This dissertation is about the political and aesthetic dimensions of Indigenous media in Peruvian Amazonia. It explores how Kukama media-makers use aesthetic mastery to engage in three key political fields in Amazonia: indigeneity, historicity, and environmentalism. I specifically examine the audiovisual discourses and media-making practices coming from an Indigenous radio station called Radio Ucamara, located in the town of Nauta in Northeastern Peru (Loreto region). Drawing on place-based ethnography and digital research methods, I analyze the way this radio station instrumentalizes multiple digital and non-digital media forms to make visible (and also audible) their identities, violent histories, and cosmological worlds amidst their confrontation with the Peruvian neoliberal state and oil companies. The dissertation also contemplates how through these processes of mediatization, Amazonian ontologies, mytho-histories, and identities are being reimagined. For this purpose, I focus both on the analysis of media products (e.g., music videos, documentaries, journalistic reportage, murals, books) and the social dynamics surrounding those creations, to understand the way Kukama media producers take part in ongoing struggles for the revitalization of the Kukama language, seeking justice for the rubber times violence, and stopping the pollution of Amazonian rivers. Following theoretical frameworks derived from the anthropology of media and the anthropology of music and verbal art in Lowland South America, I argue that media aesthetics is becoming a major instrument in building political power in the region.

This research is an interdisciplinary work on the use of media by marginalized ethnic minorities for self-representation, using as its frame of reference scholars such as Faye Ginsburg, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Stuart Hall, Achille Mbembe, and David Harvey. Specifically, this dissertation examines Indigenous communities in Brazil and the Roma (Gypsy) population of Spain, uncovering the multiple discourses through which ethnic identities have to be negotiated within a larger dominant culture, especially in contexts of globalization, and brings to this discussion the theorization of new media. These two highly stigmatized populations have been finding new and more democratic venues for collectively defining their own cultures in the complex process of identity (re)creation. Based on interviews with media producers, I discuss community radio stations, online network groups, video making, and blogs, and how these constitute different tools for promoting culture and conducting political activism. Through constant performances of culture, I argue, they are able to restore and participate in the dialogue on self-determination and minority rights in a different sphere of discourse, both locally and globally, at the same time that they also influence their own (and others') understanding of their ethnic identity. In terms of the impact of media products produced autonomously or in collaboration with non-Indigenous groups, this research also addresses the fact that, despite the efforts of both Indigenous and Roma groups in using these new media as non-hegemonic communication venues, their invisibility as a subject is often repeated, even when sympathetically supported by the discourse of cultural diversity, due to financial and distribution constraints. Ultimately, this study brings together their similarities and differences to determine how these technologies can be both helpful or hinder the self-affirmation and increased autonomy of ethnic minority groups.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

<ul>The growing field of Indigenous media has contributed greatly to theorizations around digital appropriation, self-representation and political advocacy, and the importance of media to Indigenous People’s movements. However, these theorizations and scholarly works tend to primarily focus on Indigenous men’s media practices and contexts. This dissertation presents findings from the Mẽnire Making Movies project, a participatory media project that explores Kayapó women’s digital worlds through a case study that merges ethnographic research and on-site media training in the village of A’Ukre in the Kayapó Indigenous Lands in northeastern Brazil. This project trained 4-6 Kayapó women in introductory audiovisual production and editing and is the first project to focus exclusively on Kayapó women’s engagements with digital technology. Through a decolonial and participatory methodology, this media project centers Kayapó social values of accountability, relationality, and conviviality, to analyze how Kayapó women’s media-making speaks to gendered and generational dimensions of personhood through an Amazonian social lens. Drawing from literature on feminist geography, Amazonian social theory, and Indigenous media in Latin America, this project presents findings that broaden the current literature on Kayapó media by introducing the conceptual framework of accompanied media. As an analytical and theoretical framework, accompanied media approaches Indigenous media as both a product and a social practice, centering the relational dimensions of production, consumption, and circulation. Scholars and media facilitators can apply the accompanied media framework to design inclusive media workshops with Indigenous communities that take into account barriers that can limit women’s participation like language, gender, social and behavioral norms, and other practical elements of participatory media work.</ul>

