MediaSmarts Tags - Aboriginal People

Community radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) Northern Service short-wave radio had been an integral part of northern life since the mid-1950s. By the early 1970s, 16 per cent of Northern Service programming was in Inuktitut and, with CBC and government-funded training and technical support, radio began to be used throughout the North for everything from political information and local news to bingo and the communication of family messages.

Problematic portrayals remain an issue today, not just in movies and on TV but in a medium particularly popular among Aboriginal youth, video games. As Beth Eileen puts it in her article “Indigenous Representations in Commercial Video Games,” on the website Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace:

The website Groupe autochtone de surveillance des médias (Aboriginal media monitoring group) describes its objectives as follows: ”Due to a number of blunders by media (in particular V-Télé, formerly TQS) on Aboriginal issues, we have decided to develop a way to better inform ourselves about these blunders and then plan how we will act. The purpose of this is to educate the media and present them with the Aboriginal perspective on the issue.