Indigenous peoples,digital leisure,and popular culture

Abstract

This is the introductory article for the special issue “Indigenous peoples, digital leisure, and popular culture”. Following the 2016 issue of AlterNative edited by Michelle Harris and Bronwyn Carlson “Indigenous people, popular pleasure and the everyday”, this article comments on the continued influence of the former issue and offers some new commentary on Indigenous popular and digital leisure today.

Almost 8 years after Michelle Harris and Bronwyn Carlson (2016) guest-edited the special issue of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples—Indigenous people, popular pleasure and the everyday, much has changed in social and cultural lives of Indigenous peoples, and much has not. Indigenous peoples globally still resist everyday interventions and impositions on our lands and lives from European, settler colonial and, particularly, imperialist forces forged through corporate and military alliances between the USA and other dominating White settler states like Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and so-called Australia. Those of us Indigenous to these territories continue to resist not only myriad physical and institutional acts of colonial violence but also a cultural kind of colonial violence that relegates our existence to past tense in the settler imaginary, ideologically erasing our ways of life from both the future and the present. Larissa Behrendt described this in 2002, 10 years after the Mabo decision in so-called Australia, as psychological terra nullius. Although the legal myth that Australia was uninhabited land was overturned in 1992, she wrote (Behrendt, 2002), the linguistic and psychological myth of terra nullius abounded in settler Australia’s political and cultural psyche. Globally, parallel settler myths that Indigenous peoples are either non-existent or archaic prevail.

Even while settler imaginaries reproduce themselves “through the institutionalization and disciplining of knowledge practices to perform, mediate, and maintain colonial order” (Rivera, 2023, p. 299) including through mass media, digital technologies, and the capitalist system, Indigenous peoples still cultivate pleasure, meaning, humour, resistance, and creativity everyday within and around this very same colonial system “often by subverting and rearranging it to suit” (Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 459). The significance and relevance of AlterNative’s 2016 special issue can still be felt as a Black and Indigenous academic intervention contrary to settler knowledge about Indigenous cultures (Harris & Carlson, 2016). Indigenous culture, they argued (Harris & Carlson, 2016), was continuous, quotidian, innovative, dynamic, and produced into the future through production and consumption in the everyday. Utilising Raymond Williams’ (2014) articulation of culture as “both traditional and creative” (as cited in Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 459) and Friske’s (1990) definition of popular culture as “emerging from the efforts of consumers to make cultural offerings their own through acts of resistance and appro-priation” (as cited in Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 459) they offered what was, for all intents and purposes, a new conceptualisation—Indigenous popular culture.

Indigenous popular culture as both a concept and a phenomenon existed prior to 2016, of course. However, Harris and Carlson (2016) mark 2016 as an important year for Indigenous popular culture, not only with the special issue but also as the year of the first Indigenous Comic Con on Tiwa (a First Nations people of New Mexico, USA) lands in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. They also note the screening of Cleverman (Griffen, 2016–2017) in both Australia and the USA—a futuristic television series about an Aboriginal superhero created by Ryan Griffin. The years following saw a burst of Indigenous and Afro futurist content from North America including two film adaptations of Marvel’s Black Panther (1966–) comics. Indigenous and Afro queer futurist works like Indigenous LGBT sci-fi anthology Love Beyond Body, Space and Time (2016) edited by Hope Nicholson and Janelle Monae’s (2018) album and film Dirty Computer, and her accompanying book The Memory Librarian (2022) also made critical cultural interventions. As Arlie Alizzi (2021) observes in his PhD thesis, Indigenous queer writers transformed Indigenous futurist political and creative thought in so-called Australia as well as in North America. Authors like Ellen van Neervan, Claire G. Coleman, Laniyuk, and Mykalea Saunders have irrevocably shifted the literary landscape in so-called Australia and their writing is in conversation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander political ambitions for a world beyond colonial occupation (Alizzi, 2021).

