While Indigenous media have gained increasing prominence around the
world, the vibrant Aboriginal media world on the Canadian West
Coast has received little scholarly attention. As the first
ethnography of the Aboriginal media community in Vancouver,
Sovereign Screens reveals the various social forces shaping
Aboriginal media production including community media organizations
and avant-garde art centers, as well as the national spaces of
cultural policy and media institutions.Kristin L. Dowell uses the
concept of visual sovereignty to examine the practices, forms, and
meanings through which Aboriginal filmmakers tell their individual
stories and those of their Aboriginal nations and the intertribal
urban communities in which they work. She explores the ongoing
debates within the community about what constitutes Aboriginal
media, how this work intervenes in the national Canadian
mediascape, and how filmmakers use technology in a wide range of
genres—including experimental media—to recuperate cultural
traditions and reimagine Aboriginal kinship and sociality.
Analyzing the interactive relations between this social community
and the media forms it produces, Sovereign Screens offers new
insights into the on-screen and off-screen impacts of Aboriginal
media.