IsumaTV is a global movement, it’s just not one many have heard of. Launched in 2008 by Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn, it is an online platform for Indigenous film and video makers to share their work for free and unrestrictedly. At the time of writing, IsumaTV has media in Aymara, Cree, Dehcho, Gitksan, Gwich’in, Inuktitut, Keres, Krenak, Maori, Maya Yucateco, Mi’kmaq, Náhuatl, Quechua, Sámi, Tlingit, Yindjibarndi, and Zapoteco, among many others, all original languages that are still spoken in the Americas, throughout Northern Europe, the South Pacific, and Africa. Stemming from the small Arctic community of Igloolik, IsumaTV came about as a way to address a number of urgent conditions. Bandwidth in the global north and in Indigenous communities in the south is extremely expensive and rare, yet it is increasingly the principle way people connect and communicate with one another. By developing online media players that operate on either low or high bandwidth, and by making their catalogue entirely free, IsumaTV has opened a link between audiences and producers from Indigenous and other nations around the world. This platform—one based on an acute understanding of the inequities of digital media access—enables media agency, media literacy, and the spread of culturally-specific information. Importantly, it is a platform for those whose voices most often go unheard or are deliberately marginalized.

For founders Kunuk (Inuit) and Cohn, IsumaTV was initially a means to create space for Indigenous voices in a market where the majority of broadcast and online media is (still) derived from the “south.” They describe the venture as a “collaborative multimedia platform for Indigenous filmmakers and media organizations,” and one where the personalized spaces, or “channels” are culturally-specific and can be customized to reflect the identity of the maker, as well as their mandate and audience. Content is available in over 80 languages—the majority Indigenous. And they note that their “politics emphasize oral Inuktitut uploads rather than syllabic texts.” What is inferred is how the syllabic writing system was introduced among Inuit society. Syllabics were first used by priests in the newly formed settlements as a way to translate the bible into local languages and dialects, thus enabling assimilationist practices and the deliberate eradication of Inuit spiritual practices and shamanism in exchange for Christianity. Syllabics are bound with the dark history of colonialism, something that Kunuk and Cohn’s statement lays bare.

Fittingly, “Isuma” roughly translates into “thinking for oneself” in Inuktitut. Isuma Productions, an initiative of Kunuk and Cohn along with Paul Apak Angilirq and Pauloosie Qulitalik that preceded IsumaTV, is responsible for dozens of films and videos, but it was Nunavut: Our Land (1995) that helped define the work of Isuma Productions. Made initially for a northern audience and only available in Inuktitut, the videos responded to a distinct lack of locally produced programming. The few home television sets quickly became communal hubs, yet the majority of programming was in English and non-Inuit. Kunuk was immediately concerned about how television was supplanting traditional pedagogies, oral teachings and stories. Familiar with the format of the television mini-series, he and his collaborators embarked on creating a series fit for Arctic audiences. The series, beginning in the spring of 1945, is based on the transition period from a customarily semi-nomadic lifestyle to re-settlements as part of Canadian government assimilation policies, a move predicated in many areas by the collapse of the fur-trade, and the attendant overhunting of fur-bearing animals.

Education and community collaboration are central to the mini-series. Through their recreation of this time, elders taught younger crew members important survival skills: how to sew waterproof caribou boots; how to hook up sled dogs in a “fan” harness; how to hunt with a harpoon instead of a gun, and build a snow-house in a blizzard. Indeed, each episode of Nunavut includes a synopsis that is based on the skills demonstrated rather than a synopsis of the narrative. In a deliberate inversion of the usual route of broadcast media, it was only after success with a local Inuktitut-speaking audience in Igloolik that English subtitles were added and screenings took place in the south.

Six years later, Isuma Productions released the first all-Inuit, Inuktitut language feature film, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. Made with an entirely local cast and a community-based crew, the film received only lukewarm response in Canada until it was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Kunuk noted that it took the foreign award to gain due recognition back in their home country.

IsumaTV expands upon the important early work of Kunuk and Cohn—one that foregrounds Indigenous ideologies and practices—to demonstrate how Indigenous cultures thrive in the media realm, forever eschewing the tired arguments of “authenticity” and the stereotypes first put forward in Robert Flaherty’s heavily dramatized film Nanook of the North, that Inuit are ignorant in the face in new technologies. While the project is international in scope, the focus for Kunuk and Cohn remains in Igloolik. Cohn noted that through IsumaTV, they installed vital broadband internet hubs in many northern communities in the Arctic, these hubs being the digital connectors between Indigenous and other audiences. IsumaTV merges early conception of public access TV to broadcast stories that otherwise wouldn’t find their way to the screen.