Where once Indigenous popular culture was cultivated and shared among Indigenous peoples, increasingly Indigenous digital and screen works are disseminated in mass media from the West. Māori (the Indigenous people of New Zealand) director, screenwriter, and producer Taika Waititi’s break in Hollywood has contributed considerable Indigenous presence across comedy, fantasy, and science fiction. Waititi (2017, 2022) is best known in US popular culture for directing two of Marvel’s Thor movies. However, arguably his contribution to Indigenous popular culture can be measured in television series. Waititi’s long-time collaborator Jermaine Clement, who is also Māori, adapted their vampire film What We Do in The Shadows (Basch, 2014–2024) for television in 2019 and although it is not explicitly about Indigenous people, it is written and directed by Clement and, regularly, Waititi who is also a producer. It was renewed for a final season in 2024 giving a fantasy-comedy imbued with Māori humour a six-season lifespan. The series also revitalised the music of Norma Tanega, a queer Panamanian and Filipinx artist, who recorded Your Dead (1966) the song used for the show’s opening credits. Waititi made an offering to queer culture himself with his performance as Edward, the central love interest in Our Flag Means Death (2022–2023), a series revolving around romantic and platonic queer relationships between pirates for which he was also a producer. But perhaps most notably, Waititi’s collaboration with Seminole (a First Nations people, Oklahoma and Florida, USA) filmmaker Sterlin Harjo created award-winning Indigenous dramedy Reservation Dogs (Basch, 2021–2023) a ground-breaking streaming series with a majority Native American cast.

Harris and Carlson (2016) raised the question of what counts as Indigenous popular culture. Does, for example, a television series about European vampires set in Long Island, New York count if it has a Māori creator? Does a series that incorporates elements of both traditional and contemporary cultural life for young people on a Muskogee reservation count? Does a series like Rutherford Falls (Helms, 2021–2022) which features a fictional town and a fictional Native American tribe count? And, with the rapid transformation of screen cultures from television to streaming services to shorter video consumption via mobile devices, does widely dispersed Indigenous user-generated content on TikTok, Instagram reels, and YouTube count as Indigenous popular culture? Harris and Carlson (2016) would argue that because Indigenous people are contemporary people both producing and consuming mainstream screen cultures, the answer is yes to all. For them, Indigenous popular culture is produced at the nexus of transgression and conformity that occurs when Indigenous people engage in meaning-making as both creators and consumers who are simultaneously embedded and engaged in political struggle with mass media cultures globally (Harris & Carlson, 2016).

In settler imaginaries, Indigenous people are defined in opposition to digital cultures—we are racially constructed as pre-modern and pre-technology (Day et al., 2023). In reality, Indigenous people all over the world live vibrant technologically and digitally engaged lives. One need only look to the use of social media like Facebook and Twitter for Native political discourse and action (Vigil-Hayes et al., 2017) or the relational and educational uses of video calling between Pasifika (diaspora from Pacific regions and their descendants) communities during the COVID-19 pandemic (Enari & Matapo, 2021) for evidence of this. Indigenous peoples not only use the Internet, mobiles, laptops, and other digital devices for political, social, and cultural connection. They also use them for leisure. As Carlson and Frazer (2021) point out, Indigenous fun, enjoyment, humour, and politics are not mutually exclusive in public spaces like the Internet. Using examples like Koorioke on Twitter—where Aboriginal people shared videos of themselves doing karaoke (singing for the enjoyment and entertainment of others) while experiencing extended lockdowns during COVID-19 pandemic, and Indigenous-only groups on Facebook for sharing cooking and political memes, they observe that fun and humour are one of many ways that Indigenous people collectively create and nurture networks and communities on the Internet based in shared cultural, political, and social understandings (Carlson & Frazer, 2021). In this sense, Carlson and Frazer (2021) argue that shared practices of enjoyment and recreation among Indigenous people are also a kind of socio-political technology necessary for survival in violent settler colonial societies like so-called Australia.

