. At the same time it also references “European notions of nation-to-nation political sovereignty” (Raheja 2010, 198). Raheja makes good use of this geopolitical hybridity to analyze Indigenous films in terms of “visual sovereignty.” Indigenous filmmakers select, critique and refashion cinematic conventions, blending them with other ways of visualizing the past, present and future with which they are familiar, such as prophecy. They “suggest ways of decolonizing knowledge and methods of interpretation through putting seemingly discordant discourses in conversation with each other” (189).

To illustrate how such a dialogic process refreshes and fortifies Indigenous traditions, Raheja—like Diamond’s documentary Reel Injun—examines Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. She highlights how “the Atanarjuat filmmakers strategically adjust and reframe the registers on which Inuit epistemes are considered with the twin, but not necessarily conflicting, aims of operating in the service of their home communities and forcing viewers to reconsider mass-mediated images of the Arctic” (Raheja 2010, 193). Her reading of Atanarjuat demonstrates how the virtual reservation of Indigenous film provides a powerful, multi-faceted medium for re/claiming Indigenous geographies. In addition to reading Raheja’s analysis, students could view Atanarjuat online via Isuma TV, the website of Igloolik Isuma Productions, the organization based in Igloolik, Nunavut that made the film. They might also explore this Internet site through which they can view thousands more Indigenous videos. Of particular note is the work of Arnait Video Productions, an Inuit women’s media organization also based in Igloolik.⁴

Kristin Dowell’s book Sovereign Screens: Aboriginal Media on the Canadian West Coast complements Raheja’s book and its analysis of Atanarjuat. Dowell examines how Aboriginal media makers use video to represent themselves and their communities in the ways they wish their historical and contemporary triumphs, struggles, and everyday lives to be represented. They create “image nations” and “decolonize the screen” in the pursuit of a deeply politicized cultural sovereignty. Sovereign Screens differs from Raheja’s book because it is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork. Dowell’s research centered on a media organization in Vancouver staffed by Aboriginal activist-artists and non-Aboriginal advocates—including Dowell, who work together to produce and screen Aboriginal films.

Dowell participated in and studied the “the off-screen, behind the scenes, social practices of Aboriginal media production” (Dowell 2013, xii). Her book-length study elucidates how the social geographies generated through Aboriginal media making galvanize and fortify a diverse urban community. It demonstrates how media organizations shift over time as leaders and mentors come and go. Sovereign Screens introduces students to the key roles that women and their families play. It details how state funding can both enable and hobble the production and exhibition of Indigenous media art. And like Reservation Reelism, it features thoughtful analyses of several Indigenous videos. Ideally, students should watch one or more of the videos Dowell discusses. Doing so offers them an opportunity to critically consider the film’s aesthetics, the filmmakers’ techniques, and Dowell’s analyses. For example, Nikamowin is an award-winning experimental film available for viewing online.⁵ This 11-min video showcases the ways Aboriginal media makers utilize innovative audio and editing strategies to artistically (re)create cultural traditions such as language, song and storytelling. Dowell argues that Burton “created a Cree mediascape” and that social actors like him are “negotiating the interface between digital technologies and indigenous knowledge through the media production process” (Dowell 2013, 171).

Situating Indigenous Video in Mexico

The second component of this Indigenous media course focuses on the geographies of Indigenous video in Mexico. It begins with the book Indigenous Media in Mexico: Culture, Community, and the State by Erica Cusi Wortham. Like Sovereign Screens, this book is based on the author’s extensive fieldwork, institutional advocacy, and organization of festivals. Wortham examined the social practices of Indigenous media by supporting, spending time and talking with the media makers who are “making culture visible” in the face of “hegemony on steroids” (Wortham 2013, 3 and 5). Her book details the invention of video indígena, a documentary style of video making that was disseminated through a series of video production workshops orchestrated by mostly non-Indigenous reformers working in the Instituto Nacional Indígena (INI-National Indigenous Institute), a federal agency targeting Mexico’s Indigenous population. Although this mode of media making emerged out of a state institution, video indígena has provided a platform for the documentation and revalorization of cultural traditions historically denigrated by state policy and public education. Wortham’s book shows students how much of the cultural work initiated and informed by aims of video indígena fortifies connections between cultural production, political action and social organization, connections formerly and currently severed by neo/colonialist practices of representation.

