April 1996  MEDIATING CULTURE:   ABORIGINAL MEDIA AND THE SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION OF IDENTITY for   Communication and Empowerment: Uses of Media and Information Technologies in Developing Countries   Program in Development Conmunication, The Annenberg Center for Communication, USC     My talk today is about new media being produced by Aboriginal Australians and other indigenous people as part of a broader development over the last decade of indigenously-produced film, video, television. The emergence of indigenous media in a number of local situations -- with Amazonian Indians, Native North Americans, Inuit, and Maori -- has captured both scholarly and popular attention of late. These new arenas for the production of film, video, and television emerged out social movements for self-deterruination by native people throughout the world during the 1 970s, lii storically changing goverument policies, and accompanying transforruations in consciousness of both Aboriginal and Euro-Australians, as well as the increasing global presence of new media technologies.   I have been following this work since 1988 when I first went to Australia to collect work as part of my interest in expanding the range of what has come to be known as ethnographic film. I was so intrigued with what I saw and the people I met that I have made it an ongoing research project, and have also made an effort to bring more of this work into the academy through teaching, programs, and now through fellowships for indigenous media makers at the Center for Media Culture and History which I direct at NYU.   Since the 1970s, a small but influential cohort of indigenous cultural activists in many different locales around the world have recognized that new media technologies offer a form that not only "fits~ comfortably with oral and performative traditions (Molnar 1995: 171). They also recognized that "small media" provide a field of cultural production that can enhance struggles for indigenous rights, ranging from the preservation and revival of languages, ceremonies, and histories; to interventions in representations of indigenous people made by media institutions of the encompassing state societies; to the invention of cultural possibilities that suggest alternatives to a reified traditional past, a marginalized present, or an assimilated future. I map indigenous media onto this landscape of activism and media practice not only because it most closely resembles what I have seen. It also reflects the perspectives of indigenous directors who see their media efforts on a continuum with movements for cultural and political autonomy by and for First Nations people. Media work also was catalyzed in relation to an increasing interest in the social and political possibilities of alternative media practices as a means of intervention into the status quo on a number of fronts, initially articulated by (mostly First World) film and video activists many of whom have been active supporters of indigenous media production in a number of     I ways.   I want to spell out some of the circumstances that have created the conditions for the development of indigenous media, and the relationship of these kind of media practices (what some scholars have called "small media", to certain contemporary forms of social action and movements. I argue that these latest products of indigenous expressive culture are part of a self-conscious efforts to sustain and transform culture in aboriginal communities, a form of social action that is linked to indigenous efforts for rights to self-representation, governance, and cultural autonomy after centuries of colonial assimilationist policies by surrounding states. Aiialytically, I use the term cultural activists in my discussion of indigenous mediamakers in a way that underscores their sense of both political and cultural agency in creating this work. The ethnographic material I use encompasses work and mediamakers from a number of indigenous groups; however, my focus today will be on that which I know best from primary research, the work of Aboriginal Australian media makers.   The development of indigenous media is also part of a global process of decentralization, democratization, and penetration of new media technologies, a process that has had multiple and sometimes contradictory effects on local communities (Raboy and Bruck 1989). In the case of indigenous media makers, far from being "polluted" by contact with other cultural forms, as some have argued (Fans, Moore), they have taken on Western media technologies both as critics of the culturally destructive effects of mass media, and as producers of tlieir own work. This point is stressed by Tony Bennett and Valda Blundell in a recent volume devoted to cultural politics and First Peoples. They write:   The "innovative traditionalism" of First peoples has, of course, always faced two ways. If.. Western cultural resources have been drawn on to lend new forms of social mobility and adaptability to traditional indigenous forms, the use of traditional cultural resources to produce distinctive transformations of Western cultural forms and traditions has been equally important. The significance of such exchanges is clearly evident in the history of First People's relations to modem media. (1995: 7)   Extending that argument, I would suggest that indigenous media work is significant not simply as a transformation of Western technologies, but also as a new form of collective self-production that is being used     2 self-consciously by indigenous producers to mediate historical and social ruptures within their own cultures, and to assert the presence and concerns of First Nations peoples in the broader societies that encompass them.   