A Victoria community radio station is seeking pitches for Indigenous-focused radio documentaries for a new series.
Victoria Campus and Community Radio (CFUV) will provide a $600 honorarium, training and support for up to 16 one-hour documentaries produced by Indigenous people who live in the Capital Regional District.
The documentaries will be aired as part of CFUV’s Indigenous Radio Documentary Series.
Indigenous Programming Co-ordinator Cassidy Villebrun-Buracas, who is from the K’atl’odeeche First Nation and Métis, says the series was started as a way to “give power back” to Indigenous people in the media.
One idea that Villebrun-Buracas would like to see in a pitch is related to futurisms.
“Imagining different worlds beyond colonialism, different ways of seeing the world and understanding the world,” he says.
“Shifting the narrative from how Indigenous people relate to colonial structures but that imagines Indigenous peoples telling their own stories beyond that.”
The goal of the radio documentaries will be to explore Indigeneity through topics such as language, culture, storytelling, arts and politics.
Glen Swarnadhipathi, the station manager, says it’s part of a larger effort to give voice to the communities that have been historically underrepresented or misrepresented by mainstream media.
The documentary series is being supported by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.
“Our goal is for documentarians to create content by and for Indigenous, Métis, and Inuit peoples,” Swarnadhipathi says. “And to build skills, training, and capacity for Indigenous documentarians, present and future, to participate in media.”
The deadline to apply for the honorarium is Feb. 7 and the documentaries will be completed by mid-July.
