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May/June 2006 Featured Story AlterNATIVE Media: Indigenous Video Activists Set the Scene to Be Heard By Cristina Verán
Bucking the ‘60s era adage, “The Revolution Will Not be Televised,” indigenous peoples around the world have made television – more specifically, community-based and produced video news media – a revolution all its own. Some initiatives are tribe-based, others international collaborations, still more are the brainchildren of individuals breaking down barriers and documenting the process all the while, behind and in front of their own cameras. Indigenous issues, struggles, and triumphs will be televised.
Media is our nonviolent way to wage war,” asserts Maori videographer Dean Te Kupu Hapeta, producer of Ngatahi: Know the Links (ngatahi means “united together” in Maori). The ongoing video documentary series presents the news and views of indigenous (and non-Native marginalized) youth around the globe, 20 countries thus far – from South Africa to Colombia to Tahiti. With the support of his iwi (tribal groups) – Ngati Raukawa, Ngati Toa, and Te Ati Awa – as well as the national arts fund Creative New Zealand, Hapeta’s work educates and has furthered the connecting of diverse peoples, from Maori to Masai to Mohawk, who share a host of historic and contemporary concerns in their respective post- (if not neo-) colonial contexts. “We are mostly isolated from one another,” he notes, explaining, “Ngatahi: Know the Links puts a face to our distant relatives who are ‘family,’ separated not only by geography but also spiritually.” Himself a pioneering hip-hop artist in the Pacific, fronting the politically charged Upper Hutt Posse, Hapeta envisioned the series fusing interviews with music. It is a kind of “rapumentary,” embodying the language and aesthetic favored today not only by Maori youth, but Native young people in many parts of the world. Ngatahi is also a personal journey, one which connects Hapeta as well as his audiences to universal ideals and concerns. He enters into classrooms of Hawai’i as an educator, communes with Rastafari spiritual leaders at Nyabinghi masses in Jamaica, shares political perspectives with the artists of South Africa’s sprawling townships, and marches for freedom in New York with advocates for the imprisoned scribe Mumia Abu Jamal. “The series comes from an indigenous perspective, presenting other indigenous and marginalized peoples’ perspectives,” he says. Indeed, Hapeta attends first to this audience, making no claims to impartiality in the series’ coverage of diverse issues – from police brutality toward African immigrants in Paris to the sovereignty movements of Native Hawaiians. Aotearoa New Zealand sits geographically in the Global South, but like Australia is a relatively wealthy nation. In developing countries, meanwhile, geographic proximity is no guarantee that even blood-related peoples can maintain communication links through war zones and other impassible terrain. This makes it all the more urgent and challenging to document and disseminate news and issues across deserts, mountain ranges, and rainforests.
“By and large,” explains Alexandra Halkin of the Chiapas Media Project (CMP), “these are oral, storytelling – not written – cultures, in terms of the way information and history are transmitted.” Video, accordingly, is an especially apt medium for conveying this. Her organization works in Mexico with not only the consent but in consultation with the EZLN (aka, Zapatistas) to fiscally support, facilitate, and distribute news and information videos by and for the people of Chiapas. While some works receive outside distribution, expanding and informing a larger international audience, “Most,” Halkin makes clear, “are produced for internal consumption, among the communities of Chiapas.” “We’re not just documenting resistance,” says Halkin. “Chiapas Media Project is part of it; a form of resistance in itself.” Indeed, as mainstream, national news entities rarely if ever venture into their remote, isolated territories, CMP’s work also often serves as the de facto protector of law and order for indigenous communities. For example, CMP videos of military incursions into Chiapas, where government soldiers had been caught throwing rocks at local children, have been used successfully in court, forcing the government to pay the children’s hospital bills. There are 16 videos currently available and distributed by Chiapas Media Project, including, notably, The Land Belongs to Those Who Work It, a story about an ongoing dispute between a major resort development and the local communities whose lands have been sold out from under them to house a future tourist hideaway. Also in development and still seeking funding is a comprehensive digital archive of indigenous peoples film and video, which will be based in the state of Oaxaca. In Mexico, as elsewhere, the growth and development of visual media programs takes a long-term commitment of human resources and finances to ensure sustainability. In Chiapas, the high-functioning level of structure, organization, and clarity of purpose that the Zapatistas already had in place have greatly served and supported that community for the region’s media initiatives.
