Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
In the summer of 1990, Native land defenders in Oka, Quebec, confronted white neighbors over a proposed golf course expansion on forest long claimed by the Mohawk of Kanehsatà:ke. The standoff, which lasted seventy-eight days, left two people dead: a provincial officer and a Mohawk elder. But in the majority of press coverage, only one fatality seemed to matter. “When the crisis was over, our people were getting mostly all the information out of the mainstream press in Montreal,” recalled Kenneth Deer, a former high school principal from Kahnawà:ke Kanien’kehá:ka Territory. “They weren’t getting the best information, because it was all slanted.” So Deer gathered a few friends, turned his dining room into a makeshift newsroom, and debuted The Eastern Door, committed to telling the story from an Indigenous point of view.
Thirty-three years later, The Eastern Door is still publishing, though Deer, now seventy-seven, has moved on to advocacy at the United Nations as a key contributor to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Recently, he helped launch the first study focused on Article 16: the right to Indigenous media. “Indigenous peoples’ media is not treated equally—it’s ignored, suppressed, or in some places, doesn’t even exist,” he told me. “That article exists because it needs protection.”
In the spring of 2023, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues formally requested that UNESCO examine Article 16—a call to advance Indigenous peoples’ right to create, control, and access all forms of media, in Indigenous languages, free from discrimination. The request also urged states to ensure that both public and private media reflect Indigenous diversity. UNESCO moved quickly, forming a working group, hiring researchers, and developing an AI-powered media monitoring system with Cision software. That July, Deer traveled to Geneva’s Palais des Nations to offer his insights at the first official research meeting. Last November, the agency invited thirty-three Indigenous media representatives from twenty-eight countries to its Paris headquarters, me among them. There, study advisers revealed a first look at their findings, including results from an unprecedented global survey—a collection of 308 responses across 74 countries from Indigenous media organizations alone. “The best thing that could ever happen is that we all get together and become one big voice,” said Kelly Williams of the Bundjalung Nation, a study participant and director of First Nations Strategy at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Her unifying message remains one that needs to be heard.
Participation in the project was fueled by a growing movement of Indigenous journalists and media makers, any of whom could relate to the Oka Crisis—an enduring example of how entrenched industry barriers and cultural blind spots surface once stories about us hit the press. There was also a pervasive sense of the risks involved. As the climate crisis deepens, a recent study found, Indigenous land defenders are being killed at higher rates than other environmentalists—though journalists working beside them, especially in regions of mining and deforestation, rarely, if ever, appear in the data. In a world that undervalues Indigenous knowledge and futures, we speak because we must. Storytelling—our oldest form of media—has always been a tool of our resistance.
In April, UNESCO released its findings in a report, “Indigenous Peoples and the Media,” which confirmed a fact that many of us already knew: stereotyping and biased framing by non-Indigenous media persist. For journalists like me, the study offered rare validation. (Consider that, back in 2005, I needed NGO sponsorship just to access UN grounds because my freelance outlet, Indian Country Today, wasn’t recognized as legitimate press.) The report signaled more than interest in our stories. It affirmed our right to tell them. This was the promise, at least, to a global cohort of truth-tellers. But, like so many promises made to us, this one was ultimately broken.
In mid-April, I rode the M15 bus to UN Headquarters for the start of the Twenty-Fourth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The opening ceremony in the General Assembly Hall began with an Onondaga prayer and Kichwa violin performance. Aluki Kotierk, an Inuk leader from the Canadian Arctic, was appointed then as the forum’s new chair, and gave a speech. She began by calling out a familiar distortion: the framing of her homeland as “isolated” and “harsh.” Later, she told me why she started her remarks that way. “Because people often repeat words they’ve heard without thinking about what purpose they serve,” she said. “Colonialism depends on narratives of barren land so outsiders can come in, use our resources, and feel no shame. It’s the same with portrayals of us as barely surviving—it benefits the other.” As it happened, Kotierk didn’t see a television until she was ten—not for lack of money or electricity, but because Inuit leaders had banned them to protect their language.
Though Kotierk didn’t know it the day we spoke, tension had been mounting around UNESCO’s Indigenous media study. Rumors began circulating soon after her speech that an event to unveil the findings—meant to give the report weight and elicit attention from policymakers and journalists—had been abruptly canceled. Some participants knew before boarding their planes; others arrived in New York unaware. (A UNESCO spokesperson said that no such event had been planned, but it was listed on a schedule for the session.) Jodi Rave Spotted Bear, a Mandan Hidatsa-Miniconjou Lakota journalist, only learned what was happening—and wasn’t—when she turned up at the UN. “There was a clear element of surprise and confusion,” she said. The next morning, an agency representative presented the findings in a brief statement before the forum. But before she could finish, her mic cut out—three minutes in.
After two years of research, thousands of miles flown, and countless emails exchanged, the study now sits quietly in the UN record—its promise of Indigenous visibility largely unfulfilled. Across sixteen pages and an annex of datasets, Indigenous identities were flattened into generalities, with just one breakdown by region, and no mention of tribal affiliations. The survey offered a broad picture, but was too basic to reflect the complexity it aimed to map. And the discussion of Article 16, the study’s very reason for being, had no guide for implementation. The report included twelve recommendations, but not one directly called on UN bodies or member states to act, even the most obvious: “Ensuring Rights, Freedom of Expression, and Access to Media.”