While some early and important work in film and TV production by Native North Americans occurred in the 1970s (Weatherford 1990), it took until the mid 1990s, for indigenous media to achieve the status of a small but dynamic "growth industry." Contemporary producers include Aboriginal Australians; Maori; various Amazonian Indian groups, most notably the Kayapo (Turner 1990, 1991); Inuit (Roth and Valaskakis 1989); and a wide range of Native Americans from both the North and the South (Weatherford and Seubeurt 1988). These efforts emerged in tandem with the development of multiculturalist identity politics -- especially in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. -- that, over the last decade, created new understandings of the relationship between cultural and political rights. As my colleague Terry Turner has argued,   the presently constituted forms of multiculturalism may be seen as embryonic expressions of   the revolutionary principle that the protection and fostering of the human capacity for culture is   a general human right and, as such, a legitimate goal of politically organized society. (1993:   428)   To insist, in this case, on the relationship between activities for self-determination and cultural autonomy -- whether these are very local efforts to sustain native languages, or broader-scale movements for land rights -- insures that analytic attention to a phenomenon like indigenous media is not confined to an ethnocentric domain of study that would focus on these works as isolated texts. For example, Canadian communications scholar Gail Valaskakis has argued cogently that for First Peoples "resistance is cultural persistence ontinnally negotiated in the discourse and practice of everyday life" (1993: 283). This point is crucial to understanding why, for indigenous directors, the very creation of media work that both reflects and re-visions their lives and histories, is a form of self-conscious and direct social action, which establishes and reinforces the visible cultural presence of indigenous lives in a form that can circulate in and among many communities. International conferences, festivals, co-productions and consultations are an important dimension of social action on the part of First Nations peoples contributing to the emergence of a global network of cooperation that has been growing steadily since the 1970s. The range of contexts -- from the local to the     3 traiisnational -- is the "mediascape" (Appadurai 1990: 7) that shapes and is shaped by indigenous media makers, as interdependent arenas of social action. Despite the diverse cultural practices of indigenous peoples around the globe, my use of the term indigenous (like First Nations or Fourth World), while always tied to a specific local perspective, is nonetheless explicitly intended ~ index their common political conditions as people disenfranchised by the colonial practices of European settler states.       Cultural Activism   My work is part of a small but growing area of interdisciplinary research, scholarship, and cultural criticism interested in understanding, empirically, the relationship between new media practices and social action. I have found that a focus on people who have taken it upon themselves to engage with new possibilities for their own collective self-production allows us to engage with more general questions about the political possibilities inherent in self-conscious shifts in cultural practice.   Many indigenous producers see the capabilities of visual media to transcend boundaries of time, space, and even language can be used in part to transform historically-produced social ruptures by renarrating, from their perspective, the relationships between indigenous histories and cultures and the encompassing societies in which they live. To underscore that point, I use the term cultural activism as an analytic frame for this phenomenon, to index how indigenous producers self-consciously use these hybrid cultural forms as means of social action that is powerfully linked to the kinds of activities more traditionally identified as "political" in the social movement literature. This perspective is articulated in the following statement by Alberto Muenala, a Quichua filmmaker form Otavalo, Ecuador, who also directed the first indigenously-organized "Festival Latinamericano de Cine de Pueblos Indigenas" in 1994.   Cinema about indigenous peoples must chart a new route, one that shatters the established language of Indians as objects. The new cinema treats us as subjects, as protagonists and producers of our own histories. We suffer a colonization that has not allowed the development of a cinematographic laugnage. Only through a rupture with colonizing messages, assuming our own identity, will we transform and develop new imagery. 1994, translated by     4 Victor Zamudio Taylori   The language of cultural activism points, in turu, to a recognition of the necessity of recognizing "the field of cultural production" (Bourdieu 1993) as a potential locus not only of social reproduction but of social transformation. This focus allows one to see media as a dynamic aspect of social relations, a vehicle through which mediations take place (see also Dowumut, Riggins); the work of cultural activists can help illuminate how particular social actors become involved in and nnderstand the creation and circulation of media that are intended to stand for collective bodies. While the actual number of people directly engaged in indigenous media is small, the impact of this work has been widespread in and among different communities, particularly in liberal welfare states such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand where there has been regular government support for everything from monolingual local media associations, to programming on national television, to subsidizing feature film work. This pov offers an important alternative to the paradigms in media studies which until recently have tended to focus on the film/video text, media institutions, or the technology itself, rather than the social relations of production, circulation and consumption of work, a perspective which has recently gained strength.   