Navigating NDN youth networks: Media interventions among Aboriginal youth in Winnipeg

Aboriginal media offers a viable alternative to Aboriginal gang life largely because Native media employs the same principles for communication that inform Aboriginal gang practice. Rather than individual advancement, both aspire to bring people together in physical space. The history of constraints placed on Aboriginal peoples’ capacities to assemble in public is part of what informs the collectivizing goals of Aboriginal gangs and of Aboriginal communications agencies more generally. Both provide critically important contact zones, where diverse interest groups gather to negotiate, to perform and to exchange ideas about contemporary Aboriginality and Aboriginal youth experience. Media spaces, however, unlike gang turf, create pro-social discursive space for the discussion and contemplation of Aboriginal ways of engaging in the world. The Aboriginal films that circulate through the film festival circuit, for example, address themes that are sometimes difficult to discuss, such as bullying, solvent abuse and suicide.