Indigenous Journalism in Ecuador: An Alternative Worldview

Indigenous communities have been using a variety of media as vehicles for internal and external communication for several decades in Ecuador. These include the development of radio, newspapers, blogs, websites, and social media production, in often precarious conditions, as a result of low or non-existent budgets. Much of the effort to analyze these developments in Ecuador has focused on community and intercultural media, ignoring the specificities of Indigenous media. This chapter considers Indigenous journalism as an emergent practice and form of communication that has played a significant role in Ecuador, directly confronting racist structures of corporate media and producing content based on collective community voices and Indigenous communication rituals. We examine the case of Red de Comunicadores Interculturales Bilingües del Ecuador (REDCI)/the Ecuadorian Network of Bilingual Intercultural Communicators, the first multimedia Indigenous news organization in Ecuador. To explore REDCI’s journalistic practices, we conducted ethnographic research and website content analysis in 2009–2011 and updated this with research into REDCI’s journalistic project in 2018–2019. Our main argument is that Indigenous journalists in Ecuador are creating counter-narratives to mainstream media, contributing to the empowerment of Indigenous peoples. The case of REDCI also makes it possible to rethink what it means to communicate from an Indigenous cosmovision, and in terms of who produces information, and how is it exchanged and circulated.