Caption: Indigenous dancers from the Mapuche tribe in Chile dance for a Colombian delegation to New Zealand following a government to government agreement for to move towards a Free Trade Agreement.
Indigenous media from the west coast of North, Central and South America are being added to MediaPasifika, a Pacific Rim interactive database developed by a New Zealand company to move towards complete Pacific Rim indigenous coverage.
Wellington-based Netmedia runs a suite of interactive media databases which it markets globally. But it first developed MediaNZonline (now owned by iSentia) and has been able to use this successful platform to create MediaPasifika, which contains all the print, radio, television and internet media from Guam to the Cook Islands, as well as Maori, Samoan and Tongan media in New Zealand and Australia, where Native Australian newspapers, radio stations, television links, and internet media are of course in place.
Subsequently media databases were researched for Russia and East Europe, the English language media in Asia, and Brazil — a first step to expand in Latin America.
‘MediaPasifika brings together indigenous communities over this huge area’ says publisher David Reade. It encourages them to get their voices heard. And it’s just as important in reverse: a message can go out to all Polynesians — Maori, Samoans, Tongans — wherever there is a community with a publication, a radio or television station, bloggers or users of other social media. You could use it to talk to all the Native Australians, or the Melanesians in Fiji and New Caledonia.
‘Now by spreading the net wider we can include the Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, for example, the Kogi in Columbia and Inuits in Alaska — working towards including all the indigenous and ethnic voices from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
‘Indigenous people throughout the area have more in common with each other than with their colonial era immigrant populations’ he says.
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