Shine-A-Light

In our first year as a network, Shine a Light recognized the need to address the growing number of indigenous children on the street, and the result was the groundbreaking Statel Stuk, our first digital workshop, and one of those that has garnered most attention on an international level. Over the last two years, we have received emails from tribal leaders all over Latin America who have heard of the Statel Stuk Project, either through indigenous networks or through our website, and all make the same comments: we are entering a moment of great crisis for indigenous children. At SAL, we had known about this crisis for children who migrate to cities, but local leaders made it clear that village children are facing the same problems.

Globalization bears a great promise for small indigenous groups, as we have seen by the ability of the Yanomami (Brazil), the Shaur (Ecuador), and U'wa (Colombia) to use the international press to draw attention to their struggles against violence and oppression. The strength of the indigenous movements of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chiapas - probably the most interesting line of political thought in Latin America today - also depends on global technology, video, blogs, and email. However, globalization also threatens indigenous cultures and people, especially their children: movies, television, and the internet provide role models from other cultures and the money economy undermines traditional relations of production and consumption.

In 1925, the Kuna Indians revolted against the oppressive government of Panamá, which had attempted to revoke their rights to a national language and culture. The Kunas were badly outgunned, and it appeared that they would lose both the revolution and their lives, when Chief Cimral Colman and other Kuna leaders saw how they could use power against itself. They told an American explorer, Richard Marsh, about the violence of the Panamanian government, and asked him to denounce it to the United States. The Kuna then kept watch on the US naval fleet, and when they saw several ships headed south (for an entirely different purpose), they sent a formal telegram of thanks, knowing that Panamá would intercept it as they had all previous communication. The Panamanian government, fearful that its northern neighbor was coming to attack, immediately signed a peace treaty with the Kunas, giving them a political autonomy that endures to this day.

Project 1925 will give indigenous children the tools they can use to turn global power against itself to gain autonomy, leveraging the strengths of indigenous communities and children into education, social change, and social inclusion. In 1925, the Kunas used political judo as their way to win independence, but indigenous children have something even more powerful: their stories.

In the section of this report about Project Pibe Quijote, we saw how the stories of poor and marginalized children can change both their own lives and the world. Project 1925 will use this same methodology with indigenous children, knowing that their experiences also embody the adventure lacking in the lives of most children. In an indigenous context, we will need to address several new challenges and fortify other strengths, but the results should be equally powerful.

Every culture develops strategies to educate its children, but Mike Feigelson's research for the Statel Stuk CD-ROM showed that government schools, urbanization, and changing economic needs have weakened these traditional educational methods. In Pibe Quijote, we will work with children whose education has been supplemented by the work of excellent NGOs, but such organizations are rare in indigenous groups. For that reason, we will need to research and strengthen lost or weakened ways of teaching, training educators while we work with children. Fortunately, this is one of SAL's strengths, and we have the Statel Stuk CD-ROM as a basis for the course.

Language issues may be a challenge. Though all of the leaders that have written me speak and write Spanish, this may not be true for children or many other adults. Techniques developed in Statel Stuk will be helpful, but we may need to dedicate more time to each project, or recognize that the results will be more limited.

According to several anthropologists that work in indigenous villages, “remote tribes” often have better internet connections than one finds in Latin American cities. We plan to use this connectivity to bring kids from distant groups into contact with each other, whether to exchange ideas, create art or stories, or simply become friends. As poor children in cities gain more connection to the internet, we should be able to generalize the techniques we learn in indigenous villages.

Projects will have a schedule that looks something like the following:

Week 1-2: Learning with and from the local community. Intensive training of local educators. Meeting and developing relationships with children

Week 3-4: Creating a team of child artists. Brainstorming about the sort of story they wan to tell and how they want to tell it. Training in the media they wish to use (computer, video, drawing, storytelling)

Weeks 5-11: Story development, editing, etc.

Week 12: Presentation of the project to the community. Critiques, evaluations, changes, ideas for publication

All ideas for publication will be carefully developed with the children, their parents, and indigenous leaders, making sure that all dissemination fulfills the will of all participants, distributes all profits justly, and can be called off by the participants at any time. There have been many conflicts between indigenous groups and people whom they believe want to exploit them, and we want to make all of this process as honest and transparent as possible.

We can anticipate several important results from this project.

Improving indigenous education by training educators, advising in the creation of new organizations, and strengthening traditional educational models.

Direct educational impact of work with indigenous children, helping them use art and writing to become protagonistas in their own lives and leaders in a more equal cultural exchange. We hope that children will continue to use the skills they have learned to tell more stories and to find a dignified place in the global economy.

Transforming public ideas about Indian groups by showing the richness of their culture and the genius of their children. The stories the children tell may emerge from important political struggles in which the children's families are involved, which should increase social solidarity with their cause.

Indigenous groups are some of the most marginalized and excluded groups in Latin America. Cultural exchanges through children's stories, movies, and the internet will help overcome this social exclusion, but on terms established by the indigenous people themselves. They will have the right to define who they are, supplanting the stereotyped portrayal of the international media

Contemporary anthropologists have shown the way that the category of “culture” has become a tool that indigenous groups use as their struggle for recognition and human rights, but most of this work has occurred on the level of formal diplomacy: lawsuits, treaties, economic contracts. Some indigenous groups have been able to use film as a powerful tool as well - the people of Nunavut, Canada, and the Vídeo nas Aldeias project in Brazil are two of the clearest examples - but Project 1925 will bring this tool to the level of popular education (“public diplomacy” might be the term from political science), allowing indigenous children to have the same impact on pubic opinion and individual human relations as tribal leaders have on formal legal structure. It brings together the best of Shine a Light with the strengths of indigenous communities to create a powerful political and educational synergy.