Wortham explores the organizational relationships and cultural programs that preceded, informed, and emerged out of this state-supported technology transfer program. She describes how many community-based media collectives sought, and seek, to work beyond state sponsorship and sometimes struggle(d) to explain their efforts to their neighbors, relatives, and community authorities. She also explains how a small independent media organization, Ojo de Agua Comunicación, arose out of the ashes of a national Indigenous Video Center that had been established in Oaxaca at the climax of state investment in Indigenous media production.⁶ Refusing to tell a simple tale of triumph, Wortham also probes the ways Indigenous videos made in Oaxaca risk replicating state discourses of a depoliticized, male-dominated and folkloric cultural patrimony. To make her case, Wortham compares video indígena to more revolutionary but still related (Smith 2006) videos the Chiapas Media Project produced with Zapatista communities. This scholarly strategy effectively illustrates a spectrum of Indigenous media operating in southern Mexico at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Recent research on Indigenous videos made in Oaxaca, Mexico also spotlights academics who have worked to reform the educational and research institutions that employ them, as well as the scholarly venues where they publish, in order to enable and foster greater Indigenous participation in the visualization of authoritative knowledge about Indigenous geographies. This angle of analysis helps draw students’ attention to the contributions of Indigenous media makers to scholarly knowledge production. To do this, instructors might assign a special collection of short articles titled “Gaining Ground: Indigenous video in Bolivia, Mexico and Beyond” that was published in a 2004 issue of American Anthropologist. It features an introduction by the journal’s Visual Anthropology editor, Jeff Himpele (2004a), an interview Himpele did with Bolivian media makers (Himpele 2004b), an article about a particular Indigenous media organization in Oaxaca by Wortham (2004), and an interview with Juan José García, a Zapotec media maker from Oaxaca (Brígido-Corachán 2004). García was interviewed in April 2003, when he was president of Ojo de Agua and attending the Taos Talking Picture Festival, where Ojo de Agua received a lifetime achievement award. The interview allows students to hear what García has to say about the transition from the state-sponsored Indigenous Video Center to the independent organization Ojo de Agua. Emphasizing the interview’s publication in the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association provide a starting point for a conversation about how Indigenous videos can and should contribute to scholarly discussions about Indigenous geographies, and the ways that scholars can also contribute to the making and moving of Indigenous videos.

Such a classroom conversation about the decolonization of geographic knowledge production could be fortified by assigning an article (Smith 2003) that considers the contributions of Stefano Varese, a Peruvian anthropologist who worked in Mexican cultural institutions before relocating to U.S.A., where he is now the Director of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas at the University of California-Davis. In the early 1980s, Varese spearheaded state supported popular culture programming that hired representatives of community-centered collectives to undertake initiatives such as theater and traditional knowledge about medicinal plants. Positioned as organic intellectuals, these individuals and the Indigenous collectives associated with them accessed media technologies, as well as some support for using them. Varese and several other academics that initiated institutional reform also used this programming to share and rethink critical theories of ethnicity and development. These institutional, intellectual and technological exchanges are evident in videos made by particular community-based Indigenous organizations, especially when the videos are theorized as the result of postcolonial technoscientific practices (see also discussion of Gustavo Esteva in Smith 2010).

The coproduction of Indigenous videos is also evident in a project made possible by Josefina Aranda, an anthropologist who helped establish a statewide coffee cooperative organized along the lines of community governance traditions that distinguish the Indigenous regions of Oaxaca where coffee is grown. Aranda worked with Ojo de Agua to make a video called Mujeres del mismo valor (Women of Equal Worth), which is available online for viewing.⁷ Smith (2012b) argues this 27-min video can be viewed not only as a multi-purpose postcolonial archive that illuminates Indigenous women’s new forms of participation in development and community governance, but also as an illustration of Aranda’s research on the gendered inequalities characterizing coffee and other forms of agricultural production. Introducing students to this kind of analytical perspective encourages them to think about how and why Indigenous videos intervene in neo/colonialist and androcentric geographical imaginations of Indigeneity. It can also prompt discussions about the relevance of geographic research undertaken with emancipatory aims.