Digital leisure for Indigenous people, then, is more than just recreation using digital devices. As Carlson and Frazer (2021, p. 135) say, it is now an element of “Indigenous life in all its realness and silliness.” Popular culture and digital leisure are part of everyday for many Indigenous peoples globally. In this way, Indigenous people are simultaneously distinct from Western cultures and increasingly contributing and embedded within them. It would be erroneous, however, to assume that inclusion in dominant digital and mass media cultures is overwhelmingly positive for Indigenous peoples. Access to devices and technologies necessary for participation in popular culture and digital culture come at great material cost to Indigenous people all over the world. Indigenous people are widely dispossessed and exploited in the name of Western corporate possession of rare minerals like lithium and cobalt which are essential to the production of these technologies. There is considerable reliance on natural resource mining from the African continent as well as across the Asia-Pacific Region to manufacture and power digital technologies. Data centres, which are physical infrastructure required for most communication and streaming technologies, require vast amounts of energy and water for cooling systems and contribute considerably to carbon emissions and pollution of air and water across multiple Indigenous lands including Data Center Alley in Virginia which covers multiple tribal lands in the USA and in Sápmi, northern Sweden (Sargsyan, 2023). Connectivity and communication ownership overall is also concentrated in North America.

Inequality in terms of representation in media as well as access to technology and connectivity are treated as opportunities for market expansion and regularly, by extension, geographic expansion by Western corporations and governments (Oyedemi, 2021). Similarly, harm facilitated by digital technologies, including disinformation, racial abuse, and the spread of White supremacist ideology which disproportionately impact Indigenous people and communities of colour, are often met by corporations like Meta and Google as opportunities for technical solutions (Kuo & Marwick, 2021). Technical solutions justify corporate demand for rare earth minerals and sites of pollution, worsening circumstances mentioned above and increasing Western drive for influence over Indigenous lands and resources. There are also significant geopolitical consequences of media ownership like streaming service and communication technology concentration in the USA, a settler nation-state whose own political milieu is mutable and prone to influence from White settler demagogues on news and social media. US cultural, political, and economic hegemony limit the influence of Indigenous representation in both mass media and on digital platforms (Duarte, 2017). However, with the establishment of Web 2.0 or the user-generated Internet, we have seen a great diversification of political voices in the public sphere both for the better and for worse. Indigenous TikTok is just one example of a new and exciting site of political and cultural discourse, where Indigenous creators and consumers can speak and organise collectively across oceans and borders. While social media and user-generated video apps like YouTube and TikTok also offer new possibilities for Indigenous popular culture and digital leisure, media and digital technology production, access, and ownership remain inequitable and, arguably, integral to global imperialist expansion of US Empire.

Theorising Indigenous collective responses and resistance to globalisation and imperialism, Makere Stewart-Harawira (2005) argues for beginning with recognition of the sovereignty and political autonomy of Indigenous nations under occupation by Western settler nation-states. Indigenous answers to nation-state sovereignty and hegemony trouble the imperialist global order. Similarly, Marisa Duarte (2017) discusses the potential of story for tribal collaborations across the Americas, and how Indigenous peoples can collaboratively make sense of the complex potential and perils of current digital technologies. This also speaks to Carlson and Frazer’s (2021) claim that the cultivation and consumption of online spaces and content for leisure by Indigenous people is a kind of socio-political technology. It is evident from the papers contributed to this special issue that while Indigenous popular culture and digital leisure exist within a media and technological landscape shaped by settler colonial occupation and imperialism, they also offer new sites of solidarity, story, resilience, and resistance as interventions to these conditions. Indigenous popular culture and digital leisure are complex sites of collective meaning-making which pose challenges to settler knowledge and imaginaries which would otherwise silo and relegate Indigenous people to past tense, eradicating us from contemporary global cultural and political landscapes.