In indigenous media work, there is a density of involvement by a cohort of people born in the 1 950s and 1960s, who see their work as part of their community's struggle for visibility on their own terms. Of those coming from more traditional backgrounds, most are well-versed in ritual and sacred knowledge, fluent in native languages, and leaders in their communities or tied to leadership through kin ties. At the same time, many of these activists have had access to education in die dominant culture and are comfortable dealing with western languages and technologies, bureaucracies, and venues for showing media work, all of which have been key elements in successful indigenous media projects. Many of these people came to consciousness in the movements for indigenous rights that were developing in different sites during the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of those activities, and policy responses to them. many also had access to scholarships and training programs that gave them skills and knowledge, enabling them to enter into new areas of cultural work. Examples span the planet, from the the establishment of the Aboriginal Programs Unit at the ABC, Australia's national bmadcaster, to teli development of Inuit Broadcasting Corporation in Canada's Arctic that provided the training     5 ground for the award-winalng Inuit videomaker Zach Kuiiuk. (CLIP: Zach Kunuk) This generation, then, is also one that is, perhaps uniquely, bicultural, and thus able to build bridges between domains because of their cultural abilities in different settings. As Eric Michaels described Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, a key player in the creation of the Warlpiri Media Association established at Yuendumu in Central Australia in the 1980s,   Jupurrurla is indisputably a sophisticated cultural broker who employs videotape and electronic technology to express and resolve political, theological and aesthetic contradictions that arise in uniquely contemporary circumstances. (Michaels 1987: 26)   From their own life experiences, these cultural activists recognize that social change cannot simply be legislated, but requires a long struggle against racism that is pervasive in the dominant culture in multiple arenas. Activists of all ages have recognized the impact of negative stereotypes and the invisibility of Aboriginal people, cultures and languages in the mass media; many younger people began to resist directly through the creation of counter-images that circulate both in home communities and in the surrounding dominant culture. IIopi videomaker Victor Masayesva, Jr., who is also the head of the Native American Producers' Alliance, articulates this clearly in a recent essay on Native American media.   The recent crop of commercial films and television programs on Indians purportedly from a Native American perspective is a half-lie... Row could such media goodwill produce such ill will from native communities? An answer starts with the recognition that it's not so far removed from the U.S. goven~ent offering to manage our lands and natural resources...   CLIP: Ritual Clowns       SeIf-ReDresentation and Abori~inal Activism   In 1988, I took my first research trip to Australia to collect tapes and see what was happening "on the ground" and over the airwaves. Since then I have been following the work being produced by and with Aboriginal Australians who, over the last decade, have been using film and televisual media to create images of themselves that are seen in various contexts by Aboriginal and European Australians as well as overseas audiences. Like indigenous people in other parts of the world, Aboriginal Australians recognize the power of     6 visual media not only for their own communities, but also for changing the consciousness of the nations that encompass them, as they insist that indigenous perspectives be increasingly heard and seen in an Australian polity that is finally beginning to take account of the rights of its Aboriginal citizens, not least of all the right to represent themselves. In this case, the correspondence between the political and the figural meanings of self-representation are totally appropriate. Indigenous media productions acknowledge the traumas of contact history and the contradictions of life in the present and, most importantly, take these stories as a means to envision a cultural future for indigenous people both locally and as part of larger social formations. Thus, these productions are both about and part of the construction of contemporary indigenous identities. Their productions are another dimension of efforts to establish their voices and visions on their own local terms, as part of Australia's past and present, and in relation to a trausnational network of indigenous people. As Helen Mohiar has pointed out in her study of Aboriginal media,   A siguificant feature of the indigenous media industry has been the formation of indigenous media associations throughout Australia. The link between these associations and the community is very important, and is often misnnderstood by government departtnents. Many   have grown