Faye's discussion of Isuma TV inaugurates Indigenous Media week in an important and compelling way.  Thanks, too, to Pam for expanding on the conversation by placing this new media outlet in its broader transnational and historical context.  From language pedagogy to boarding school survivor's testimony to Inuit narrative, documentary, and experimental film, Inuit TV provides free access and local and international coverage of events and issues in and around Nunavut.

One of the most intriguing things about this clip from _Before Tomorrow_ is how the filmmakers "people" the Arctic against a literary and visual field that has rendered the far north relatively empty of human imprint and culture.  The non-diegetic sound--a heartbeat--serves to strengthen this connection between the community and the landscape.

I think the point Nancy makes regarding the relation-creating capacities of Arnait’s filmmaking is critical – and one certainly made by Faye herself in her earlier work on aesthetics.  Arnait’s alternative application of filmmaking – i.e., as a means both of participating in every day political processes such as alliance building, and of achieving commercial valorization, highlights a filmmaking context in which multiple socialities are operative. Arnait’s films seem to make both penerative and intersubjective interventions.
The clip Faye features was also employed as an interstitial piece between the featured films at the 2008 ImagineNative gathering in Toronto – the largest Indigenous film festival in the country, where members of Arnait, invited guests, ‘hosted’ questions from the audience.  That the producers are able to occasionally accompany the film on its travels seems to afford them the discursive space to acquaint themselves with each audience in its locality.  Despite that theirs and Isuma’s films are often referred to as “ethnographic film” (much to their chagrin) the real work of ethnography appears in their gauging of audiences, in their capacities to read them and to compensate for the sorts of missing information that continually impede a recognition of the uniqueness of their labours and intentions.  It is almost a like a radioizing of film….  Where the film travels without them, on the other hand, it seems to take on the lives of its audiences.
Kathleen Buddle

First of all, this is a riveting clip!  I'm now really looking forward to seeing Before Tomorrow.  I  think it's interesting how Igoolik Isuma is taking advantage of digital technologies in a way that also takes into account digital divide issues, such that the digital divide is hardly a reason to take projects off line, instead it's an impetus to think creatively about how to use these technologies, and thus to introduce a project like NITV.  Thank you for this post, Faye.

Thanks also to all of the posters who presented links to different online media sources - I will certainly be using them in my fall class, Media, the State, and the Senses.

Thank you Faye for an interesting post and others for participating in this stream. During my fieldwork, I asked people at APTN (www.aptn.ca) about the mainstream media, and they usually answered by saying that APTN was not seeking to become mainstream, at least not as it is normally conceived of today. On the other hand, the same people stated that they wanted to become mainstream. The mandate of becoming mainstream, while retaining an Aboriginal perspective, became the fundamental goal of the network: to reach its potential audience pool, and at the same time, to provide them with an alternative model of what mainstreaming should mean. Aboriginal scholars have pointed out that mainstreaming in the Eurocentric sense of the word implies that people and institutional practices try to achieve norms in their assumptions, opinions and behavior. In this case, the mainstream is constructed as one main stream. That is not, however, what the conception of the mainstream should be for Aboriginal people. Rather, the mainstream should take into account that there are multiple streams that should be perceived together, collectively, in the imaginary construction of the mainstream.

ps. like tremendously the coloring and movement of the camera in the video!

I love this clip! I am also very interested in the alternative distribution platforms that Isuma TV is using...

There are a few online Indigenous video projects happening here in Australia (Indigitube, Nyurru Warnu). The Australian government recently announced a plan that will take broadband into remote Australia, so these initiatives are important.

As a researcher, however, I am finding myself increasingly drawn back to digital broadcasting policy issues. Cost issues around internet access means that online media may never supersede free to air broadcast out here (phone billing has proven to be a perpetual problem). Moreover, until satellite broadband improves or wireless mesh networks/smart radio etc are given serious consideration, broadband speeds are likely to be slow or non-existent in many areas. Then there's digital literacy and maintenace to think about... I'd say there's no real hurry with any of this, except that analogue TV will be switched off in 2013 and the government currently has no plan as to how digital TV will work in remote areas.

The government preferred model for TV seems to be satellite direct to home in remote areas (which will have cost and maintenace issues too!) Because of the nature of this technology, we may see the end of the local/regional model of remote Indigenous television.

I am not talking about NITV here... NITV (the Australian version) is not aimed at remote Indigenous people, but mainstream audiences. It is more like public service broadcasting than the community model that came before. I support NITV but it is a national channel which does not address the language, social and cultural needs of remote people. While some communities are using their community television licences to insert local footage over NITV, these kind of 'making do' options will not be possible with digital broadcasting...