One of the few affirmations in the study was something most in the cohort already knew: radio is essential. More than a third of Indigenous survey respondents named it as their primary medium, with 84 percent of those organizations broadcasting in Indigenous languages. These low-power signals are more like lifelines—sharing everything from weather alerts to land seizure warnings. But UNESCO’s AI-powered monitoring tool wasn’t built to track any of that. The Cision software captured only what entered its digital data lake, which meant that humble AM/FM news was left out. Of the world’s four thousand Indigenous languages, few if any are traceable by Cision’s 96 programmed languages—yet even these would have been excluded, since UNESCO limited its scope to English-language sources. The system, meanwhile, turned up an overwhelming amount of junk—duplicate press releases and cooking recipes, for instance. In the end, the report concluded that digital platforms represented 87 percent of Indigenous coverage—depicting only a partial view of our diverse realities.
The study’s failures went beyond bad data. Another sign the research had lost its way came in what appeared to be a copy-paste error embedded in recommendation five, “Ensuring Fair Representation in Media Content.” Out of nowhere, the last line veered into an unrelated UNESCO initiative: “the illicit trafficking of Indigenous cultural goods.” In a report meant for Indigenous journalists and media workers, it was a damning blunder, signaling that our time, stories, and knowledge weren’t worth a careful proofread. Worse, it betrayed decades of Indigenous human rights advocacy that brought this moment into view.
These weren’t just lapses in editing—they reflected a deeper pattern of disregard. Nowhere was this clearer than in the study’s treatment of violence. Early results and drafts shared with study participants reported that 62 percent of Indigenous media workers face threats on the job. But by the time the final report reached the forum, that number had dropped by nearly 15 points—without explanation. (When reached for comment, UNESCO said the data had not been peer-reviewed when it was first distributed.) Worse, the study failed to mention journalist killings, even though UNESCO maintains its own count through its Observatory of Killed Journalists. Nor did the report distinguish journalists from other media workers—an omission that dangerously erases fatal frontline risks.
As I made my way home from the UN, I started messaging and speaking with members of the cohort. Many are longtime colleagues of mine. Others I met as part of the study. At first, my outreach was to commiserate about the outcome. But the more we talked, the clearer it became: frustration and rumor had been spreading among participants—about the research, and especially about the subdued release of the report. It wasn’t until I reached out to UNESCO’s public relations division that I learned anything of substance. The agency blamed “budgetary constraints” for the muted rollout, but declined to specify which funding stream fell short. (One funder of the research was a multimillion-dollar program that, last year, featured our cohort in its annual report.)
Spotted Bear, who had attended a rare Indigenous media workshop at the UN back in 2000, told me that she found UNESCO’s communication to be uneven—and the lack of transparency became hard to take. This especially hit home since the nonprofit she runs, the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance, expressly condemns the censorship of Native truth. “Everyone should have been properly notified that the report was being swept off the global stage,” Spotted Bear said.
Such lack of meaningful engagement by UN entities is what has driven the modern Indigenous human rights movement since the first gathering, in Geneva, in 1977. Back then, Indigenous Peoples were referred to as “populations,” a term that, according to Kenneth Deer, reflected demography over sovereignty. “And we were fighting that term all the way to the very end,” he said, recalling when the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was finally adopted, in 2007. “The words matter.” Deer, who had been the media study’s guiding voice at the start, did not participate in the process since meeting with UNESCO in 2023. He said he was disappointed to learn that the language in the final report had been handled so carelessly—and that no direct call had been made to states or the UN to implement Article 16. “We have to be there to fight for those words.”
It’s hard to describe the creeping sense of erasure when it becomes cross-generational, transnational, and layered. But a global cohort of Indigenous media practitioners felt it—including Dev Kumar Sunuwar, who was, in many ways, the reason the study began. Sunuwar, a journalist and media entrepreneur from Nepal’s Koĩts-Sunuwar community, fed his family the first sound of their own language by radio, then launched a TV station that broadcasts in eighteen additional Indigenous languages. In 2016, he founded the Indigenous Media Caucus (and invited me to join). For him, UNESCO’s research was always about creating visibility. “There was no global study that clearly defined Indigenous media,” he said. “We wanted something official, a reference that gave genuine recognition.”
Part of that recognition, we knew, had to include our safety. So in 2023, as the Permanent Forum considered whether to task UNESCO with the study, our caucus submitted a formal statement in full support—with a crucial message: protect Indigenous journalists from violence. The forum listened and adopted our call word for word, alongside its own prompt for the study. Today, our intervention serves as a chilling reminder of what remains at stake.
To Dora Muñoz Atillo, Article 16 is not abstract. It’s about survival in places where journalism can be fatal. In 2022, Muñoz’s husband, an Indigenous political leader in Cauca, Colombia, was named in pamphlets submitted to paramilitary units, then kidnapped and killed. The same year, illegal gold mining surged by 73 percent across the country, much of it on Indigenous land. “Armed forces, guerrilla groups, state actors, private armies run by companies—they come to our lands and impose extraction on us,” Muñoz told me. “Indigenous media has become strategic to defend land and life.”
Spotted Bear and I met Muñoz at the talks in Paris, but she hadn’t discussed any of this personal hardship then. Instead, she focused on how the Colombian government routinely denies radio licenses to Indigenous communities—a way to censor coverage of crime and corruption. “We’ve been quite demanding of our right to media,” she said. This includes others now working where, two decades ago, she got her start—at Radio Pa’yumat, a community station serving her people, the Nasa. Today, a mural inside its office bears the faces of five “communicators” like her—three men and two women—who were killed for their reporting. “We face great risk in speaking about these issues because we live in disputed territories.”
That this reality was glossed over by UNESCO felt beyond negligent. Indigenous voices were invited, consulted, recorded—then disregarded. In the end, UNESCO published its report in English only, a language Muñoz neither speaks nor reads. “They never think of us,” she told me. A UNESCO spokesperson said there are plans to translate the report into more languages eventually. Even so, the meaning of Muñoz’s words, I knew, ran much deeper.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