This special issue begins with “Total control: Black Bitches offending the offenders” from Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson, one of two of the original editors of the preceding special issue that inspired this one—Indigenous people, popular pleasure and the everyday (2016). In this article, Carlson deliberates on Australian Broadcasting Corporation series Total Control (Blair, 2019–) where Aboriginal woman Alex Irving played by Deborah Mailman begins a political career after she is involved in a viral event that attracts media attention. Carlson draws parallels between the interplay of Australian politics, social media abuse, and gendered settler violence experienced by Alex Irving in the series and the real online, political, and police violence experienced by Aboriginal women including former Labour Senator Nova Peris and Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe. She reflects on colonial violence and political incompetency on the part of Australian governments, including the political trajectory to a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Australian constitution which failed in 2023 after receiving a majority no vote from Australian citizens. Analysing real social media posts and statements from White settlers targeting Aboriginal women in politics, Carlson concludes that the sexual and gendered violence depicted in the series mimics everyday reality for Aboriginal women, and particularly, those like Alex Irving who dare to step into the public eye.

Continuing with the theme of social media, Angela Matthews offers “Melanesian reimagining: a digital tok stori [storytelling] of Papua New Guinean identity on Instagram”—an exploration of how a framework of Melanesian tok stori extends into visual social media. Examining posts and the articulation of Papua New Guinean identity through photography and cultural archiving on Instagram, Matthews demonstrates how prevailing impacts of Christianisation and Western imperialist constructions of the Pacific are challenged using digital tok stori. She positions these works as cultural self-representation that speaks directly to an extended Papua New Guinean renaissance exercising artistry and complexity in the face colonial narratives about Melanesians. Matthews provides examples of photography posts and accounts including @archiveples and @taniabphoto, which provide complex representation, including Indigenous mobility, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, and contemporary Papua New Guinean feminine aesthetics. She shows how such representation disarticulates imperialist projections of savagery which posit Papua New Guinean people as anachronistic and stagnant. She argues that this rearticulation of identity partially occurs through hashtags such as #PNGwomen and #Melanesian, which have both indexing and unifying functions for interested users on Instagram. Digital tok stori, Matthews explains, highlights Papua New Guinean identity as both deeply rooted and dynamic.

In “Queer Indigenous screen representation: beyond a gift from the past or a problem to be solved”, Professor Sandy O’Sullivan, Dr Han Reardon Smith, Alana Blakers, and Teyah Miller inquire into complex representation of queer Indigenous characters in TV and streaming series. Drawing from an expanding audit and database of complex queer representation on screen, the authors identify patterns of story and characterisation across queer Indigenous characters. They note how limited representation of Indigenous peoples and concentration of media production in North America means that audiences, and particularly Indigenous audiences from so-called Australia, recalibrate our expectations and look for ourselves in stories about other Black and Indigenous peoples. They discuss how asexual representation intersects with issues of race and the collapsing of Two Spirit, transgender and intersex identities in the character of Yahima in Lovecraft Country (Abrams, 2020). The authors also discuss the complexities of casting both Indigenous and queer characters and ask what kind of responsibilities and risks lie with actors who may be Indigenous but asked to play a character who is queer when they are not or from a region they are not from. They consider the distinction in an Indigenous-made series like Reservation Dogs where, in the character of Willie Jack, queer Indigeneity is always present but rarely discussed. They close by noting that while Indigenous actors, writers, and directors make significant difference to representation, greater insights are needed into audience interpretations.

Arlie Alizzi’s contribution “Don’t respond: sexting and scrolling in First Nations queer literature” is a ficto-critical article utilising creative self-narration alongside an examination of three literary texts by Indigenous queer authors which address online abuse, harassment, racism, and innovation on digital media, as well as the authors own experience being catfished. Alizzi offers a deeply personal and nuanced letter addressing the person who deceived and betrayed him who is another transgender Aboriginal man. It outlines the impact of their behaviour and how risks and harm associated with being queer and Indigenous online interrupt spaces that can also be sites of activism, belonging, eroticism, fun, and care. Sharing stories of scrolling, sexting, swapping nudes, and being scammed, he gifts us a rare window into queer Aboriginal digital erotic life. Alizzi raises questions about how digital technology mediates intimacy and trust. He also asks us to hold the potential of digital technology for connection and affirmation of queer Indigenous identities and relationships alongside how we actually use it, which is sometimes anonymous, deceptive, and reckless. Contemplating Tommy Pico and Ellen Van Nervan’s poetry, he asks the person who catfished him to consider whether our interactions on digital technology are a web we both weave and are ensnared. Ultimately, Alizzi revisits the question of whether the potential of anonymity online corrupts our relations IRL [in real life].

