Stories from and

Venezuela's Oscar Entry Speaks an Indigenous Language

  22 September 2015

“Gone with the River” by Mario Crespo is Venezuela's Oscar entry in the Best Foreign Language Film… https://t.co/XR8tzauaSU — Carlos Aguilar (@Carlos_Film) September 3, 2015 Lo que lleva el río (“Gone With the River”), from Cuban-Venezuelan filmmaker Mario Crespo Dauna, is a Venezuelan film shot almost entirely in Warao, the language...

Peruvian Ministry of Education Makes 24 Indigenous Alphabets Official

  19 June 2015

The alphabets of 24 indigenous languages were made official in Peru as a result of joint efforts by the Ministry of Education and numerous indigenous communities. The documents were adopted by consensus and will be used to help preserve and improve the use of these languages, both in their written and spoken forms. De ese modo, los...

Peru Sets Up First Bilingual Spanish-Awajun Civil Registrar

  24 May 2015

May 21 marks the National Day of Cultural and Linguistic Diverisity, and to commemorate the occasion, the Peruvian National Registrar of Identification and Civil Status (Reniec) launched the Awajun-Spanish bilingual civil registrar: Las actas generadas de esta manera tendrán el mismo valor oficial que las actas tradicionales en castellano, y...

Whooping Cough Epidemic Looms Over Nanti Children in Peru

  7 May 2015

The Nantis is one of the semi-nomadic communities that live in Peru. A part of them live in the townships in the upper Camisea river and the central area of the Timpía river. There are isolated families that live scattered in the upper Timpía river and the northern area of the...

Peruvian Web Users Take the #LanguageChallenge

  9 April 2015

International Mother Language Day was celebrated on February 21, as a commemoration of the right every nation has to keep its own language, a key element of cultural identification. In Peru, there are 47 native languages, spoken by about 4 million people. To mark the occasion, the Office of Indigenous...

Indigenous Activists Threatened and Attacked in El Cauca, Colombia

  19 March 2015

Several indigenous communities in Colombia continue to be victims of human rights violations and threats by paramilitary groups. Moreover, activists also report being attacked by public security forces and ESMAD, Colombia's mobile anti-riot squad, as exposed by Ama Pachamama in a Facebook post from March 11, 2015: […] A la fecha, se reportan...

Indigenous Tweets Highlight International Mother Language Day in Australia

  24 February 2015

Wamut,aka @kriolkantri on Twitter, and blogger of ten years, shared indigenous tweets on Storify: “February 21 is International Mother Language Day and this year, Australians showed off Aboriginal and Islander languages in a spectacular way and highlighted the amazing-yet-fragile linguistic diversity found across the continent”. Happy International #MotherLanguage Day! We're...

Documenting the Struggles of Papuans in Indonesia

  14 January 2015

Papuan Voices is a video advocacy initiative that highlights the struggles of the people of West Papua, a province of Indonesia. West Papua has been struggling to be an independent state although this conflict from Indonesia is not widely reported in the media.

COP20: Responsibilities of Capitalism On Climate Change

  29 December 2014

The 20th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and 10th session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP20/CMP10) was held in Lima between December 1 to 12, and was chaired by the...

Video: Amazon Indigenous Tribe Protests Hydroelectric Dam Construction

  8 December 2014

Indigenous people from the Munduruku ethnic group are fighting against the construction of the São Luiz do Tapajós dam in the state of Pará, Brazil. The dam will mean the flooding of 700,000 km2 in their homeland. The Brazilian Federal Government plans to build up to five dams in the Tapajós...

Recreating Life of Comechingon People

  21 November 2014

Villa de Merlo, in the province of San Luis, was home of one of many indigenous communities that settled in the territory of what we now know as the Republic of Argentina. Wenceslao Bottaro tells us about the Theme Park Yucat Land of Comechingones, which teach us about this culture:...