Māori Television's Indigenous insistence

Abstract

ABSTRACTEstablished in New Zealand in 2004, Māori Television is the result of many years of Indigenous political agitation to gain government support for the health and well-being of Māori language and culture in the face of the debilitating (and persisting) effects of colonial settlement. As such, Māori Television is more than simply a television broadcaster; it is a media producer dedicated to strengthening Indigenous voices and cultural knowledges. This article suggests that Māori Television's capacity to broadcast alternate perspectives of what it means to live in Aotearoa/New Zealand plays a crucial role in this process of cultural revitalization. Māori Television could be understood within an overtly political framework of decolonization, in that it is dedicated to centring Indigenous concerns and world-views and building forms of knowledge that express Indigenous perspectives for Indigenous purposes. However, this Indigenous broadcaster must engage with, and negotiate, more firmly institutionalized media systems and forms of settler governmentality that continually compromise Indigenous expressions. How can Māori Television draw upon the polysemic powers of television to express the complex dynamics of Indigeneity within a contemporary settler nation such as this? In this article I suggest that the political ramifications of Māori Television's Indigenous screen presence are both contradictory and full of political potential—if. we deploy a more expansive understanding of politics. Elaborating the notion of Indigenous insistence as a form of televisual occupation I offer an alternate model for understanding Māori Television's political potential. Māori Television could be understood as an expression of cultural sovereignty or a form of ‘writing back’ to a centre that has Māori always already framed as different. But there is another way of understanding Māori Television; as a form of mediatization that asserts a norm or sense of ordinariness that flows from an Indigenous world-view. How this mode of expression might come to be understood and engaged with, is the topic of this article.