In “Trash Tiddas: Blak queers, terrible TV and the Blachelorette”, Madi Day, Tully De Vries, Amy LF, and Brooke Scobie take up Bronwyn Carlson’s (2016) theorisation of Indigenous humour as a technology to make sense of a world impacted by coloniality in a discussion of Blak queer millennial cultures and reality TV. The word Blak is a reclaiming of the term Black from English as a colonising language used by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The article is a conversation between the hosts of the Trash Tiddas podcast Tully, Amy, and Brooke and Madi who is a listener. The conversation revolves around Season 7 of the Bachelorette Australia (2021) where Brooke Blurton was the first Blachelorette—a Blak, queer Bachelorette. Tiddas is an Aboriginal English word that describes and claims Blak women, femmes, and effeminate people. Season 1 of Trash Tiddas began focused on the Blachelorette; however, its scope rapidly widened to include many elements of popular culture and Blak millennial life including regular anecdotes from the hosts’ own lives as Blak queer women. The article describes a kind of insider culture for Blak queer people and women that is staunchly opposed to gentility and colonial gender norms. Discussing Aboriginal participation in and consumption of reality TV, the authors articulate a desire for more transgressive representation. They compare reality TV representation of Aboriginal women and queer people to streaming series created by Blak millennials and note how rigid colonial impositions on gender and sexuality are challenged in the latter. The authors observe a Blak renaissance of alternative media content that runs alongside a deep investment in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation on mainstream Australian TV.

Sarah Demekech Graham applies a Black Studies lens to the post-racial settler imaginary in the USA in “Ozark matters: implications about Black lives”. Dissecting the crime drama series Ozark, she focuses on the intricate coding of Black masculinity onto White female character, Ruth Langmore. Utilising sound, media, and literary analysis, Graham excavates Black symbolism imposed onto Ruth which ultimately foreshadows her death. She situates Ruth in a broader American history of Blackface and using language and performance to nebulously superimpose Blackness onto White actors. Graham also utilises Regina Bradley’s (2014) work in sound studies on the use of hip hop sonics and aesthetics to invoke Blackness even where it is absent in American popular media particularly where a White character is embodying a moment of living dangerously or rebelliously. Highlighting Ruth’s personality which is closely associated with defiance, poverty, and criminality, physical attributes including her short cropped curly hair, enjoyment of rap music, and fashion including a Tupac t-shirt and hoodies, Graham maps how Blackness is overlayed onto Ruth’s otherwise white body. She also discusses the association of hoodies with Black death noting the significance of this item of clothing in George Zimmerman’s decision to murder Trayvon Martin. Graham demonstrates how 90’s hip hop is used through Ruth’s trajectory in Ozark to associate her with themes of aspiration and doom present in lyrics from Tupac, Nas, and Notorious B.I.G. Ruth’s sonic and visual coding with Blackness ultimately culminates in a scene where she meets rapper Killa Mike and his crew. Graham closely follows the intensification of these associations showing how Blackness is operationalised to lead audiences to accept Ruth’s death.