out of existing indigenous community organizations, because these organizations feel that the electronic media can be used to provide information on a range of social, cultural, economic and political issues in a form and language that is relevant to the needs of Ak)rigines. (Molnar 1995:170)   The evident interest in media is apparent in the extraordinary development of this work since 1980, when only a few radio shows existed. Now, indigenous producers are in almost every sector of the media. A recent survey of Aboriginal involvement in media (not including the extroardinary growth in radio) counted 150 media associations, eighty small-scale television stations in remote communities (the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme), two areal remote commercial television services, and Aboriginal Units at the state-sponsored ABC and SBS television stations, and a representative body, The National Indigenous Media Association of Australia (NIMAA) representing the hnndreds of Aboriginal broadcasters working in radio, video, and television (Molnar 1995:170).     7 The range of this work reflects die diverse experiences of contemporary Aboriginal people. Traditional people living in relatively unsettled areas of Australia and whose contact history may be as brief as a few decades, have been experimenting with video production strategies to suit very specific cultural concerns (Michaels 1986). By contrast, urban-based producers may be oriented toward opportunities in national television to create documentaries and other kind of programming on Aboriginal history and culture; or, like Aboriginal filmmaker photographer Tracey Moffat, be involved in making independent experimental and feature films, working comfortably within the structures of an international independent film world, albeit addressing problematic issues of Aboriginality. The scope of this film and televisual media corresponds not only to differences iii the experiences of urban, rural, and remote living Aboriginal Australians, but also to diverse cultural, historical, and social backgrounds within these categories.   The context for Australian Aboriginal involvement in visual media production cannot be understood apart from the legacy of social movements for Aboriginal rights. Strikes, freedom rides, and other forms of civil disobedience in die 1 960s catalyzed Constitutional changes that granted Aboriginal Australian voting rights in 1962, and Australian citizenship in 1967, and set the stage for the recognition of Aboriginal claims for land rights and cultural autonomy in the 1970s. However, the official beginning of the "Aboriginal civil rights movement" is popularly recognized as January 26, 1972, "Australia Day," which commemorates the "founding" of Australia. On that date in 1972, four young Aboriginal men erected a small tent -- what was later named Tent Embassy -- on the lawns of the Parliament House in Canberra and declared themselves a sovereigli nation. Their action succinctly dramatized the issue of Aboriginal land rights in the Australian imagination. The Labor (Whitlam) government initiated a policy of Aboriginal self-determination and stopped all applications for non-indigenous mining and exploration on Commonwealth Aboriginal reserves. The Tent Embasy helped mobilize a period of confrontational activism of the Aboriginal Black Power movements in the 1970s. Indeed, that moment became the subject of a 1992 documentary by urban Kamiloroi producer Frances' Peters documentary, Tent Embassy, produced for the APU of the ABC.   CLIP: Tent Embassy   As part of their demands, the activists insisted on Aboriginal control over media representation of their     8 lives and communities, which quickly escalated into explicit interest in gaining access to media production. lAs anthropologist and Aboriginal activist Marcia Langton recalled this period:   During the 1970s and 1980s, the Aboriginal response to racist representation, especially in the large urban centres, was to demand control of representation. These demands for control and for funding of community-controlled media, have been expressed at every major film and media conference during the last twenty years. I   In 1979, Aboriginal country and western singer Essie Coffey, along with white filmmakers Martha Ansara and Alec Morgan, made the landmark documentary "My Survival As An Aboriginal". As the first film with an Aboriginal director, this film was a dramatic break with the ethnographic genre that focused on ceremonial and traditional knowledge with little or no reference to the conditions of welfare colonialism. By contrast, "My Survival" offered a first person examination of the difficult conditions of "fringe dwelling" rural Aboriginal communities, considering not only their "dispossession and alienation from the inside out but also... the strength of both the filmmaker and her culture as they survive despite having such odds stacked against them doing so" (Leigh 1992:1). CLIP? Mu Survival...   The question of Aboriginal media representation heated up quickly in the 1980s with plans for the launching of Australia's first communications satellite over Central Australia, which generated an acrimonious public debate about the impact of "dumping" mainstream television signals into the lives of Aboriginal people living in there. As one Aboriginal elder from the community of Ernabella snnunarized the situation, unimpeded satellite transmission "will be like having hundreds of whitefellas visit without permits every day" (Annianari Nyaningu quoted in N. Turner 1990: 44).   