Asserting a distinctly Inuit concept of news: The early years of the Inuit broadcasting corporation's Qagik

Abstract

The Inuit of Canadian's Eastern Arctic created the Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) “to teach, to entertain and to inform with the images and the language of the North”; (Inuit Broadcasting Corporation, August, 1982, pp. vi, v). As part of its attempt to fulfill that task, IBC created Qagik, the first news and current events broadcast created by and for Inuit (the word by which people traditionally called Eskimos in the United States identify themselves). One of Qagik’s major tasks was to communicate information relevant to the North within the framework of the Inuit cultural system, as opposed to essentially becoming the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in drag. This article examines early Qagik productions to assess the extent to which IBC was able to develop a news program that reflected distinctly Inuit values in content and presentation. It concludes that a close examination of Qagik in those early years did reveal an assertion of Inuit ideas about news and the news media's role in society consonant with Inuit values and significantly different from those expressed in southern Canadian and U.S. newscasts. In this regard, Qagik was able to provide its audience with a vision of reality compatible with their culture and, through this, helped provide the opportunity for cultural and political reflexivity that might help enable the Inuit to preserve their cultural identity.

Key words:

• cultural adaptation
• cultural survival
• newsgathering
• reflexivity
• ritual and transmission models of communication
• social construction of news