In “Indigenous knowledge and creativities online: Tiktok as a relational tool within the Indigenous art process”, Dylan Barnes explores the use of TikTok as an audio-visual medium. They begin by describing the Aboriginal concept of relationality—a philosophy of total interconnectedness shared across cultures from the so-called Australian continent (Graham, 2014). Relationality underpins all ways of Indigenous knowing, doing and being, and storytelling, dance and other artistic practices are a way of doing and continuing relationality through knowledge sharing. Relationships with other Indigenous people as well as relationships with time, space, and place are also fundamental to the living theory and practice of relationality. Barnes argues that although social media technologies are fraught for Indigenous peoples, they are also important tools of relational practice for Indigenous artists. Contrary to Western thinking, they explain, Aboriginal art is much more than finished products that can be bought or sold. Instead, Barnes articulates Aboriginal art as an extension and continuation of ancestral, community, and cultural knowledges and as an ongoing story of relations between the artist(s), their human and non-human ancestors, and viewers of the work or process. Barnes shares four non-linear stages of their own process as a Wiradjuri (a First Nations people, Central New South Wales, Australia) artist to demonstrate how this occurs. Then, examining TikTok’s made by other Aboriginal artists, they demonstrate how TikTok is a tool integrated into these four stages of process as both a medium and a tool for connection and knowledge transfer. In this way, Barnes asserts, TikTok can be used as relational tool for Aboriginal artists, particularly in its capacity to expand and extend relations and knowledges across time and space.

This special issue concludes with Andrew Farrell’s “Love letter to drag”. In this heartfelt letter, Farrell addresses drag as a mutating and expanding global cultural phenomenon post RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009–). Farrell speaks of growing through drag’s entry into the mainstream and the profound impact of Drag Race as a television series on them as a young Aboriginal trans and queer artist. They also comment on the erroneous conflation of trans and drag in mainstream media and on the rising levels of hostility to drag that are based in transphobia. They incisively restate that trans is who you are, drag is what you do. Farrell argues that widespread reactionary violence to drag runs along the same timeline as drag’s entry into public consciousness. The transphobic and homophobic oversexualisation of drag performers in banal circumstances like public readings in libraries, they contend, is punishment for queerness exhibiting unapologetically in the everyday colonial realm. They contrast this to their familial and cultural life as a Wodi Wodi (a First Nations people, South Coast New South Wales, Australia) person where drag is not just a spectacular moment but part of a joyful and connected quotidian existence. Farrell’s letter is a throwback to their article “Lipstick Clapsticks: A yarn and a Kiki with an Aboriginal drag queen” (Farrell, 2016) in AlterNative’s 2016 special issue (Harris & Carlson, 2016).

The articles in this special issue are by majority Indigenous women and transgender people who are also Blak or Black and who are from or situated in the Southern Hemisphere. They offer subversive and transformative interventions to academic, political, and digital landscapes that, although increasingly inclusive of diverse representation, are dominated by settlers occupying North America. The way the English language is used varies in each of these articles. The word Blak, for instance, comes from Kriol (variations of English creole spoken by Aboriginal people across the northern Australian continent as well as the Torres Strait Islands) and was adapted for wider use by Mer (a Torres Strait First Nation) and K’ua K’ua (a First Nation, Cape York, Queensland) artist, Destiny Deacon (Munro, 2020). Angela Matthews’ article incorporates Tok Pisin (an English creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea). Aboriginal English (the most widely spoken Aboriginal language in Australia comprised of words from multiple Aboriginal languages as well as Australian English) is also used throughout. A central value of Aboriginal English is to talk straight or speak plainly and directly with unabashed use of expletives for expression and emphasis (Heiss, 2003). Thus, for cultural integrity, we have not sensitised any expletives in this special issue.

As a descendent of Harris and Carlson (2016) guest-edited special issue of AlterNative, this special issue carries forward a tradition of presenting and examining contemporary cultural artefacts through varying Indigenous worldviews. The significance of Indigenous popular culture and digital leisure can be felt throughout this special issue through the use of language and representation as well as different kinds of media and technology as both personally and politically relevant. Underpinning the analyses in these articles are distinct Indigenous ontologies informing stories, theories, connection, and creativity resisting settler colonial dominance and imperialist expansion, and also contributing to vibrant living cultures of enjoyment, pleasure, and solidarity among Indigenous peoples. They are windows into Indigenous cultural and digital life. Almost 8 years after AlterNative’s 2016 special issue (Harris & Carlson, 2016), Indigenous popular culture and digital leisure are still dynamic, innovative, and quotidian elements of Indigenous cultures which are simultaneously continuous and produced in the everyday.