Indigenous creative cultures and intellectual traditions—practices since time immemorial—now have a home at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). The Indigenous Media Caucus is a space within SCMS for Indigenous scholars and for scholarly approaches to media created by and about Indigenous communities. Our scope is global, covering the entirety of Abiayala (the Americas) and beyond, in recognition of the shared histories of coloniality and survivance at the root of Indigenous experience. The caucus promotes Indigenous screen and digital cultures within SCMS, in film and media scholarship and curricula, in service-learning and community-based media projects, and at national and international film festivals. While centering Indigenous voices, visions, and methodologies, it is also a space for the study of the history of representations to which global Indigenous peoples have been subjected and have themselves challenged throughout the history of settler media.

Indigenous Media and Indigenous Futures

Indigenous media refers to film and media made by and for Indigenous peoples. The late Māori filmmaker and critic Barry Barclay coined the term “Fourth Cinema” to emphasize the way Indigenous cinemas operate outside of national orthodoxy—outside of “invader cinemas,” the settler cinemas of the modern nation state—because Indigenous peoples exist “outside the national outlook by definition, for Indigenous cultures are the ancient remnant cultures persisting within the modern nation state.”[1] As artistic practice and interdisciplinary study, Indigenous media and scholarship encompass a wide range of histories and methodologies, from archival recoveries of the earliest Indigenous representations in silent film to transhemispheric approaches to current Indigenous digital practices. Indigenous media research provides theoretical contributions around key topics such as visual and sonic sovereignties, political activism and governance, Indigenous futurisms, Indigenous feminisms and gender expansiveness, Indigenous practices of human and more-than-human relationalities, transmedia storytelling, language and culture revitalizations, Indigenous performance and celebrity, and methodologies that balance consideration of onscreen aesthetics with offscreen social practices of production. From humanistic inquiry to applied models, Indigenous media studies sheds light on centuries of settler colonialism and histories of Indigenous resistance, as well as media’s impact on Indigenous lives worldwide. Research on mediations and mediatizations in Indigenous communities reveals how settler media industries have posited Indigenous absence and structured themselves to actively ignore millennial Indigenous communication technologies. Meanwhile, examining the impact of institutions like the US-based Sundance Institute’s Indigenous Program, the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival and Indigenous Film Office in Canada, Australia’s First Nations Media Australia and Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), Aotearoa/New Zealand’s Whakaata Māori, and Latin America’s Latin American Council of Indigenous Peoples Film and Communication (CLACPI), and many others, is critical to Indigenous media industry studies.

Indigenous media studies gained momentum in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first through trans-Indigenous festival networks and community-based media, a growing body of scholarship, fan cultures, and a Native New Wave film movement. Indigenous peoples’ contributions to screen cultures are as old as film itself, and their participation has underpinned the trajectories of all colonial and postcolonial media industries. In North America alone—home base to SCMS—a few recent examples highlight the acceleration of attention to Indigenous media. In 2019, Taika Waititi gave the first land acknowledgment at an Academy Awards ceremony after presenting Wes Studi with the Academy’s Governors Award in honor of his lifetime achievement in the industry. A few years later, Reservation Dogs (2021–2023), created by Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, entered its third and final season on Hulu and FX, ending only when its Indigenous creators made the call. When Billy Luther’s Frybread Face and Me (2023) was released on Netflix and hit #4 in the United States, according to Seeing Red Media (an Indigenous-owned media company on Haudenosaunee Territory), many critics and scholars deepened their engagement with the digital turn’s impact on Indigenous independent media.[2] More recently, there has been an increase in Indigenous characters—especially Indigenous women characters—across screen genres, including Kali Reis and Isabella Star LaBlanc in True Detective: Night Country (HBO, 2024), Alaqua Cox and Tantoo Cardinal in Marvel’s Echo series (Disney+, 2024), and others. Groundbreaking representations in and of themselves, this screen visibility has also ignited historical considerations of global Indigeneity—most notably as audiences have grasped the fact that to date three Indigenous women have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress: Keisha Castle-Hughes in 2004, Yalitza Aparicio in 2019, and Lily Gladstone in 2024.[3] These examples from mainstream US media reflect a temporal and geographically specific slice of Indigenous media matters—just one starting point for the discussion of Indigenous media in stolen and unceded Indigenous territories worldwide. Indigenous media futures are being imagined across global contexts, and SCMS members engage with Indigenous media production and scholarship beyond our home base, including the media developed by Indigenous peoples who continue to steward the tropics, Arctic circles, deserts, mountain ranges, river valleys, and oceans of their ancestral homelands. While an exhaustive list of global Indigenous media productions exceeds the limits of this Spotlight essay, Fourth Cinema’s expansive geographic scale underscores the urgency and ecocritical, linguistic, and cultural intricacies of Indigenous media studies as a field.

