B&T travelled to Karasjok in northern Norway as part of the Australian delegation to the annual World Indigenous Broadcasters Network conference. Part one looked at how SBS’ Tanya Denning-Orman spent a year rebuilding the machinery. This is part two.
When Jason Momoa asked Kaina Makua to play Kamehameha in Chief of War, Makua said no.
Then he said it again.
He’s a Hawaiian farmer, teacher, father, coach, language advocate and community leader. The ledger was full. What eventually turned him wasn’t the profile or the paycheque, it was working out that telling the story was the same obligation he was already carrying. Kuleana. Responsibility. Hawaiians have spent a very long time having their stories told by other people.
So he took the job, and then he took the language with him. Handed English lines on an Apple set, he translated them into Hawaiian. Kept pushing. People around him started learning it.
“Language was chief on set.”
Park that line somewhere you’ll see it again.
Because the question in this room is no longer whether Indigenous stories can carry a global platform. That’s answered. The question is whether the language, the people and the cultural obligations get through the door with them, or whether they’re the thing you check at reception.
Twenty years to an overnight success
Stacey Aglok MacDonald walked the room through North of North, and the timeline did the work.
Twenty years ago she and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril were pitching Inuit stories to broadcasters and being asked why anyone else would care. So they stopped pitching. Made documentaries. Ran their own workshops when nobody would teach them what they needed. When no production company was offering the opportunity, they became the production company.
Two decades later the show is playing well beyond the Arctic, and it got there without sanding anything off. Shot in the North. Community in it. Screen full of contemporary Inuit life, humour, fashion, music. Modern, funny, commercial, theirs.
The note from international partners is the one to steal. It was almost never “make it less specific.” It was: be more specific. Audiences can lean in. They don’t need to understand everything by the first ad break.
And the audience she was most frightened of disappointing wasn’t in New York. It was home.
Nothing about us without us
Sápmi’s version is Oro Jaska — Shut Up — co-created by Vegard Bjørsmo and Silje Bürgin-Borch for NRK. Bjørsmo put the principle plainly: nothing about us without us. A writers’ room of young Sámi and queer voices telling hard stories from inside their own community instead of handing them to someone else to interpret.
He grew up in Karasjok. The series is set in Karasjok. It was pre-screened at the Karasjok community centre before it went to air. We are, at this moment, sitting in Karasjok.
The constraint didn’t shrink it. Six episodes, shot in 42 days, simulcast across NRK, YLE and SVT, and nominated for an International Emmy.
Hawai’i, the Arctic, Sápmi. Chair Shane Taurima’s read: cultural specificity isn’t the toll you pay to reach the world. It’s the asset.
What actually got built
Part one left the network’s two workshops mid-argument. Here’s where they landed.
A cross-network news group, with every member organisation represented, working on how newsrooms talk to each other, share journalism, supply translation and context, and cover stories affecting Indigenous peoples globally. NITV’s Dan Bourchier made the point that determines whether it survives contact with the day job. Those people need authority, time and backing. Not a line in the minutes.
And a co-production, proposed rather than merely mused about. NITV commissioning head Dena Curtis brought the idea in as Bamay; the workshop worked it over and came out the other side with a title that does more with one word. Why? Short films from each member on why particular traditions, protocols and harvests happen, and why knowledge gets carried from one generation to the next. Different peoples, different answers, one collection, aimed at the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples next year.
The network also grew. Taqramiut Nipingat Inc — “Voice of the North” — joins from Nunavik in northern Quebec. Founded in 1975, not-for-profit, a regional radio network plus TV production, broadcasting news, culture and community programming in Inuktitut across Nunavik and out to national and international audiences. Its brief: strengthen the language, carry traditional and contemporary culture, get Inuit youth into media, and make sure Inuit stories are told by Inuit, for Inuit. Fifty years of experience walking in the door.
The hardest question of the two days went unanswered, and probably should have. NRK Sápmi asked it: do Indigenous broadcasters build their own AI, or hand their data and knowledge to the major platforms so the systems millions of people already use carry something accurate about them? Ownership. Control. Accuracy. Cultural authority. And what happens to knowledge once it’s out of your hands.
No resolution. But a clear position from the chair: turning up after the systems are built to ask where you fit isn’t a strategy.
Speaking of the chair — Taurima steps down at the end of the year. A successor should be known within days.
The delegation now moves on to Kautokeino.
