Review of Producing Sovereignty: The Rise of Indigenous Media in Canada by Karrmen Crey

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Indigenous media is on the rise, both in Canada and globally. Lists of must-see Indigenous films and TV shows now proliferate online even while critics and journalists have sought to explain the “special sauce” that’s in internationally popular shows like Reservation Dogs or Molly of Denali. Spoiler, in case you’re catching up: it’s the Indigenous teams of writers, actors, directors, and producers that have made the remarkable difference in how Indigenous people are represented, and Indigenous stories told, in these shows. In the wake of these successes, discussions around and about narrative and visual sovereignty—when Indigenous People have full creative control and independence in telling their own stories—have become much more common. But as Karrmen Crey’s Producing Sovereignty compellingly demonstrates, this is not a new conversation. Rather, it’s one that began in the wake of broader, Indigenous-led discussions about sovereignty that, in Canada, began after the 1960s and 1970s, flourished in cultural institutions starting in the late 1980s, and gained enormous momentum in the 1990s.

Scholarship on Indigenous film and television has often tended to focus on aesthetic contributions, distinctiveness, or social movement dimensions, with less attention paid to the institutional conditions that affect these productions. Crey makes a strong and critical turn from such approaches without ignoring the medium’s creative and visual aspects, situating her study equally in both media studies and Indigenous studies. Starting with the Canadian Constitution’s patriation in 1982, Crey introduces a historical timeline that helps explain how it is that institutions are “not neutral backdrops or platforms for Indigenous production, but are active and meaning-generating places” (3). Cultural institutions are often linked to and arise from the priorities and investments of the state—a point Crey makes powerfully using Foucault’s concept of governmentality, as well as the works of Indigenous political scholars Jodi Byrd and Glen Coulthard. In so doing, she sheds light on how it is that these institutions can position themselves as both independent and critical of the state, providing space and support for the flourishing of Indigenous media, resistance, and narratives, while also being part of and funded by the state. Much has rightly been studied and said about, for example, the role of the National Film Board (NFB) or the works of legendary Indigenous filmmakers like Alanis Obomsawin and Loretta Todd, but Crey differentiates her analysis by focusing a critical and appreciative eye on a larger and understudied “field of institutions” that has fuelled a wide body of media productions (18), ranging from television series and student films to virtual reality (VR).

Crey uses a case-study approach for the main chapters of the book; she describes these cases as models for an “institutional analysis of Indigenous media” (17). Methodologically, she draws notably from the anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, among others, and combines historical and ethnographic methods with close reading. Her choice of case studies covers a wide range of productions, which Crey hopes will draw attention to lesser-known artists, filmmakers, and journalists who have laboured at a diversity of institutions from the 1980s onward. Chapter 1 looks at two films by Cree journalist Doug Cuthand: Stay in School, broadcast in 1995 on the Saskatchewan Communication Network (a provincial broadcaster), and his 2001 NFB film, Donna’s Story. It’s a kind of proof-of-concept chapter, with Crey breaking down exactly how it is that media’s institutional context requires negotiations that impact the aesthetic and narrative aspects of these works. Chapter 2 historicizes the Aboriginal Film and Video Art Alliance and its 1993–1996 partnership with the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, which resulted in an experimental series of public service announcements (PSAs) on the topic of self-government. Crey argues these PSAs mirror the kind of experimentation that was being undertaken in the wider national context. Chapter 3 moves into the early 2000s, after the launch of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), and looks at the reality show Indians and Aliens. Here, with her innovative choice of topic and style of analysis, Crey smartly shows how the show brings Indigenous knowledge and interpretive approaches alongside Western scientific interpretations, giving each equal weight and thereby challenging epistemological norms. This was something that happened, Crey contends, because APTN was positioned as a “cultural bridge” (88).

The final two chapters do rich comparative work among media made by and about Indigenous women. Chapter 4 analyzes two films made over twenty years apart: Navajo Talking Picture by Arlene Bowman and Cry Rock by Banchi Hanuse. Bowman, a Diné student at UCLA in the 1980s, and Hanuse, an early-2000s Nuxalk graduate of UBC working at the NFB, produce very different independent films about their grandmothers. In Crey’s generous analysis, these differences have as much to do with “complex institutionality” (116)—the need to subvert and challenge colonial structures of storytelling and transform the limits of what can be documented from oral cultures—as they do with the Indigenous women behind the lenses. Chapter 5 powerfully addresses the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) crisis, looking specifically at Highway of Tears, a VR project directed by highly regarded Anishinaabe filmmaker Lisa Jackson. Crey’s analysis sets Jackson’s negotiation of both the technology’s and the institution’s (in this case, CBC’s) affordances and limitations in a robust historical context. Crey accounts for the history of Indigenous films on the subject of MMIWG, as well as other Indigenous experiments with “new” media, building on the work she started in the first chapter with Cuthand’s Donna’s Story. She also situates her analysis within the evolving social and political work around the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, including activism from and by families. It is Crey’s most personal, deftly written, and poignant chapter.

Having been a young Indigenous (Tahltan) filmmaker, journalist, and television producer in the 1990s, I am deeply appreciative of how Crey historicizes the past in a way that’s recognizable to those of us who lived through it, setting the rich case studies she has chosen within wider contingencies and conditions that impact both media-makers and the media themselves. Having been a scholar for the last couple decades, I wished for more engagement with the influence of changing institutional perceptions of Indigenous publics and audiences, and for discussions about Indigenous journalism among scholars and journalists. My particularities as a reviewer aside, the layered case-study approach in the book is an achievement, not only because the chapters speak to each other in varied ways, but also because, individually, they each offer models of insightful, well differentiated and defined analyses across decades of media evolution, Indigenous approaches to making media, and institutional contexts.

Instead of a formal conclusion, Crey ends with a brief afterword that celebrates both the strategies that keep Indigenous media innovative and “culturally rooted” (168) and the historical contingencies inherent in working with Canadian cultural institutions. She closes with the emergence of the Indigenous Screen Office (for which I sat on the advisory circle as it was being founded, but no longer serve in any related role) and, in so doing, points to shifts in institutional relations as a culmination of broad efforts from which we might expect new challenges and more experimentation. It’s an appropriate ending, given that Producing Sovereignty provides a much-needed exploration of how it is that we’ve arrived at this point—where sovereignty is not just an end goal, but a vital, necessary engine for Indigenous storytelling and production.