I think that in the long term we are looking at a range of novel, unique media systems to serve remote Australia. However, I am not confident that ad hoc local innovation can address all the issues - and I don't think the Indigenous media sector believes that either.

It is a confusing time for media policy. And, as always, remote Australia has been left til last.

Thanks Faye for inviting me to participate in this interesting dicussion. I’d like to make some comments regarding some of the issues brought up by Ramesh.

Just to give folks a little background, the Chiapas Media Project (CMP)/Promedios has built four Regional Media Centers with the Zapatista communities that provide video production, post-production, audio recording equipment and satellite internet access. The project is now 11 1/2 years old and we are currently distributing about 30 productions worldwide.

The vast majority of the Zapatista video productions are for an internal audience, in their language. These productions range from documentation of meetings, celebrations, local projects, events etc. When they make videos available for an international audience a lot of consideration goes into that decision. First, is there anyone in the video who will be put in danger by having their image made public? Since the Zapatista’s live within the context of an on-going low intensity war with the Mexican government, this is an important consideration. We have seen in other low intensity conflicts in Mexico (Oaxaca, Atenco, Guerrero etc.) how government authorities use video productions and photos posted on the internet to identify individuals or groups that they feel are a threat to state power.

Latin America indigenous video is many times used as a way to document and denounce human rights abuses committed by the state against indigenous peoples. These producers, communities and organizations in the vast majority of circumstances are not receiving support by their governments for their productions. I think the question of how indigenous media is being funded deserves some attention because it is very difficult to compare Maori TV or APTN or indigenous producers in Canada and the US who are receiving government grants to the vast majority of indigenous producers in Latin America who scramble just to have enough money to buy video tape.

Hello all -- joining in the conversation a little late here -- and thanks Faye! Isuma is indeed a great point to start talking about indigenous media. Picking up from Lucas:

Working in a very different meridian, with Video nas Aldeias (Video in the Villages), in Brazil, we've come to see Isuma as a consistent, organized strategy of broadcast and streaming distribution. Video nas Aldeias joined Isuma and started to post some videos there, and there's also an effort gone into a Youtube channel. One of the main questions I see concerning these strategies for distribution over the web is connected to the production model of much of what the indigenous filmmakers are doing in Brazil. In the "documentary" approach to making audio-visual, there's this notion of a finished film, to be packaged in DVD's and Tapes, and to be sent to festivals, sold, or shown in other villages or schools. This is always the result of a several month long effort, and it is very much the paradigm. It has worked great, but there's a need to discuss other forms, faster, more dynamic, and that channels like Isuma (or Youtube) articulate so well. It's not the type of packaging that TV programs made everyone used to over the last half century, but it is not this feature (or mid-length feature) format that the festivals take up. With this in mind we are trying to organize at Video nas Aldeias a workshop for June to work exclusively with short pieces, maybe use left-overs from finished documentaries, or help filmmakers that have ideas for short films. I hope some of it may end up in Isuma.

Now, thinking about the "digital divide", there's something interesting to note about the history of radio in Brazil. Because the so-called "alternative radios" (pirate, unnoficial etc) were so persecuted in Brazil during the 80's and 90's, it occurs that the internet, when in was popularized, was taken up as a space that the radio had in many other Latin-American countries. In many place, and for many constituencies, this was an eager encounter with a democratic means. And there are in fact many intense and wide-spread programs for taking Satellite internet connections to remote localities, including many comunities working with Video nas Aldeias. In this sense, Radio, because it is low-fi, is not necessarily more available than internet in many states in Brazil (not counting its more commercial version).

Video in the Villages' Youtube channel: www.youtube.com/user/VideoNasAldeias

Ernesto Ignacio de Carvalho www.videonasaldeias.org.br

Thanks to Faye and others for interesting feedback to IsumaTV and internet for Indigenous media. I'd like expand on and clarify a few points.

First, anyone can visit IsumaTV’s new 2.0 ‘beta’ version now even before we launch officially May 29th. Use the URL www.isuma.tv/beta for the next two weeks as we complete final fine-tuning of the new site. IsumaTV 2.0 allows more interaction and networking enabling users to join and upload content to one another's channels. 2.0 also accepts all media content, not only videos, but audio, radio, documents, photos and text.

