The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication

Valerie Alia

Jan 2012 · Anthropology of Media Book 2 · Berghahn Books

About this ebook

Around the planet, Indigenous people are using old and new technologies to amplify their voices and broadcast information to a global audience. This is the first portrait of a powerful international movement that looks both inward and outward, helping to preserve ancient languages and cultures while communicating across cultural, political, and geographical boundaries. Based on more than twenty years of research, observation, and work experience in Indigenous journalism, film, music, and visual art, this volume includes specialized studies of Inuit in the circumpolar north, and First Nations peoples in the Yukon and southern Canada and the United States.

About the author

Valerie Alia was an award-winning independent scholar, writer, and Professor Emerita, based in Toronto, Canada. She was Senior Associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, Distinguished Professor of Canadian Culture at Western Washington University, and Running Stream Professor of Ethics and Identity at Leeds Metropolitan University. She was also a television and radio broadcaster, newspaper and magazine writer and arts reviewer in the US and Canada. Her books include: Un/Covering the North: News, Media and Aboriginal People ; Media Ethics and Social Change ; Media and Ethnic Minorities ; and Names and Nunavut: Culture and Identity in Arctic Canada. She was a founding member of the International Arctic Social Sciences Association and founded the sub-discipline of political onomastics, the politics of naming.