In part to pre-empt the impact of the satellite, two remote Aboriginal communities in that area developed their own video production and low cast television stations (not yet granted licenses), Warlpiri Media Association (WMA) and Ernabella Video and Television (EVTV). In the words of Frances Jupurrurla Kelly, a Warlpiri man from Yuendumu who was one of the key players in setting up WMA:   Warlpiri Media's history started from their own people.. .because they're worried about their   culture, mainly kids, concerned about their future. Ideas didn't come from the Europeans, it     9 came from ourselves in the community... because the satellite went up and that time if been too light for our culture we wanted to say something against the satellite or against television in   our territiories. . The community decided to chuck in for it. Everybody put money toward it themselves. They made ten grand -- everybody chucked in -- the buildings were from their own money. The store allocated three grand as a donation. We finally got buildings up and gear. (quoted in Cohen 1993: )   CLIP: Manyu Wana   Around the same time, an existing regional Aboriginal radio and media association, the Central   Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) centered in Alice Springs, made a bid for the license for the satellite downlink, as a symbolic assertion of the presence of Aboriginal people in Central Australia. After a long struggle (and much to their surprise), CAAMA) won the license and established Imparja, the first   Aboriginnily owned commercial television station in Australia. 1988, the year Imparja was established, was also crucial as Australia's Bicentenary; it was marked by considerable protest by Aboriginal activists and their supporters who renamed the event "Invasion Day", successfully drawing attention no only to an oppositional   reading of the founding of the nation, but also to the ongoing need in the present for redress of the brutal legacy of colonization. They demanded (and received) considerable government support for counter-events, with a   particular focus on representation as an issue (much like what happened in North America around the Columbus Quincentenary.) For example, Aboriginal trainees at the national television station, the Australian Broadcast   Corporation (ABC), protested the lack of attention to Aboriginal concerns in national television programming, an effort which resulted in the formation of the Aboriginal Programs Unit. The first work produced and from that unit (with a mix of Aboriginal and Euro-Australian staff) was a biting dramatic parody of 200 years of   institutionalized racism, in Australia, "Babakieuria," broadcast during 1988 as part of the counter-discourse to the bicentenary celebrations.   Analytically, institutional responses to social protest such as the creation of the Aboriginal Programs   Unit can be understood as part of the processes through which nation states like Australia constitute and reframe their "imagined communities" (Anderson 1983) via the circulation of televisnal and cinematic images of the     10 people and places they govern. While the Australian zeitgeist since the 1970s has increasingly favored multicultural expression as an acceptable version of the Australian polity (Hamilton 1990), it was only in the late 1980s, under increasing pressure from Aboriginal activists and media associations, that the government has given more support to Aboriginal media production, explicitly bringing them into the mediascape of the Australian "national imaginary." For example, in 1978, the government extablished a separate Special Broadcast Service (SBS) initially to serve non-English speaking immigrant minorities. In 1988, the SBS expanded its policy to include the presentation of Aboriginal radio and television programs, and to take as part of its mandate the correction of popular misconceptions about Aboriginal history and culture.   All of these events were part of a slow process of change in Aboriginal policy over the 1 980s from "welfare colonialism" to "self-determination" in response to the pressures placed on the government by Aboriginal activists. Additionally, positive representations of Aboriginal people are also part of the cultural capital on which contemporary Australia builds its economy in arenas such as tourism, political affairs, and the marketing of things Australian overseas. For example, the international circulation of a festival of film and television on indigenous Australians as part of the Year of Indigenous Peoples in 1993, was sponsored by Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.   These broader contexts -- the political economy of media, the changing relations of Aboriginal people with the state, a history of social struggle, and an ever-expanding realm of media technologies and representations -- shape the complex mediascape of Aboriginal media production and circulation. In terms of actual social relations, it means that Aboriginal producers are frequently in the uneasy position of working with and funded by governing bodies responsible for the political circumstances that, in their media work, they are protesting.   In the following section, I want to demonstrate how cultural activists understand this new and complex object -- Aboriginal media -- as an extension of their collective (vs. individual) self-production in a variety of domains, from the assertion of local cultural practices to more overtly political work.       