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Review

Cover: Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada

Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada

By Karrmen Crey

Review By Derek Moscato

January 16, 2025

This past fall, the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) celebrated a milestone both symbolic and material in the form of its 25th anniversary. The Winnipeg-based news and entertainment enterprise, which received its CRTC license to be rolled out across Canada in 1999, was the first national public television network for and about Indigenous peoples. APTN’s recent birthday was symbolic in that it has served as a beacon of sorts for Indigenous media across Canada and globally, even as it has generated quibbles about distribution, production, and language. But the material dimensions of APTN’s quarter-century successes also warrant attention. The network has spawned scores of original shows, including national and regional news but also children’s programming, and it has moved into areas such as subscription-based streaming.

            On the occasion of APTN’s anniversary, the network celebrated in the heart of Toronto’s financial district at the TMX Market Center with cheering and confetti, even as it ambitiously launched a second network called APTN Languages focused on Indigenous language programming. That’s a stunning arc of success that underscores the significant advances made by the broadcaster but more broadly by Indigenous journalists, filmmakers, and media producers across Canada.

            Given this backdrop of growth and reflection, Karrmen Crey’s book Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada comes along at an ideal time. Crey, who is from Cheam First Nation and is an associate professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication, brings lenses of political economy, state theory, and cultural identity to tackle the rise of APTN, but also a wide range of Indigenous media in Canada, from engagement with the National Film Board to advocacy in the arts and media sphere, including documentary-making and virtual reality. Notably, Crey’s focus is on the production of media at the institutional level, including national concerns but also under-the-radar endeavors such as educational broadcasting and independent film. Thus, Producing Sovereignty is unique in that it doesn’t consider specific cultural enterprises or programs in isolation. Rather, it presents an ongoing interaction between Indigenous media makers and the rest of Canada through themes of representation but also production, regulation, policy, and funding. This perspective complements previous scholarly work focused on the rise of Indigenous media, including the late Valerie Alia’s The New Media Nation: Indigenous Peoples and Global Communication.

APTN therefore makes an ideal focal point for Crey’s chapter on “Programming Indigeneity.” Pointing to how APTN has embedded itself into the cultural but also political fabric of the contemporary Canadian media ecosystem, she points to the active role that Indigenous media makers continue to make in shaping popular culture in Canada. This engagement, according to Crey, is far from passive. She points to the perspective that “Indigenous artists, filmmakers, and producers are in critical conversations with popular cultural forms and genres, adopting them to Indigenous concerns and lived experiences” (p.87). Plenty of this activity aligns with the same timeline that set the stage for the launch, and subsequent success, of APTN. Crey, noting that Indigenous media has experienced a boom across various formats over the past three decades, situates this cultural surge against a backdrop of social, political, and technological variables. Notable among these was the support of provincial and national funding mechanisms and cultural institutions.

            The astonishing growth of Indigenous media since the 1990s is therefore entangled with media organizations such as APTN, the CBC, and Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance, even though this organizational reality has been sometimes overlooked, or at the very least under-analyzed. Crey seeks to rectify this scholarly gap, noting that such institutions are “meaning-generating places that interpret and make sense of social, legal, and material shifts in relations to their own institutional identities, cultures, administrative structures, and production practices” (p. 3). Thus, Crey’s Producing Sovereignty provides a robust and timely rendering of media history, technology, and political economy, making it a valuable read for those interested in both Indigenous and Canadian communication and identity.

Publication Information

Crey, Karrmen. Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. $37.99 224 pp. paper.