Indigenous Livestreaming in Brazil

Abstract

This chapter explores how livestreaming is a means to advocate for Indigenous rights and seeks to understand how Indigenous communal organizing is disseminated to distant others, focusing on researchers. Using video data analysis (VDA), it empirically explores a livestream on Instagram by the Huni Kuin showing a food distribution program. The key findings show that livestreams have both epistemological insights and rifts regarding the information that can be gained from distant witnessing. It argues that indigenous streaming is a positive, however, it's vital to remain reflexive as researchers when examining Indigenous livestreams. It postulates that we should understand streams as a form of witnessing rather than observation and sets out best practices for conducting empirical research on them. It conceptualizes a methodology for cataloguing livestreams by expanding on VDA and amalgamating it with critical auto-ethnographic reflections as a distant researcher. It concludes we should be sharing spaces as solidarity witnesses, and provision testimony in a form of knowledge transfers.