Mediating Maoritanga: Film, Television, and Indigenous Sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealan

This dissertation is an ethnographically grounded academic exploration into contemporary Maori media production in New Zealand. I examine how film and television production create, negotiate, and sustain Indigenous subject formation, reclaim Maori political and cultural agency, and contest state-legislated identities, and how this has become a series of practices of international import and influence. I consider how multiple media technologies, from radio to television to broadband, are paired with linguistic ideologies to encourage the revitalization of the Maori language among particular demographics in New Zealand. In this way, my objective is to conceptualize media technologies as tools by which Maori subjects can produce alternate objectifications of themselves in ways that subvert national narratives, create an Indigenous counter-public sphere, and claim native media sovereignty.