Any Indigenous media content or archives can be uploaded any time. Our project for Digitizing the Inuit and Aboriginal Media Archive (DIAMA) preserves audio and video archives recorded over the past 40 years on deteriorating or obsolete magnetic tape formats in danger of being lost. DIAMA can set up a channel and digitize up to five sample videos for free, and then co-sponsor with the archive a search for funds to digitize and upload the rest. Please contact me or write info@isuma.tv

I wanted to add to the discussion of old vs. new media and how internet may or may not be useful to remote Indigenous communities where access to bandwidth and computers is so poor that many cannot use it? At present, Inuit and other Indigenous people are on the brink of being left out of the most important new communication technology since the printing press. Almost everything in the 21st century will be conducted at least partly by internet. Being left off, even for another decade or two, is like a linguistic, cultural and economic death sentence. Isuma’s commitment to create IsumaTV even in the face of these disadvantages is our recognition of how access to the internet cannot be ‘negotiable’ for Indigenous communities struggling to survive. This is particularly the case since the new 2.0 multimedia internet actually offers a practical tool especially suitable for oral cultures in remote regions. Unlike the literary medium of print, or the 1.0 print-based internet which is all about reading, in which oral cultures traditionally have been disadvantaged by participating in their second languages, the 2.0 audiovisual internet advantages people using sophisticated aural and visual skill-sets in their own first languages. In Nunavut, for example, the new Inuktitut Language Protection Act requires public and private sector agencies to improve their services in Inuktitut. So far, this is interpreted to mean providing Inuktitut syllabic translations of English-written documents, including syllabic website pages as an alternative to English. However, Inuktitut is an oral language for sophisticated storytelling over four millennia. Syllabic Inuktitut was invented by priests a hundred years ago to translate the Bible, and more recently government-language web pages and position papers that make no sense at all when transliterated into written Inuktitut. Everyone who speaks Inuktitut knows that very few Inuit who read will choose to read Inuktitut translations of English texts rather than read the English itself or not bother at all.

A 2.0 interactive multimedia internet allows bureaucracies as well as citizens to speak to one another in Inuktitut through audio-video uploads, and be spoken back to by users or clients in their own first language. Innovative thinking about an audiovisual internet may well free oral cultures from feeling, and being treated as, ‘illiterate’ and everything that follows from this kind of stereotyped misrepresentation.

People for whom minority language preservation is a priority have no choice but to invest in the internet immediately and find new solutions to current obstacles. No centralized satellite television channel ever can address the multilingual needs of Indigenous people for whom language preservation remains a cultural necessity. APTN in Canada, for example, programs fewer hours per week of Inuit or Aboriginal language programming in 2009 than it had ten or twenty years ago. The linear pressure of showing only one program at a time, no matter how many people may be watching, allows APTN to broadcast no more than 24 hours of ‘unilingual’ programming (that is, only one language at any given moment) in any 24 hour day. In contrast, IsumaTV has over a thousand films in 28 different languages simultaneously available to anyone at any time. APTN's still prohibitive cost of satellite access, infrastructure and overhead for a single centralized channel showing only one program at a time forces programming choices towards the mainstream, that is, majority English and French language programs, to attract thewidest possible audience. No centralized pressure leads IsumaTV toward the mainstream since our website is simply a delivery platform for an infinite number of different channels all available at the same time; people watch whatever they choose, in whatever language they prefer. APTN is one channel, offering one program in one language at a time, for a cost of $20 million a year. IsumaTV holds an infinite number of channels in as many languages as people speak, in which any one film can be chosen by any viewer at any time of any day. Compared to YouTube or Vimeo or IsumaTV, conventional satellite channels like APTN or Australia’s NITV will soon seem like General Motors SUV’s, or even worse, oversized Cadillacs from the 1950’s and 60’s.

On APTN, Inuit Broadcasting Corporation has been cut back to three hours per week of Inuktitut-language time slots, the least since the 1980’s. Meanwhile IsumaTV’s DIAMA is digitizing hundreds of IBC programs from the past 25 years which will be available to any viewer any time they ever want to see it on IBC’s channel on IsumaTV.

25 years ago, in For a Cultural Future, Eric Michaels made the same point about the impossibility of a single satellite channel to mesh with existing Aboriginal information structures. He cited the 22 Aboriginal languages spoken in Australia’s central footprint area that represent not simply different dialects but different cultural formations.

