Something New in the Air

After decades of distorted stereotyping by the media, Canada's First Peoples began to take control of their own image by creating a broadcast industry to transmit their own representations and perspectives. "Something New in the Air" charts the development of indigenous television broadcasting within the wider context of Canadian contemporary, multicultural society from the 1960s to the present. Lorna Roth focuses on the regional, national, and global implications of Television Northern Canada and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), the only dedicated aboriginal television service in the world available to every household in Canada with cable and satellite. She shows that by making their programming an integral part of the Canadian broadcasting infrastructure, First Peoples have succeeded in mediating their own historically-ruptured pasts and creating a provocative model for media resistance. Concentrating on policy development, Roth explains how First Peoples in Canada have refashioned television broadcasting, indigenizing, and transforming it into a tool for inter-community and national development. "Something New in the Air" valorises the struggle of First Peoples to attain legislated recognition of their collective communications and cultural rights, and shows how this struggle explains, in part, why they are now acknowledged as having the most advanced aboriginal broadcasting network in the world.