On Location: Indigenous Media     11 My first example is drawn from a succesful conimunity-based Aboriginal media association developed at Ernabella, a relatively traditional remote settlement on Pitjantjatjarra lands in South Australia, just south of Ulum (Ayers Rock). Like many other remote Aboriginal communities, Ernabella has a highly mobile population that can vary from 500 to 1500 over die course of a year. Founded by missionaries iii the 1940s, it became self-governing by the 1970s and retains an infrastructures consisting of a community store, a town office, a police station, a primary school, a health clinic, a church, an art association, and local broadcast facilities.   In 1983, people at Ernabella, began producing video programs with the encouragement of white schoolteachers and advisers, in particular Neil Turner who settled in the community, leamed the langnage, and facilitated the development of Ernabella Video Television (EVTV) from its inception to the present. Established in 1985, EVTV operates from a small video production, editing and playback facility and an inexpensive satellite dish that provides local broadcasts of work produced by EVTV as well as items selected from national television feeds. Determined to be as independent as possible from government subsidies, EVTV has supported itself successfully through a self-imposed tax on cold drinks in the community store, the sales of EVTV videos, and occasional public and private grants (Batty 1993; Molnar 1989; N. Turner 1990).   Since 1983, EVTV has produced over eighty edited videos as well as thousands of hours of community television under the direction of a respected couple, Simon and Pantiji Tjiyangu and a local media committee made up of male and female elders. Their concerns range from monitoring the content of work shown -- so that images are not circulated that violate cultural rules regulating what can be seen (e.g. tapes of women's sacred ceremonies are only accessible to appropriate senior women and are never edited) -- and the timing of viewing so that television transmission, whether locally produced or the national satellite feed, does not interfere with other cultural activities. Far from turning Ernabella residents into "mere fringe dwellers on the periphery of national mass media networks" (Turner 1990), EVTV has become a powerful force for cultural revival for all members of the community. As Turner has observed,   Children at Ernabella have seen themselves on TV more than any other of the world's   children. They still invade the studio most afternoons after school to dance in front of the     12 camera and watch themselves transmogrified by special effects! The power of video for educational purposes became quickly apparent (particularly for formal English) as tongue-tied children soon developed confidence and special narrative styles for the camera. (1990: 45) Perhaps because the supervision of EVTV is largely in the hands of elders, the video work of Ernabella   is distinguished by its emphasis on ceremonies, in particular the stories, dances, and designs associated with the Kungkarangkalna (Seven Sisters Dreaming) (which explains the origins of the Pleiades constellation). In adapting such forms to video, EVTV producers include in their tapes the production process itself, which can involve the whole commullity, including children, dancers, story tellers, and video crew. For example, one sees in tapes such as Seven Sisters Dreaming: Tiukurpa Kungkarangkalna Tiara (1985, EVTV) not just a performance as we understand it in the West. Dances and enactments of the story of the Seven Sisters are preceded by extensive preparation and participation by those members of the Pitjantjatjara community who are responsible for ritual knowledge and ceremony. This aspect of Pitjantjatjara ritual performance has been reconfigured to accommodate video production: the tape includes not only ritual preparation but also other participants offering their comments on the ritual as they sit at night by the campfire to view the day's rushes (Leigh 1992: 3). Such reflexivity is not a Brechtian innovation; rather, it authorizes any reconfiguring of traditional practices for video as "true" and properly done.   CLIP: Seven Sisters from Satellite Dreaming   Productions by EVTV are empowering forms of social action in a number of ways. First, they extend the power that ceremonies have to revive sacred aspects of the landscape, while at they same time they provide an activity that reinforces the social relations that are fundamental to this kind of cultural production. Every time a tape is seen, particularly one of a ceremony, it enhances their power and authority as ceremonial experts. In a parallel process in the dominant Australian regional culture, people from Ernabella have have been invited to nearby cultural centers such as Adelaide to "perform", a process of cultural self-objectification that has been hastened by the community's ongoing video practices. Neil Turner assessed the impact of EVTV in the following way.   Its production is seen as a cultural imperative involving the whole community, not as the     13 prohibitively expensive preserve of a mystified elite offering luxury handouts. In fact, EVTV has turned the cultural hegemonist model on its head, using video to promulgate their own cultural product nationally and around the world. They perform their inma (ceremonies) in cities to enlighten those unfortunates who have lost their pre-literate oral heritage. The Seven Sisters has now been sent over the central satellite footprint to Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney, the Phillipines, Hawaii, Austria, Berlin and London (Turner 1990: 45)   Knowledge of these issues is important to understanding the value of EVTV tapes as forms of social action that crosses over cultural borders, reaching other Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal audiences. The process of creating tapes has strengthened the community's sense of itself as having a strong hold on its language, "law", and cultural practices.   