Inuit Broadcasting Corporation

The Inuit Broadcasting Corporation (IBC) is a television broadcasting company based in Nunavut. Its programming is targeted at the Inuit population of Nunavut and almost all of its programs are broadcast in Inuktitut. Select programs are also broadcast in English. In contrast with traditional commercial television broadcasting companies, IBC shows centre on Inuit culture. The company has five production centres in various places in Nunavut, all staffed by Inuit. Founded in the early 1980s, the IBC was the first Native language television network in North America.

Television was first introduced to the north through CBC’s frontier coverage package, which allowed the delivery of southern videotaped programming to twenty-one northern communities. There was no northern content: CBC’s priority at that time was to extend its southern coverage area into the north, not to develop a northern-based service for northerners.

It is difficult to gauge the impact that the sudden introduction of southern broadcast services had on language, culture and day-to-day life in the traditional settlements of the Arctic. Some communities, such as Igloolik, initially voted to refuse television through a series of hamlet plebiscites, fearing irreversible damage to their lifestyle. Many national and regional Aboriginal organizations voiced the same fear, and insisted that native people had the right to define and contribute to any broadcast service distributed in their homelands.

The newly formed Inuit Tapirisat of Canada was determined that Inuit would not become just a new market for existing southern services in English and French: they insisted that communities should be permitted to define their own communications environment, and that Inuit should be able to contribute to the Canadian broadcasting system in a significant way. One of ITC’s first major policy statements called on the federal government to ensure Inuit control over the expansion of radio-telephone, community radio, videotape, and newspaper services into the Arctic.

In 1978, the federal Department of Communications (DOC) launched a program to test satellite applications, using the newly launched Anik B satellite. One area of particular interest to the government was the potential application of satellite technology to enable production and distribution of programming in the Arctic. The Inuit Tapirisat of Canada recognized an opportunity, and launched the Inukshuk Project.

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