How A Bunch of People Who Didn’t Know They Couldn’t Created a National TV Network

In five days the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network celebrates the tenth anniversary of its first broadcast. For a lot of folks, APTN is just another specialty channel, usually way up there on the dial, something you flip past on your way to HBO.

But it’s a lot more than that. APTN, to me, is one of the most amazing stories in Canadian broadcasting – the fruition of thirty years of lobbying, policy development, and legislation, driven by a crazy alliance of First Nations filmmakers, Inuit broadcasters, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, media people, and journalists – at least three of whom are regulars here at Stageleft.

By pure luck and timing, I got to watch and take part in some of the story. So here’s one guy’s version of a piece of broadcasting history that deserves to be better known.

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The north escaped TV for a long time simply because until three decades ago there was no easy way to get programming up there. In the late sixties the CBC began shipping videotapes north to larger settlements, and these were broadcast on low power local transmitters for the benefit of local teachers, nurses, Bay employees and RCMP stationed in the communities. Inuit, by and large, couldn’t afford TVs, and didn’t much care.

The Anik A-1 satellite changed all that. Suddenly you could feed TV signals right across the country. In 1974, Federal government approved a plan to extend CBC radio and television services to all rural and remote communities with populations of over 500. Some territorial and provincial governments provided programs to complete coverage to smaller communities.

At this point a number of communities began to take notice. The newly formed Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, in particular, began to get a little worried about this wholesale introduction of southern programming into the Inuit north -especially since there were no media in the Inuit language to counterbalance it. Tagak Curley, the first President of ITC, likened the introduction of TV to the north to a cultural invasion. “In war, it’s the communications system that gets attacked first,” he said. “If we’re fighting to keep our language and culture alive, that’s what we need to take back.”

It’s difficult to imagine being the majority population in a community or a territory where every scrap of programming is in English, a foreign language. Your kids speak that new language better than you do, and they’re now explaining the world to you. What you see, what you know, what you’ve lived all your life doesn’t exist on that TV screen. Your world has no value.

Some communities just said “no”. Igloolik simply voted not allow television to be broadcast in their settlement for more than a decade.

ITC decided this was a priority, and got agreement among the communities on some broad goals. First of all they wanted Inuit in the communities to be able to choose what was going to be on air in their communities, up to and including the option of not receiving any television service at all. And second, they wanted Inuit to have access to distribution systems and to programming that was made by Inuit and relevant to Inuit. Not Eyewitness News from Detroit, or the CBC, or the National Film Board – but programming by Inuit, for Inuit.

It was an interesting time, socially and politically. A new generation of educated, bilingual, and politicized leadership was emerging in northern and southern Aboriginal circles; the federal government was beginning to invest in programs to support social and cultural development; and new technology made low cost production and transmission of video programming much more accessible. In 1973, the Department of the Secretary of State established the Native Communications Program (NCP) to fund Aboriginal media projects.
The National Film Board sponsored a series of animation workshops in Cape Dorset, and began working with northern writers and producers. CBC hired and trained a number of Aboriginal staff, focusing initially on radio.

A couple of specific projects accelerated the change. In 1976 ITC ran a community television workshop in Pond Inlet, and participants started talking about the ways you could use a local broadcast system…things like town hall meetings, or language instruction, or elders stories. And under the Native Communications Program, a training and production group in Iqaluit called Nunatsiaqmiut began producing short, very good films and showing them on CBC. They began with local vignettes, cultural profiles, and eventually branched out into some very weird and wonderful dramas, including a memorable Inuktitut horror-science fiction thriller.

All of these elements…political will, growing northern interest in media, and new technology…came together in 1978. The federal Department of Communications launched the Anik B Program, which provided funding for two Inuit television production projects…one in the NWT, managed by ITC and called the Inukshuk Project, and one in Nunavik managed by Taqramiut Nipingat Inc.

That’s when I first got involved. I was working in Eastern Ontario as a combination producer/director/community animator, looking for ways to use video as a tool for social development. One day I got a call from two folks from ITC who wanted to talk about the feasibility of low-budget studios in a series of small Arctic settlements. We had a great chat, and the next day I got a phone call asking me whether I would be interested in traveling north to do a short workshop for a group of trainees. Of course I said yes, flew to Frobisher Bay, delivered an intense week’s worth of training in the “studio”, a decrepit former classroom where you could reach up and adjust the studio lights without even standing on tiptoes – people were in constant danger of having their hair singed.

I was overwhelmed, as everyone is on that first exposure. As is usually the case, I learned more than I was able to teach. This was what I had been trying to do in the south…trying to find ways to use video as a tool for achieving some kind of social goal. Inukshuk struck me as the best use of video I had ever seen.

The Inukshuk project linked six communities: Iqaluit, Pond Inlet, Igloolik, Baker Lake, Arviat, and Cambridge Bay. The setup was pretty primitive by today’s standards. You could send video and audio out from Iqaluit, and dishes were installed so that the signal could be received locally in the remaining five communities. Audio was fed back from the communities to the studio in Iqaluit by phone line.

The time available was virtually unlimited. And the first rule of design was: forget “television”. Inukshuk programming didn’t have to look anything like television. We can send sound and pictures out of Iqaluit to these communities, and we can get sound back. So how can we use this?

As it turned out, there were a lot of ways. Volunteer fire departments across the territory used the system to hold a territorial meeting to talk about new firefighting techniques and equipment. There were community discussions about what was happening in land claim, and what was happening with the division of Nunavut. Inuit leaders came on air in front of their constituents and talked about what was happening at ITC and in the regions. At Christmas all the kids at Ukkivik residence came down to the studio and talked to their families, who could actually see that they were okay. It didn’t look much like television, and that was a good thing. The Inukshuk project was about giving this tool to the community. The producers were primarily technical facilitators. Their job wasn’t to produce smooth, packaged events and programming: their job was to come up with ways that the community could use this tool. And they did a brilliant job.

Next: The Eighties and the Distribution Dilemma.