This emphasis on particular bodies involved in the coproduction of Indigenous media is also central to an examination of, and personal entanglements with, another Indigenous video made in Oaxaca with the assistance of Ojo de Agua: Dulce convivencia (Sweet Gathering) by Filoteo Gómez Martínez. Smith (2012a) provides a tripartite analysis of this video’s production and meaning that neatly intersects with the conclusion of Wortham’s book, where she discusses the same video (Wortham 2013, 210–218). Both examinations of Dulce convivencia emphasize the ways Indigenous media makers and differently located audiences understand Indigenous media in sometimes drastically different ways. In addition to reading and comparing both analyses, students can view Dulce convivencia by accessing it online on Isuma TV.⁸ These three resources—Smith (2012a), Dulce convivencia, and Isuma TV—link Indigenous media made in Oaxaca with Indigenous media made in and/or circulated online from a server in Igloolik (see Table 25.1). Instructors might ask students to think (or write) about these connections in terms of a relational approach to Indigenous geographies.

To expand on this lesson about tranborder geographies of Indigenous media, I suggest wrapping up this second part of a class on Indigenous video by assigning a 20-min interview with Guillermo Monteforte, an Italian-Canadian documentary maker who was one of the architects of the state technology transfer program and founding director of the related Indigenous Video Center, as well as a key figure in the establishment and maintenance of Ojo de Agua. Like Atanarjuat and Dulce convivencia, this interview is available on an Isuma TV. It is found on a channel titled “Making Connections,” which was created by Marie-Hélen Cousineau, a non-Indigenous media maker who has worked with the all-women Arnait Video collective in Igloolik since the early 1990s. Cousineau interviewed Monteforte during a 12-day tour in 2009 that brought the four members of the original Arnait video crew (including Cousineau) and others to Oaxaca.⁹ Her conversation with Monteforte not only provides insight into the formation and continuing goals of Ojo de Agua, but it also discusses the possible impacts of the cultural exchanges characterizing Arnait’s visit. This interview encapsulates some of the far-flung relationships that constitute Indigenous media geographies. It also reveals the invaluable cultural work of non-Indigenous advocates who dedicate their lives to creating conditions for exchange and access that will enable Indigenous peoples to mediate Indigenous geographies.

Conclusion

Wortham closes her book by asking readers to consider how “the study of indigenous media constitutes a collaborative space in which researchers work alongside other participants” (2013, 221; see also Ginsburg 1997). While this collaborative space fails to rectify asymmetrical geopolitics, it does allow participants and a growing range of audiences to reimagine Indigenous peoples’ relationships with states, and—I would add—scholars. Wortham argues that, “the struggle for self-determination is being waged on the fields of media production and consumption. Indigenous media production and consumption act as catalysts, engendering discussions that lead to empowering awareness.” While this “project of decolonizing our imagination is far from accomplished…the accomplishments of making culture visible brings us further along” (Wortham 2013, 221). Indigenous videos are powerful pedagogical tools that provide mobile grounds for establishing visual sovereignty. They educate viewers about Indigenous geographies, as experienced by Indigenous peoples. Indigenous videos also catalyze valuable conversations about exclusion and inclusion.

To fully understand the power of Indigenous video, students and other scholars must learn to situate them in relation to the commercial, cultural, political and institutional settings from which they arise and through which they operate. So my two-part dream class begins with lessons about the hegemonic celluloid imaginations of Indigenous peoples. Then it introduces theoretical tools, ethnographic research, and particular videos for studying the production and circulation of Indigenous media in Canada and Mexico. The overarching objective of the two-part pedagogical plan outlined above is to reflect on how the conversations catalyzed by Indigenous video can help change the disciplinary practices of geography. Indigenous videos should be mobilized to teach about particular Indigenous peoples, places, and practices. Students can be encouraged to witness these videos in terms of visual sovereignty, which suggests how the videos do not just embody, but also interpret and analyze, Indigenous geographies. Ascribing this sort of recognition and respect for new forms of mediating authorship reconfigures geographic authority. It includes formerly excised voices, illuminates alternative perspectives, and might even facilitate the recruitment and retention of students from historically marginalized communities. Indigenous videos decolonize geography by prompting geographers to ask who participates (or not) in their own geographic visualizations. They also provide a template for visualizing pluricultural conversations in which no one cultural perspective dominates the conversation.