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As COVID-19 surged in 2020, non-Indigenous media had a chronic disease of its own: sparse pandemic news from Indian Country. Within this inadequate coverage, there was an erasure of sources: Indigenous women were missing. This study evaluates the role of gender in U.S. Indigenous news coverage during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a qualitative thematic textual analysis, 161 Indigenous media news articles were analyzed to examine gendered news coverage themes from the time the United States instituted a nationwide quarantine until the autumn of 2020. U.S. Indigenous media amplified voices of the Indigenous women on the COVID-19 frontlines. This study focuses on Indigenous media as the benchmark for telling ethical diverse Indigenous community-focused stories, illustrating how women's voices led media coverage and amplified issues. U.S. tribes are often matriarchal. As Europeans wielded disease and genocide as extermination tactics on these communities, women's voices served as medicine to guide narratives to community solutions and healing. As such, this study seeks to add to current theoretical understanding of how Indigenous women's roles were portrayed in COVID-19 coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its formal approval, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project raised public concern about environmental sustainability and security. Thanks to the systematic use of Internet and communication technologies (ICTs), the nonviolent resistance organized by the Sioux tribes of Standing Rock Reservation to oppose the planned construction rapidly attracted public attention. In view of their strategic use of online video-sharing for documentation and counter-surveillance purposes, this study aims at describing how diverse modes of user activity are triggered by two different forms of distant witnessing: online video and live streaming. To this aim, this study analyzes the user activity which took place on the Digital Smoke Signals Facebook page, one of the most widely followed information outlets of the NO DAPL movement. Findings suggest that online video and live streaming trigger different forms of connective activity. The highlighted differences reflect the ways in which synchronous and asynchronous forms of online audio-visual communication impact users’ everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends a lineage of research that reveals possibilities by which indigenous and ethnic communities have appropriated media technologies to serve their own cultural, political and social visions. This article focuses on networked and database-driven 'new' media and information systems, and the possibilities and potentialities these hold within cultural scenarios. A case is presented that has focused on Native communities within the United States. Through this case study, I present a methodology, process and analysis of the means by which information systems can enable culturally and community-focused goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In June of 2008, the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the National Museum of the American Indian presented a screening of selections originally shown at the 12th annual Sámi Film Festival held in Norway. This marked the first time that a version of the festival, which features works by and about the indigenous peoples of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, was presented in New York. Three of the films shown— Last Yoik in Saami Forests?, Herdswoman, and Calmmis Calbmái ( From an Eye to an Eye)—examined how Sámi communities draw on shared traditions as a productive resource for reimagining Sámi identity in a contemporary context. [Keywords: Sámi, Scandinavia, indigenous media, ethnographic film] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]