Indigenous Media Studies at SCMS

Indigenous media scholarship has historically been profoundly underrepresented at SCMS, no less so today than in the past. However, there has been at least one Indigenous media panel at most SCMS conferences since 2000, and while audiences for them have mostly been small, some of these panels have resulted in important publications. Two panels in particular, “Global Indigenous Media I” and “Global Indigenous Media II,” led by Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart at the 2004 Atlanta conference, helped launch their field-defining collection Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics.[4] SCMS has also hosted events and screenings, such as the Plenary by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin in Vancouver in 2006 and the special screening of the restored 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters with Kwakwaka’wakw filmmaker Barbara Cranmer as a guest commentator in Seattle in 2014.

More recently, SCMS has incorporated land acknowledgments as a regular part of conference protocol, honoring the Indigenous Nations and territories where conferences are held. SCMS has also developed meaningful Indigenous representation within the organizational structure through the original SCMS Antiracism, Equity, and Diversity Task Force and Committee, the addition of Indigenous media specialists to the editorial board of JCMS, and the successful conference and membership outreach and fee-waiver program for incoming Indigenous media scholars. After decades of scant presence in JCMS, scholarship in Indigenous media studies is appearing in the journal, with more in the pipeline.

At the 2024 SCMS conference, the new Indigenous Media Caucus sponsored a book exhibit table in order to amplify the visibility of Indigenous media studies research and sponsored two panels, “New Approaches to Indigenous Media and the Environment” chaired by Leah Vonderheide and “Indigenous Cinema’s Temporalities” chaired by Joanna Hearne and Salma Monani. These conference exhibits and panels, along with a co-sponsored screening of Nyla Innuksuk’s Slash/Back (2022), a horror/sci-fi film about a group of Inuit teenage girls set in Nunavut, solidify the caucus’s commitment to bringing groundbreaking research and discussions to SCMS. We are excited to build on these developments and to teach the next generation of media scholars and filmmakers about Indigenous presence, not absence—that Indigenous creatives are and have been at the center of media history, not at the margins.

Key among our goals as a caucus is to propel a broad-based curricular intervention in the field. All film and media classes should include at least one work of Indigenous media on their syllabi, and preferably a full unit, including frameworks for analysis around Indigenous rights movements, sovereignties, and relationalities. All film and media studies degree programs should include course offerings on Fourth Cinema. Students should not move through a full undergraduate or graduate program in the field without encountering Indigenous media in various core and elective coursework, from North American and global film history to film genres to special topics.

Our path forward entails the support of Indigenous media theory, history, and criticism and the promotion of critical methods and theoretical approaches that center Indigenous epistemologies in our work on the production, circulation, and consumption of media. Furthermore, the caucus will provide a platform for networks and relationships between scholars leading to individual and collaborative projects that nurture the future of Indigenous media studies. We hope to liaise with other caucuses and SIGs that share common histories, causes, and priorities, such as the Media and the Environment SIG, among others. In addition to activities common to many caucuses—sharing information across networks; sponsoring panels, workshops, meetings, screenings, talks, and other events; promoting academic publications; and engaging and supporting graduate students, scholars, and artists in the field—we have several additional goals. These include engaging with local communities at conference locations to organize on- and off-site gatherings focused on Indigenous media and promoting Indigenous media scholarship in Indigenous mother tongues as well as in settler languages other than English.

We invite SCMS members to continue to support Indigenous media scholarship and production, to join our caucus, to meet us at our book table at future SCMS conferences, and to bring the critical interventions of Indigenous media studies into their own work and classrooms. All are welcome.

1. Barry Barclay, “Celebrating Fourth Cinema,” Illusions 35 (2003): 9. ↑

2. Seeing Red Media, “Frybread Face and Me Hits #4 on Netflix in the USA,” posted and accessed November 30, 2023, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=876672201130242&set=a.512963370834462. ↑

3. See, for example, Indigenous Life Movement, “To the Many Native Indigenous Actors who worked so very hard to kick the many doors open so the next generations of dreamers could have a fighting chance at making history . . . ,” posted and accessed March 13, 2024, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=787520410075886&set=a.593659162795346. See also Moira Macdonald, “Lily Gladstone Makes History with Oscar Nomination,” January 23, 2024, accessed April 24, 2024, https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/movies/lily-gladstone-former-wa-resident-makes-history-with-oscar-nomination/. ↑

4. Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart, Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). ↑