Journal Article

Coyote's Way: Missy Whiteman's Indigenous New Media

Angelica Lawson

2017

Overview

[...]Arapaho- Kickapoo media artist Missy Whiteman spoke up and explained that this was generally not a goal. According to Elise Marubbio and Eric Buffalohead in Native Americans on Film: Conversations, Teaching and Theory, \"Both cinema of sovereignty and visual sovereignty are aspects of media sovereignty: the act of controlling the camera and refocusing the lens to promote indigenous agency in the media process and in their own image construction\" (10). [...]definitions of media sovereignty began to form with Jolene Rickard's essay on sovereignty and visual arts and has been expanded on by numerous scholars over the years to encompass \"cultural sovereignty\" as applied to Native filmmaking (Singer), representational cinema of sovereignty in documentary filmmaking (Lewis), and visual sovereignty (Raheja, Reservation Reelism). With the surge in new media creation by Indigenous people we see not only more accurate historical and contemporary representation of the people but also counternarratives that intervene in colonial oppressive histories and serve as activist documents to be shared with audiences worldwide. [...]very recently it was difficult to find a Native character in anything other than a western and even more difficult to find one that did not fall into a number of stereotypical categories such as the polarized constructions of the bloodthirsty savage / noble savage, the drudge/princess, and the vanishing American. [...]for many Native American filmmakers, of which there began to be a large number in the 1970s, addressing this history becomes a main motivation for their work.

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Subject: Aesthetic Education / African literature / American Indians / Audiences / Colleges & universities / Colonialism / Communities / Death / Decolonization / Digital media / Documentaries / Documentary films / Ecocriticism / Essays / Ethics / Females / Film Production / Historical text analysis / Indigenous art / Indigenous peoples / Indigenous Populations / Literary studies / Modernity / Motion pictures / Movies / Music / Native American music / Native Americans / Native culture / Native Language / Native literature / Native North Americans / Political Issues / Singers / Sovereignty / Stereotypes