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abstract: Scholars have diversified notions of sovereignty with indigenous frameworks ranging from native sovereignty to cultural sovereignty. Within this range, there exists only a small body of research investigating technology in relation to indigenous sovereignty, excepting the colonial implications of guns, germs, film, and literacy. Furthermore, there is a lack of inquiry on how indigenous peoples operationalize their sovereignty through designs and uses of technology that combine emerging digital media technologies, old electronic media, and traditional indigenous media. This “indigenous convolution media” leads to what is referred to in this research as Indigenous Technological Sovereignty or “Tecno-Sovereignty.” This dissertation begins to address knowledge gaps regarding the dynamic relationship between technology and indigenous sovereignty, and it posits that Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized when indigenous groups exercise their own self-determined designs and uses of mediums and media to address their particular needs and desires. Therefore, Tecno-Sovereignty is comprised of the social, cultural, political, and economic effects of indigenous technology. This dissertation, a compendium of essays, presents an indigenous theory of media and sovereignty: defining a vision of Tecno-Sovereignty; arguing the purpose and importance of Tecno-Sovereignty; demonstrating how Tecno-Sovereignty is operationalized; and revealing capacity-building recommendations for the further development of indigenous technological sovereignty. Additionally, this research, through an exhibition of indigenous convolution media, calls attention to indigenous praxes of art, technology, and learning that are both grounded by and support the theories proposed in this research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2015

English Summary This dissertation primarily aims to synoptically place the theme of audiovisual representations of indigenous cultures within the context of cultural studies. With its interdisciplinary overlapping, the cultural studies approach is well suited to understanding the complex significance of visual representations of culture, which are both cultural artefacts and cultural interpretations and have an impact that is as artistic as it is scientific and political. The first part of the work describes the manner in which native cultures are audio-visually represented, especially in ethnographic photographs and films which emerged in the North American and European context. The mapping of "exotic others" intensified with the first modern overseas discoveries, first by means of exhibitions of living natives, illustrations and figurines, later through photographs, films and videos. These representations were significantly influenced by the socio-cultural conditions in which they arose. As late as the turn of the 20th century, there was a dominating conviction about the capability of photographs to present an objective record of reality. This technology was therefore used as an instrument for recording and classifying physical and cultural differences. The widespread acceptance of the doctrine of...

This dissertation examines nonprofit, co-operative, and volunteer media enterprises operating outside Saskatchewan’s state and commercial media sectors. Drawing on historical research and contemporary case studies, I take the position that this third sector of media activity has played, and continues to play, a much-needed role in engaging marginalized voices in social discourse, encouraging participation in community-building and local governance, fostering local-global connectedness, and holding power to account when the rights and interests of citizens are jeopardized. The cases studied reveal a surprising level of resiliency among third sector media enterprises; however, the research also finds that the challenges facing third sector media practitioners have deepened considerably in recent decades, testing this resiliency. A rapid withdrawal of media development support from the public sphere has left Saskatchewan’s third sector media at a crossroads. The degree of the problem is largely unknown outside media practitioner circles, even among civil society allies. I argue this relates to the lack of recognition of nonprofit, co-operative, and volunteer media as a distinct third sector, thus obscuring the global impact when hundreds of small undertakings shed staff and reduce operations in multiple locations across Canada. At the same time, there is increasing recognition that such media have the potential to fill a void left by commercial and state media organizations that have retreated from local communities. Accordingly, this dissertation makes the case for a coordinated media development strategy as a component of the social economy. The challenge is to build useful mechanisms of support among civil society allies that do not replicate oppressive donor-client relationships that are all too common in the arena of governmental and private sector support. While never simple, the opportunities and social benefits are considerable when citizens devise the means to participate in the creation of a robust, diverse media ecology.

Much of the scholarly literature on Indigenous media relations frames Indigenous peoples as passive players in the mainstream media, and focuses on negative elements such as stereotypes. This thesis challenges this view, finding that Indigenous peoples in Canada actively and strategically engage with mainstream and social media as they forward their social and political agendas. This thesis provides an analysis of the counter-colonial narrative in Canada by offering a new perspective on Indigenous media relations, focusing as a case on the Idle No More movement. Emphasizing three dimensions of communication--the mainstream print media, social media, and individuals involved in Indigenous media relations--I examine the ways in which Indigenous agency and empowerment have the potential to change discourses in the media. As sources of insight I draw on a discourse analysis of mainstream news media, a qualitative analysis of social media and on interviews with those who have significant experience in Indigenous media relations. Interviews with prominent media personalities and individuals involved in media relations (including CBC’s Duncan McCue and Janet Rogers; Four Host Nations CEO Tewanee Joseph, and others) illustrate the novel and impactful ways indigenous peoples in Canada are actively and strategically shaping the mainstream media. These representations create a more complex picture of Indigenous peoples as they counter the stereotyped or victimized media narratives within which Indigenous peoples have historically been placed. / Graduate / 0327 / 0708 / 0391 / tiahiltz@uvic.ca