Copyright © Tatiana Cardeal. All rights reserved.
Reprodução proibida. © Todos os direitos reservados.
I took this portrait at the VII Indigenous Festival, 2007, where for the first time I was working beside a Kuikuro and a Xavante videomaker, a Karaja photographer and a Yudja sound recorder. Documenting the Festival since 2005, this was the first time that I've worked with a group of Indigenous People documenting their own Festival, and this certainly means a strong cultural change.
I usually show links (at the right column of this Blog) for other Natives Blogs and websites, and they have been increasing fast.
Soon, I hope they will be able to show to the world their own productions and finally their own vision of history, something that is really missed in Brazil. They will also be able to develop more structures to defend themselves and their autonomy.
Here goes some interesting information (sorry, it's my translation) from the USP website (University of Sao Paulo), wrote originally by Francisco Angelo, about the seminar that is starting tomorrow, the II Mídias Nativas (II Native Media), that will join Indigenous cultural producers, professors and media cultural producers from communities, living at the periphery and inequality of Sao Paulo:
"To create a site or blog showing his life or produce a short video and placed it on the web are now more than common practice for most young people of large Brazilian cities. But what we would say if it was done by bloggers and videomakers from indigenous communities of the Amazon or Canada? There are these processing experiments possible by new communication technologies that will be presented at the second edition of the Native Media, seminar which will be held in Sao Paulo between days 25 and March 27.
In the event, designed by the Research Center of Public Opinion in Contexts Digital (Cepop / Atopos) of the School of Communications and Arts (ECA) of USP, members of ethnic groups such as Guarani, Terena and Xavante will share their experiences media, which are the publication of books, production of radio programs within the villages and reach the digital production more explicit, such as CDs, Websites, Nets and blogs. Also will be present representatives of natives from Canada, where similar projects have been developed by the people Algonquines and Atikamekw.
"What is happening today is a revolution. It is the power of the press ", defines Massimo di Felice, a professor of ACE and one of the organizers of the meeting. For him, the new digital communication technologies represent an unprecedented experience for people before "invisible" as the locals: to be the protagonists of their own history. "For 500 in many years, the Indians in Brazil were the object of policies on the part of governments, FUNAI, NGOs. Today, with the help of the Internet, they have the opportunity to make direct diplomacy, without the intermediation of the organs and entities that tutelage. They even disclose their texts, their culture, and come in contact with international organizations, for example. "
Indigenous People and young population from the periphery
At the first Native Media, which occurred in 2006, several texts of indigenous authors then presented were gathered and published in Italy, in the form of the book Indiografia. This second edition of the event has broadened the issue of indigenous peoples also for the young people of the suburbs of large Brazilian cities, as Ronaldo Costa and Elieser Santos. They created the Canal do Motoboy, a virtual daily journal where motorcyclists write and publish photos generated by mobile phones on their day-to-day in the middle of the chaotic transit of Sao Paulo city.
For Di Felice, this is a clear signal that the role electronics that are changing indigenous people is a fact worldwide. "Today, any individual can produce their own content and make it available online for the whole world. This reverses the various models of communication classic which separated clearly an emitter, the 'owner' of the information, the receivers, "says Massimo.
Apart from the changes in culture communicative, Massimo also points to a qualitative change of citizenship. The web, he said, allows people who live in the same locality is aware, to organize themselves and, above all, create ways to act on the environment in which they live. "The digital culture is promoting an activism, with implications, I would say, for the explosive politics. People are going to have a relationship of direct action on its territory, without going through the traditional forms of authority. It is a production of a new form of citizenship, more collaborative and participatory, ".
