B&T travelled to Karasjok in northern Norway, well inside the Arctic Circle, as part of the Australian delegation to the annual World Indigenous Broadcasters Network (WIBN) conference. What we heard there was the most convincing account of institutional change going anywhere in media right now. This is the first of two dispatches. Part two: what the network actually built, and the line from the set of Chief of War.
Reindeer outside. An Arctic sun that can’t decide when to set. And a room of Indigenous broadcasters from four continents comparing notes on the thing our industry talks about endlessly and almost never builds.
Karasjok sits in Sápmi, the homeland of the Sámi people, which stretches across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. It has its own parliament, its own languages and its own broadcaster in NRK Sápmi, which is marking 80 years on air this year and hosting the conference.
WIBN itself has been going since 2008, a global alliance of Indigenous broadcasters that meets annually to share content, ideas and hard-won lessons. NITV is a founding member. The membership runs from APTN in Canada to Whakaata Māori in Aotearoa, Taiwan Indigenous Television and Hakka TV, and the Sámi services across the Nordics. Last year’s gathering was in Taiwan.
APTN’s news and current affairs boss Cheryl McKenzie framed the day’s real subject almost in passing. You know the pattern. The national broadcaster approaches the Indigenous broadcaster, agrees the Indigenous broadcaster must be involved, then takes the lead anyway. Her correction was a single word. We are rights holders in this conversation, not stakeholders.
The Australian in the room made the strongest case for what that looks like in practice.
Tanya Denning-Orman took the stage at the World Indigenous Broadcasters Network’s internal conference on Monday, a year into a job that didn’t exist before her. SBS created the director, First Nations role in early 2025 and handed the proud Birri and Guugu Yimidhirr woman an enterprise-wide mandate. No blueprint came with it.
Her first instinct was the one most of us default to. Influence. Persuade. Bring people with you.
It didn’t work.
“When change is not embedded into the way an organisation works, people naturally return to the structures they already know,” she told the room. The easier way. Every executive who has watched a transformation programme quietly revert to business as usual will recognise that sentence.
There were lonely stretches, and moments when pushing the work put her professionally at risk. Underneath sat something harder. After 30 years in media she still sometimes caught herself asking permission to occupy space she’d already been given. Her distinction was between humility and permission. Culture teaches you responsibility and accountability. It does not require you to shrink the authority you’ve been handed.
So she stopped asking and rebuilt the plumbing. She calls it a mandate with machinery. Early engagement, decision rights, escalation, real accountability, Elders alongside her, cultural authority baked into the process rather than consulted once the decisions are made. Not another advisory function. Not a seat at the table that vanishes when the person who offered it takes a job somewhere else.
The numbers, one year on: First Nations content consumption across SBS approaching 30 million hours, up 25 per cent year-on-year, with more than half of that television consumption happening outside NITV. Embedding First Nations leadership across the whole network didn’t hollow out the dedicated channel. It made NITV harder to contain.
Two of her lines belong on a wall somewhere. Goodwill is not infrastructure. And: don’t make resilience the ambition. Her people have been resilient for generations. She’s spent a career learning to navigate difficult terrain. Now she wants to change the terrain.
What falls off the schedule
The host supplied the sharpest illustration of why proximity to power matters, and it was three days old.
WIBN chair Shane Taurima had opened the conference by acknowledging the death of King Harald V and extending the network’s condolences to the Royal Family and the people of Norway. The room is guesting on Sámi land while the country mourns.
NRK Sápmi sits inside the Norwegian public broadcaster rather than fighting to stay outside it, news editor Mariela Idivuoma explained. Their director sits alongside NRK’s senior leadership. That’s not a given. Generations worked to make it one.
Then on Friday, the King died. NRK’s news leadership convened to rebuild the television schedule, as every broadcaster in the country did. And the Sámi-language news programmes had simply vanished from it.
Not malice. Just absence, in the churn of a national event. Someone had to notice and ask where they’d gone. Someone was in the room to ask.
Taiwan’s long way round
Hakka TV’s Paul Shiang came at it from the commercial end. Cultural preservation was losing younger audiences, so Hakka TV looked at the reach of the Korean wave and asked whether Korean creators could be the bridge.
Hakka Kitchen is the result. Three seasons, K-pop casting including Super Junior’s Leeteuk and Girls’ Generation, distribution through TVING in Korea and LiTV in Taiwan. The rules were strict. No culture as gimmick, exchange running both ways rather than export, and an audience that comes for character chemistry and absorbs the rest without noticing. Make culture felt, not taught, as Shiang put it. Season three moves the cast into century-old village homes to farm, cook over firewood and share three meals a day, because he wasn’t going to let Hakka culture flatten into costume.
His hardest lesson came after season one and had nothing to do with production. The Korean side still didn’t understand why the Hakka elements were in the format. Start much earlier, he said. Not with logistics. With teaching your partner who you are.
Taiwan Indigenous Television’s Alang Galavangang widened it further. Indigenous media isn’t broadcasting, he argued. It’s the work of rebuilding relationships — with language, with land, between generations, and between Indigenous peoples who have spent most of history unable to reach each other.
Canada’s three cents
APTN chief executive Monika Ille brought the least glamorous case study and possibly the most useful. Four broadcast feeds consolidated into two, one upgraded to HD and given over entirely to Indigenous-language programming, funded by a three-cent increase on mandatory carriage that the CRTC approved. APTN Languages launched in September 2024 and reaches around nine million households.
The scheduling solve is elegant. Seventy-plus Indigenous languages, multiple time zones, one channel, so APTN made the programming follow the sun. The day opens in Mi’kmaq and Wolastoqey, moves through Inuktitut, crosses the prairies in Plains Cree, Michif and Blackfoot, and goes to sleep in BC languages including Squamish.
Then take the seat
WIBN chair and Whakaata Māori chief executive Shane Taurima, who opened the day and threaded through it, arrived from the opposite direction. Years as a news reporter watching his communities covered badly by people who didn’t look or sound like them. Two options: keep watching, or go and sit where the decisions get made. He put down the microphone and went after an executive career.
The afternoon turned talk into work. A news-sharing workshop run by NITV general manager Dan Bourchier. A co-production workshop run by APTN’s Mike Omelus. And an idea carried in by NITV commissioning head Dena Curtis — Bamay, a 60-hour global Indigenous knowledge series built from contributions across the network. By the time the room was finished with it, it had a working title of its own.
Our industry spends a fortune chasing cultural relevance. This room is quietly proving it was a governance problem all along.
Tomorrow: what the workshops produced, why a Hawaiian farmer twice said no to Jason Momoa, and the question about AI that nobody in the room could answer.