Since die early 1980s, the demand for more Aboriginal participation and visibility in the Australian mediascape has been increasing, not only for local access to video in remote areas, but also for more Aboriginal representation on mainstream national television. This concern is not simply about equal access but a recognition that distortion and/or invisibility of Aboriginal realities for the wider Australian public can have a direct effect on political culture. Continuing exclusion of work by Aboriginal people from Australia's media institutions has sharpened Aboriginal awareness of the connections between political enfranchisement and the need to control their own images in the public sphere.   Aboriginal people -- in terms of content and staffing -- are still virtually absent from Australia's three commercial television networks. However, two important efforts to increase an Aboriginal presence on public television were initiated in 1989: (1) the Aboriginal Programs Unit (APU) of the Australian Broadcasting Coproration (ABC), the state-owned national television station that reaches all of Australia; and (2) the Aboriginal Unit of the Special Broadcast Service (SBS), Australia's state-funded station set up to provide culturally and linguistically appropriate programming, both imported and locally produced, for Australia's many ethnic communities.   In April 1989, a number of Aboriginal media activists worked with the Special Broadcast Service to develop a thirteen-part TV series devoted to Aboriginal issues, called "First In Line," the first prime time     14 current affairs show in Australia to be hosted by two Aboriginal people.   The producers and crew were primarily Aboriginal, and consulted with communities throughout Australia for items stressing the positive achievements of Aborigines (Molnar 1989: 38 - 39). Eventually, "First In Line" was discontinued, and an Aboriginal Unit was established with Rachel Perkins at the head, a young Aboriginal woman who had trained at the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) in Central Australia, and who is the daughter of Charles Perkins, a well-known Aboriginal activist/politician and former sports hero. She has been creating programming through the use of work from regional and local Aboriginal Media Associations. In 1992-93, she commissioned "Blood Brothers" a series she co-produced with Euro-Australian filmmaker Ned Lander. The series of four one-hour documentaries, broadcast in 1993 on different aspects of Aboriginal history and culture told "through the personal lives of four prominent Aboriginal men" (Perkins 1992). These include (1) Darby Jampijinpa Ross, a Warlpiri elder who has been instrumental in fighting to retain traditional culture and law; (2) Rupert Max Stuart, an Arrente man, now a respected elder, who was falsely accused of the rape and nmrder of a white Australian girl in 1959 and jailed for 25 years; (3) Kev Carmody, a nationally known musician and songwriter, considered by many to be the voice of protest for black Australia; and (4) Charles Perkins, who in 1965 as one of the first Aboriginal students at Sydney University organized "freedom rides" to challenge the racist condiuons under which Aboriginal people lived in rural towns in New South Wales at that time.   The documentary on Charles Perkins, "Freedom Ride," written and produced by his daughter Rachel Perkins, retraces the history of this initial stage of the Aboriginal civil rights movement through the retrospective accounts by Perkins and his fellow protesters, both black and white, as they revisit the places where they had carried out civil disobedience over 25 years ago. This piece strategically refuses any imagery of Aboriginal people in "the victim position" except by an immediate juxtaposition to a positive social/political response. In reaching out to a mixed but still preominantly white national audience, "Freedom Ride" also is a reminder of the possibility of white activism on behalf of Aboriginal rights at a contemporary moment when political separatism can serve as an excuse for apathy. Using archival footage, recreations of historical scenes, mixed with oral histories, and contemporary verite footage, the documentary is powerful testimony to how     15 political consciousness was created in everyday experiences of discrimination, and transformed through direct action, much of it inspired by knowledge of the American civil rights movement gained in part through the mass media. In a particularly poignant moment, Charles Perkins recollects a solidarity visit from an African American delegation and how unexpectedly moved the Australians were when the visitors sang "We Shall Overcome," which they had heard many times on radio and television.   CLIP : Freedom Ride   This example of the role that the mass media played historically in creating contact between social movements in different parts of the world is a reminder that the documentary itself is embedded in a context of social action. Its presence on national television is yet another level of assertion and insertion of a rarely visible Aboriginal presence and perspective on Australian history.   Much like the SBS Unit, the Aboriginal Programs Unit (APU) of the state-controlled and -funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was also established 0 give voice to Aboriginal concerns on national televisuion: however, the ABC has a much greater reseource base and reaches a larger audience. In 1987, the ABC set up an Aboriginal Programs Unit (APU), but it was not until 1989 that their first Aboriginally produced and presented program, "Blackout," a weekly magazine show on Aboriginal issues, began broadcasting on a Friday evening time slot. (In 1992, it was awarded the United Nations Human Rights Media Award.) Additionally, the Unit programs occasional series such as "The First Australians," an eight-part series of independent documentaries on Aboriginal topics broadcast on Thursday nights in 1992.   