An ocean and a continent away, a group of Tanzanian youth founded an organization in the northeastern city of Arusha called Aang Serian, which translates to “House of Peace” in Ki-Masai language. The group works to promote indigenous arts and culture, and the retention of traditional knowledge systems among diverse ethnic groups in the region. As rural populations increasingly seek work outside their traditional homelands, leaving for the country’s larger towns and cities, “There is a fractured experience, dividing communities,” notes Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, co-founder of Aang Serian, “including increasing conflicts with those known as mashiftaz (Ki-Swahili for shifters), loosely organized Somali groups which have crossed the border onto Masai lands.” The tensions are palpable, and yet, as with indigenous groups that have ongoing conflicts with government entities, they’re barely noted by national media. From this House of Peace, in 2002, “Aang Serian Drum” was created as an ongoing, community-based Indigenous Media Project to train video media makers locally. It provides education, technological assistance, and equipment to individuals and entire villages. This supports their efforts to actively combat, according to Rafiq, the mainstream media’s unapologetic misrepresentations of local indigenous com-munities, which constantly find their words misquoted or taken far out of context – if they are heard at all. While territorial disputes, water rights, and wholesale theft of pastoralist groups’ livestock are immediate threats to lives and livelihood in the region, Rafiq laments that stereotypes overtake substance in terms of what little is recognized in the mainstream. “Distorted notions of modernity, from a British or colonial template, still predominate.” Those who live and dress according to their own cultural norms are treated as outsiders in Tanzanian society, where (as in Latin America) “indigenous” refers to those groups who retain distinctive, historically-based cultures, identities, and ties to the land – as compared with those more assimilated masses who are removed from these contexts. “The first incident that influenced us to write and produce our own media,” he recalls, “goes back to the time a Masai friend of ours, wearing his traditional garb, had gone to a local hotel in Arusha to meet someone. Upon entering, however, the manager came and had him kicked off the premises because of the way he looked: not ‘Western’.” Rafiq continues, “When he demanded entry, explaining that he was there for a meeting, hotel security slapped him and handcuffed him, then extorted money from him by threatening to take him to jail. “We wrote letters to the local news media, and Aang Serian Drum was born, inspired to actively engage with this media, to produce its own videos documenting their communities from the inside.” One of these, The Masai Life, a two-part documentary produced by Aang Serian Drum, is currently available for international distribution.
Indeed, indigenous visual media makers around the globe have demonstrated that active engagement is critical. Alongside the success stories outlined above are many others – such as Sámi Television in Norway, which As Internet accessibility increases and the costs of DVD reproduction decreases, too, the route from camera to editing room to audience, peoples to peoples, opens up still more avenues. Partners of the international Indigenous Media Network are gathering for an annual convocation at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues this May, in New York, to share strategies for increasing their voice and visibility on the world stage. Armed with increasingly affordable and accessible recording technology, fiscal support, and online, broadcast, and other distribution mechanisms, the days of grudging acceptance of mainstream media’s negligible, slanted coverage of New Zealand’s, Mexico’s, and Tanzania’s indigenous peoples are no more. Indigenous media arts, actions, and activism have an increasing ability to speak to and influence their world – and yours.
Cristina Verán is a journalist and historian who writes about global cultural phenomena and socio-political movements. Her work has featured in wide-ranging media outlets, including The Village Voice, Ms. Magazine, ColorLines, Vibe, and News From Indian Country. As a United Nations correspondent, she has focused considerably on the coverage and dissemination of news, issues, and interests pertaining to indigenous peoples. ©2006 Fellowship of Reconciliation |
