Right to media: breaking Indigenous Peoples’ systemic isolation

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, the 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 the global Indigenous political identity recognized by international law and treaties. This perspective study proposes and advocates for the right of people to have their own media, a stance informed by and grounded in field research by 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. This study makes a case for the urgent need for 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 through mainstream global media platforms. At present, decisive negotiations between nation-states, stakeholders, and Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are taking place across complementary treaties, which address the case of enhancing the visibility of Indigenous Peoples through their own global media networks, a historical shift in the terms of representation between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of the world.