Author Archives: sara segovia rocha

Anishinaabe artist creates Turtle Island emoji to celebrate National Indigenous History Month in Canada

Designing a pictograph that can represent the broad diversity of Indigenous people is a very complex task that requires to be cautious in regards to stereotype constructions and that can encompass the different Indigenous communities across the country. However, Chief Lady Bird, an Anishinaabe artist based in Toronto who is from Rama First Nation and Moosedeer Point First Nation, designed an emoji that differs to such stereotypes and the typical lens through which many people view Indigeneity.

“It’s important to note that I don’t believe that one symbol can represent the vastness of Indigenous people. Every nation, every language group, every clan, every individual indigenous person has a distinct story & it would be unfair to ever imply that we fall under one category.”

The depiction of a turtle, tree and the sun represents Turtle Island, “which is the English name of the continent of North America as translated from a number of native languages.”
This emoji was designated to commemorate National Indigenous History Month; and as Jenniffer Hollett, Head of News, Twitter Canada emphasized: “The emoji designed by Chief Lady Bird and related hashtags recognize and celebrate powerful Indigenous voices and movements on Twitter”.
This digital representation expresses an initiative of cultural activism for Indigenous representation through social media where the wider public can connect and have access to Indigenous perspectives.

https://globalvoices.org/2018/06/04/anishinaabe-artist-creates-turtle-island-emoji-to-celebrate-national-indigenous-history-month-in-canada/

Sesenta y Ocho Voces (Sixty-eight Voices)

These multimedia collection presents various animated Indigenous stories that have been narrated in their origin native language. Based on the premise “Nobody can love what they don’t know”, these productions have the purpose of fostering respect, pride and promote a sense appreciation and value to indigenous languages in Mexico between speaker and non-speakers. In a sense, the digital story-telling developed in this project entails an expression of a cultural self-reflection that provokes a reconstruction of our identity as a Mexican mestizo society that is embedded to Indigeneity roots.

https://68voces.mx/

Imperfect media and the poetics of indigenous video in Latino America

Francisco Salazar and Amalia Córdova elaborate a reflection about the Poetics of Indigenous media, meaning by Poetics active making or the process of making, locating self- representation at the center of Indigenous Media. They examine self-representation in Indigenous media as a process and product, which they think it is mainly characterized as an Imperfect media. This notion of imperfect media responds in a constructive way for “the Eurocentric foundations implicit in many of the Latin America cultural and creative industries” (Salazar, J. F., & Córdova, 2008) and calls for the decolonization of Indigenous media practice. Meanwhile, the complex processes of self- representation through Indigenous video-making and media is becoming an independent field of cultural production made by and for Indigenous people, there is a constant need to empower these communities and filmmakers to manage and self-determine the guidepost of their own purposes.

Reference
Salazar, J. F., & Córdova, A. (2008). chapter 1 imperfect media and the poetics of indigenous video in Latin America. Global indigenous media: Cultures, poetics, and politics, 39.

The Right to be cold

“It´s not just the Arctic ice, which recedes every year. Just as irreplaceable as is the culture, the wisdom that has allowed the Inuit to thrive in the far North for so long.” (Watt-Cloutier, 2015)

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a highly recognized environmental and human rights advocate, shares her story who as an Inuk woman had raised her voice to explain how climate change is a human right issue that concerns to everyone. In her book “the Right to be Cold”, Watt-Cloutier expressed the connection between the Arctic climate changes and the survival of Inuit culture among resilience and commitment to their land. I found this book very inspiring and valuable to understand how Inuit and other Indigenous traditional education is responsive to the natural world.

https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/the-right-to-be-cold-1.3969500

Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change

Here is a presentation of the Inuktitut language film: Inuit Knowledge and Land. This film is an approximation to Inuktitut´s land that explores the social and ecological impacts of Climate Change in the Arctic.
This film helps us to appreciate Inuit culture and expertise regarding environmental change and indigenous ways of adapting to it.

http://www.isuma.tv/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change/movie

Digital Technology Innovation in Education in Remote First Nation

A study that explores how digital technology is supporting the decolonization of education and local languages in remote First Nations communities in Northwest Ontario. This article is relevant to understand the implications of online learning in northern Indigenous communities and how these remote locations create challenges and educational opportunities for language revitalization and decolonization. Points out that First Nation leaders and elders are aware of how digital technology can be a “double-edged sword” as they try to balance the changes introduced by these technologies.
How are the people living in five remote KO First Nations using digital technologies for learning new skills? And, what have been their experiences with these opportunities, and what are their perspectives on digital technology in the community? These questions explore digital technologies as new means of self-representation in regards to the reality of such communities.

https://ineducation.ca/ineducation/article/view/266/847

Chiapas Media Project

One of the very few organizations in Mexico that work in collaboration with indigenous communities to produce their own media, which has been a space mostly developed by the Autonomous Zapatista communities to tell their own stories, in their own languages and from their own perspectives. It is interesting to see the differences in media representations made by outsiders and indigenous communities in Mexico; indigenous people tend to “portray themselves as survivors involved in the next level of struggle and resistance to neocolonialism and globalization” (Halkin, 2008) in contrast to corporate media that promotes a view of Zapatistas as armed “guerrillas” interested in power.
The extensive documentation of the Zapatista Indigenous communities includes videos on women’s collectives, agricultural collectives, traditional healing, autonomous education, and the history of their struggle for land, which presents an example of indigenous resistance for other indigenous communities in Southern Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiapas_Media_Project

The Politics and Poetics of Digital Indigeneity in Latin America

This post addresses some of the issues that had been raised in the previous modules, in relation to the nature of media constructions and the difference that technology makes to the concept of indigeneity itself, in the context of indigenous communities in Latin America.
It remarks the tension in indigenous self-representation online and what mainstream society expect from them, which is related to the determination from some media to ‘indigenize the internet by filtering concepts and practices through the lens of a ‘recognizable’, ‘traditional’ indigeneity” (Thea Pitman, 2017). The author emphasizes that he is not identifying this as a weakness, instead “it is a strategically essentializing tendency in indigenous self-representation” (Thea Pitman, 2017).

The Politics and Poetics of Digital Indigeneity in Latin America

Post 9: Outside the indigenous lens: Zapatistas and Autonomous Videomaking

In the early 1990´s, a Mayan Indigenous organization based in Chiapas, Mexico, declared war on the Mexican Government, demanding work, land, housing, food, health, education, independence, liberty, democracy, justice, and peace. This social movement was an eye-opening event for both the Mexican government and the non-indigenous population to realize the alarming situation of indigenous people in Chiapas. It was due to the production of their own media how the Zapatistas got the local and international attention that was needed as an agent of change; by using the Internet to broadcast their cause to the world and producing videos for internal community use and local circulation.
This article raises some questions related to the different manifestations between media produced by indigenous communities and corporate media where the mainstream bias vary.

Halkin, A. (2008). chapter 8 outside the indigenous lens: Zapatistas and autonomous videomaking. Global indigenous media: Cultures, poetics, and politics, 160.

Post 8: Latin America: The Internet and Indigenous Texts

An interesting article that addresses the challenges and potentials that indigenous people in Latin America face with the Internet and other communication technologies. Also, it examines how indigenous people are impacted by these technologies and how it functions differently from indigenous communities in countries in the north.

https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/latin-america-internet-and-indigenous-texts