A Right to Media? Lorie M. Graham - Columbia Law School

2010] A RIGHT TO MEDIA? 483
Just to be seen on TV makes people genuine in a way that
almost nothing else in the 20th-century culture does. This
is the psychological underpinning for the CRTC’s recent
decision to grant a licence for an Aboriginal television
network. Not only will the Aboriginal Peoples Television
Network be a place for Native people to present themselves
to one another in English, French and 15 Native languages,
but it will be an electronic arena in which many Canadians
will encounter Aboriginals in ways they might never do
otherwise. 207
While indigenous media in Canada still faces legislative
marginalization and funding shortages, it has nevertheless been
evolving for more than forty years. In the 1960s and 1970s, radio and
television programming from non-indigenous sources began to be
broadcasted into aboriginal homes. 208 In response to the deluge of
non-indigenous broadcasting, indigenous leaders pushed for
government funding for Aboriginal media programming.
In 1960, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC)
Northern Service broadcasted, via studios in Montreal, the first
Aboriginal language radio program. This marked only the beginning
for Canadian indigenous radio, and by the 1970s sixteen percent of
short-wave radio programming from Canada’s Northern Service was
in Inuktitut. 209 With funding and technical support from the
Canadian government and the CBC, radio was used throughout the
North as a primary source of political and community information. In
1971, the Canadian Department of Communications introduced the
Northern Pilot Project, which allowed several Aboriginal
communities to experiment with radio programming. 210 Due to the
project’s success, the Native Communications Program (NCP) was
initiated in 1973. The program was created to support local and
stereotyping/aboriginal_people/aboriginal_broadcasting.cfm (last visited Feb. 5,
2010).
207. Editorial, The Native Media, Globe & Mail (Toronto), Feb. 24, 1999,
at A14.
208. Media Awareness Network, supra note 206. Rosemary Kuptana, the
eventual president of the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, compared the influence
of non–indigenous television programming to the neutron bomb, stating that it
“kills the people . . . but leaves the buildings standing.”
209. Id.
210. Id.