RIGHT TO MEDIA: BREAKING INDIGENOUS PEOPLES' SYSTEMIC ISOLATION

Reynaldo Antonio Morales^1,2,3Zella Bleu Milfred^1*

• ¹Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications, and Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University, Evanston, United States
• ²Center for Native American and Indigenous Research Northwestern University, United States / Evanston, Illinois, United States
• ³Un Indigenous Media Caucus, UN New York, United States

Representation of the world’s Indigenous Peoples’ cultural, political, environmental, and social issues, continues to be marginalized within and across the seven sociocultural regions designated by the UNPFII (Africa, Arctic, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation, Central Asia and Transcaucasia; North America, and the Pacific. This marginalization is characteristic of a global Indigenous political identity recognized by international law and treaties. This perspective paper proposes and advocates for the right for a People to have its own media, a stand informed by and grounded in field research of the Indigenous policy negotiation teams at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the UN Media Caucus board since 2018. From this research, the paper makes a case for the urgent need of Indigenous Media ownership as essential to discussions of how global policy development could support this media. This includes, for example, curating specialized content provided directly by Indigenous Peoples’ newsrooms, as well as the development of special programming that links into the United Nations streaming system in parallel to negotiations and through global media mainstream platforms. At the present moment, decisive negotiations between nation-states, stakeholders, and Indigenous Peoples, and Local Communities are happening across complementary treaties, which address the case of enhancing the visibility of Indigenous Peoples through their own global media network, a historical shift in the terms of representation between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of the world.