Over five years in the making and ready for pre-orders

It was the summer of 2018 when I approached Dana Claxton, after a keen suggestion from our mutual acquaintance Heather Igloliorte, to edit a book together. I was a huge fan of Dana’s art, so it was with much excitement and anticipation that I embarked on what would end up being a long journey with her.

After more than one roadblock, including a global pandemic, I am delighted to report that our publisher, WLUP, will begin shipping copies to customers in April 2023. You can jump right on over to their site and pre-order a copy right away.

The 437-page collection features 20 contributors from across Turtle Island exploring the aesthetics, politics and ethics of Indigenous media arts from film to installation, artefacts to institutions. There are academic essays, chapters written by artists, interviews with filmmakers and a rousing text from a particularly raucous roundtable held at imagineNATIVE called “Insiders/Outsiders” (the original title of the book, which we changed for practical reasons). Whether you are in academia, the arts, or just plain interested or curious, there is a bounty of wisdom and provocation waiting for you in this timely collection. But don’t take our word for it! —

Dana Claxton and Ezra Winton’s collection of conversations between, for, and about Indigenous media makers poses vital, critical, and generative questions about Indigenous film, film festivals and institutions, residential school histories, and decolonization without providing easy answers. These conversations are at times joyful expressions of the radical possibilities of media arts and at times painful provocations about settler colonial violence and its representational apparatuses. The chapters, written by the most brilliant and creative minds in contemporary Indigenous film, are paradigm-shifting love letters to the land, lived experience, collaboration, and futurity.

— Michelle Raheja, Association Professor, Dept. of English, University of California, Riverside, and author of Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film.

Get your copy pre-ordered (folks in the US click here, folks outside of North America click here), get your library or local bookstore to carry it, help spread the word, and in a short while you’ll be able to dive into this beautiful, imaginative collection of critical thinking, creative doing and community building. Indeed, the making, caring and sharing that grounds this book is the hard work and commitment of all who contributed. We are grateful to everyone who took this journey with us, and who now share the pathways with everyone that reads the storied pages of Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing.