Media, Markets and Powwows

This article examines the construction of an Aboriginal public sphere in eastern Canada, tracing flows of images, ideas, peoples and practices over cultural and geographical borders from the late 19th century to the present. Early Aboriginally authored newspapers, agricultural fairs and exhibits of ethnic difference provided important contexts for the cultural mediation of novel forms of Indigeneity. Aboriginal cultural producers constructed these contact zones by intermingling and resignifying key identifying elements of ‘whiteness’ and Indianness—social categories that were ordinarily polarly opposed. This syncretizing technique continues to underwrite contemporary social practice. I suggest that not unlike other mass-mediated Aboriginal cultural products, contemporary powwow performances might be instructively perceived as communicative strategies in so far as they engender a reinscription of the Aboriginal ‘ideoscape’.