Frances Peters, a Kamilaroi Aboriginal woman who grew up in New South Wales in the 1960s and went to university in Sydney (where she also performs frequently as a vocalist), joined the Unit in 1989 as a researcher for Blackout. The following year, she produced and directed her own first half-hour documentary for "Blackout", "Oceans Apart," for which she also wrote and performed the music. The piece is based on the lives of three Aboriginal women who were raised in white families; as adults, they reconnect with their Aboriginal heritage either directly, by seeking contact with their families of origin, or through cultural activities in the arts, communications, and education. Peters chose as her subjects women who "don't look Aboriginal," who are sophisticated and middle-class, and who are anything but victims. This was a deliberate strategy to     16 subvert conventional stereotypes of Aboriginal people in the dominant media which tend to focus on men:   traditional bush-living people engaged in ceremony or painting or urban dwellers represented as social problems. The women's unusual narratives offer extraordinary examples of the possibilities of recapturing a contemporary indigenous identity in the face of tremendous forces of assinulation. "Oceans Apart" is also powerful for the striking differences in the women's lives despite their common struggles: Peters takes care to draw attention to the diversity of Aboriginal experiences. Frances Peters explained her choice as an effort to avoid treating Aboriginal people as issues:   They are speaking on behalf of themselves, from a personal point of view and therefore the political comes from the individual, the issue comes out of what is happening, and the person's experience rather than putting the experience up, and having the people speak on behalf of the experience. So by dealing with it on a personal level, we find that it is stronger politically as well. (1992) Additionally, while the history of Aboriginal children being taken away and placed with white families is one of the more tragic legacies of the government's assimilationist policy toward Aboriginal children of mixed descent, "Oceans Apart" avoids becoming a simple attack. By allowing the women's stories to guide the piece it makes viewers aware of the costs of institutional racism as we are drawn into their lives, enabling us to see both the consequences of policy and the ways that they have managed to overcome them by finding alternative routes back to Aboriginal kin and communities.       CLIP: Oceans Apart?   Conclusion   People like Frances Peters and Rachel Perkins are part of a generation of cultural activists who came of age when the struggle for Aboriginal civil rights was already a social fact. Their efforts resemble the more remote-living Aboriginal media makers discussed above, insofar as they are concemed with their work as part of a range of activities engaged in cultural revival, identity formation, and political assertion. Their positinning (along with that of other producers) intersects and is influenced by Westem discourses in the arts which       17 emphasize "cultural diversity as a basis for challenging, revising and relativizing basic notions and principles common to dominant and minority cultures alike, so as to construct a more vital, open, and democratic common culture" (Turner 1993: 413).   Aboriginal producers working in national television are engaged in more than the creation of media images of themselves that alter their place in the world of representations; they see it clearly as a form of social action, but one that has it base in face-to-face relations. Through their work in televisual media production, they have been able to assert the multiple realities of contemporary urban Aboriginal life, not just for their own communities but in the national public culture where Aboriginal activism and political claims are generally effaced from the official histories.   The social relations built out of indigenous media practices within Aboriginal communities and with the domitiant society are helping to develop support and sensibilities for indigenous actions for self-determination a point underscored by communications scholar Helen Molnar in a recent article on Indigenous media development in Australia:   .... Aborigines and Islanders are using the electr()nic media to create new means of distribution, and to restore the conminnication links destroyed by European colonization. Indigenous broadcasting, while largely community based, can potentially be transmitted locally, regionally, and nationally, informing Aborigines and Islanders about each other, thus strengthening indigenous self-identity. (1995: 73)   As a form of transformative work, indigenous media is expressive of changes in indigenous consciousness rooted in social movements for Aboriginal empowerment, cultural autonomy, and claims to land. Self-presentation in popular media is seen as a key part of this process. The production and circulation of indigenous media are creating new arenas of cooperation and consciousness, from the revival of local cultural practices, to the insertion of their histories into national imaginaries, to the creation of new transnatiojial arenas that link indigeous media makers around the globe in a common effort to make their concerns visible to the world.           18