Michaels distinguishes between Aboriginal and contemporary mass communications systems. Modern mass media, particularly satellite TV, is centralized, homogenized, archival and impersonal; whereas Aboriginal media is dispersed, heterogeneous, personal and current. Michaels explains:

"Video with its dispersed and loosely coordinated distribution and dissemination system when used in conjunction with low powered community TV transmission of the kind employed by Francis Jupurrurla represents a contemporary accommodation of tradition to the ‘electronic’ age. In contrast the direct broadcast satellite with its single point to multi-point transmission (centre to periphery) broadcasts the same message throughout the footprint. Consequently it will not only tend to broadcast in a common lingua franca but will seek generalized forms of address. A consequence of this must be to diminish the power and the importance of the communities, their languages and rituals within the footprint area.”

IsumaTV is one technological destination of Michaels' logical imagination. Today’s 2.0 multimedia internet permits multi-point to multi-point transmission, including Live webcasting, making it possible for the first time for “dispersed and loosely coordinated” community-based videos employing the economic efficiencies of a shared technical platform to empower communities, languages and rituals across a global footprint.

The reality that remote Indigenous communities currently lack equal access to the internet must not be used to justify ignoring this potential and making current inequality permanent. Instead, it should be a call to action towards any innovative solutions that improve internet services immediately in remote communities around the world. Nunavut is a 'good' (that is, bad) example. Nunavut's government-subsidized QINIQ service is 325 times behind national Canadian standards in cost-per-KB/sec. QINIQ's fastest high-speed service downloads at 768 KB/sec for $400/month; this is 65 times slower at five times the monthly cost of Montreal's Ultimate 50 MB/sec service for $80/month. Nunavut’s digital divide doubles every year as southern bandwidth increases rapidly while remote bandwidth remains stagnant.

Rather than see this discrepancy as an excuse to feel LESS urgency about internet innovation in Nunavut, the opposite is required. How long do Inuit have before the catastrophe of unequal internet access in their own language wipes out what remains of a still living Inuktitut language and culture in the 21st century? Or conversely, how quickly can people USE the internet to defend these languages for the first time through this powerful modern technology?

NITV on IsumaTV offers a compromise available immediately to provide the benefits of high-speed internet in communities with little or even no internet service at all. We achieve this by loading the complete IsumaTV website into a 'local server' which is a hard drive or even a laptop. The server then is installed in a community school, library or other host building with a powerful wireless router. Then, the entire IsumaTV website of, say, 1000 films, is fully accessible wirelessly to any computer at ultra high-speed, since the content once already downloaded to the local server and stored there, doesn't need to be downloaded again each time a film is viewed.

While this version of IsumaTV is frozen in time, that is, on the day it was loaded into the local server, it can be updated automatically and continuously through even a modest internet connection by synchronizing the local server and IsumaTV in cyberspace. In this way, new content added daily to IsumaTV ‘in space’ by uploads from users around the world, or from local communities where servers are installed, gradually get downloaded to the local servers where they become accessible locally at high-speed. By up- and downloading NEW content only, the local server requires far less bandwidth to keep IsumaTV current than if every user downloaded the same 1000 films again and again.

We also recognize that many Indigenous homes may have TV but not computers, although this is probably temporary as computers or handheld video devices become less expensive and as widely available as ordinary TVs. In the meantime, however, IsumaTV also can broadcast locally any of its 1000 films through the community cable system or by a low-power transmitter. A local video VJ, similar to a community radio DJ, can program a full broadcast day of selections from IsumaTV for broadcast to a local channel on home TVs. And finally, the local server can deliver selected films directly to a digital video projector allowing local movie projections in schools, community centres or any makeshift digital 'cinema.'

Of course, this solution does not immediately address the wider problem of digital equality to the WHOLE internet for remote communities, although it certainly encourages it by demonstrating the need for and benefits of having it. High-speed access to IsumaTV’s Indigenous media content through local servers does not deliver YouTube, Facebook or YouPorn to remote communities. However, in the meantime IsumaTV WILL deliver thousands of Indigenous films, video, radio and other media content in as many languages as people around the world are willing to work to maintain.

We hope to install NITV on IsumaTV in at least seven Nunavut communities this fall. At the same time, any community anywhere could install the same system in its own location and use IsumaTV to deliver its own content in its own language to as many communities as have the local server installed.

Anyone who wants more information about NITV on IsumaTV, please contact me at cohn@isuma.ca. Please also investigate isuma.tv/beta to consider how it may be useful to you or to people with whom you work. And finally, please join us at 7:30 pm EST May 29th at www.isuma.tv for the webcast of Sheila Watt-Cloutier's lecture from Iqaluit on Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change, Live on IsumaTV.