‘Welcome to a Coronavirus production’: Beyond Bows and Arrows’ Indigenous on-air community-building during lockdown

Abstract

This article examines intertribal community-building in Indigenous-produced radio show Beyond Bows and Arrows, broadcast since 1983 in Dallas, Texas, and explores ways in which on-air Indigenous articulations function as acts of resurgence in turn reinforcing an Indigenous internationalism. In this critical exploration, I draw on Beyond Bows and Arrows (BBAA) content broadcast between April and June 2020. I analyse components of the radio sound text such as in-studio talk; discussion topics; music selection and verbal segues; and station-produced informational Public Service Announcements (PSAs); and identify recurring preoccupations over three months of weekly programming during the pandemic's first lockdown. In particular, I consider BBAA's foregrounding of pandemic protocols, calls for Census 2020 participation and Black Lives Matter solidarity at the start of the unsettled yet generative 2020 summer and examine how these articulations coalesce into an on-air structure of feeling which in turn embodies the show's ongoing decolonizing project.