Challenges with mainstream media

Indigenous peoples have always been involved in the production and distribution of media content. Their efforts are reflected in contemporary print, broadcast, and digital media.

But alongside these activities, much mainstream media continues to misrepresent Indigenous peoples. Critical communication scholars show how despite their diversity, mainstream media representations of Indigenous peoples reflect similar negative characteristics that persist over time. These representations include stereotypes of bloodthirsty or noble savages, shifty half-breeds, stoic warriors, and Indian princesses. Think about the recent controversy over Johnny Depp’s character in the film The Lone Ranger.

The widespread production and dissemination of these images was amplified through the emergence of mass media. In Canada, by the 1860s and 1870s, Indigenous people came to be represented as dying cultures. Their rich visual arts, crafts, songs, performances, words, and stories – were collected and circulated in mainstream society as popular evidence of ‘primitive’ artifacts and practices”.

Consider the clip from the 1951 film The Caribou Hunters.

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