New Transmedia Series Opens Lens on Ancestral Cultures
The Esperanza Project, with the collaboration of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Mongabay, The One Foundation and the SGE Foundation, has released a groundbreaking new bilingual transmedia series called Cosmology & Pandemic: What We Can Learn from Indigenous Responses to the Current Health Crisis. A joint project of the award-winning filmmaker and journalist duo […]
Cosmology & Pandemic is live!!! And making waves throughout the world
“You have accomplished the impossible! 30 communities with 14 film crews in remote locations in 6 different countries… to pull all of that together and deliver this important message is a feat of epic proportions.” “I am stirred deeply by the messages coming from these communities and individuals as they help us see the pandemic […]
The Arhuacos: A Message from the Mamos, the Prophets of the Sierra Nevada
When news of Covid-19 came to the enigmatic white-clad peoples of the high Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, nobody was very surprised. Trained since birth in the ways of looking to Nature for guidance, these spiritual guides of the Sierra Nevada predicted this pandemic and other current crises decades ago.
The Misaks: Balance and Harmony as Medicine
For the peaceful Misak people of Colombia’s Andean region, harmony and balance are the most important medicines, and they are willing to fight for them.
The Kamëntšá Biyá: Land Use Planning in Defense of the Sacred
Territorial planning is sacred work for the Kamëntsá Biyá people of the Upper Putumayo region in Colombia. Their approach reflects a radically different view of land use — one that is integrally connected with their view of public health.
A journey through ancient cultures during the pandemic that shook the world
Cosmology & Pandemic: What We Can Learn From Indigenous Responses to the Current Health Crisis is many things at once. It’s a transmedia series — meaning a series of articles and films and other forms of media that work together in concert. In this case, it’s a collaboration between my longtime friend and colleague, Argentine […]
Back To Normal? Is That What We Really Want?
Here’s the thing: there’s a COVID pandemic raging around the world, with more than half a million new cases every day (and someone dying from COVID every 7.2 seconds). But in the US, we’re suddenly in a happy little bubble where infections have fallen and people are heading to restaurants, gyms, and organizing their summer travel plans. […]
Migrant ‘Protection’ Protocols Survivor Stories #2: Perla
Perla has been a professional pharmacist for 22 years. Even as a political refugee living in a tent meant for weekend camping, trapped by circumstance and a cruel immigration policy, the Nicaraguan grandmother managed to ply her trade and make herself useful to the thousands of other refugees halted at the US border by the […]
Navajo Nation: From No. 1 in infections to No. 1 in vaccinations
TUCSON, Ariz. – Even though Agnes Attakai is a longtime Indian health administrator, she had no way of knowing that her Diné family members would become a textbook illustration of Native America’s disadvantages in facing the Covid-19 pandemic. Then she was forced to say goodbye to two aunts, an uncle and a cousin who succumbed […]
Native youth center, rebounding from double whammy
MINNEAPOLIS – Only eight months after the grand opening of their newly renovated building, staff at the Native youth center MIGIZI watched as fast-moving flames, spread during the May protests in Minneapolis, destroyed it. Now, six months after the fire, staff, students and volunteers are looking ahead to a new beginning in the form of […]
'Command Center' sought for Native homeless amid pandemic
RAPID CITY – Participants from numerous grassroots groups tackling life-or-death issues of Native homeless and other community members highly vulnerable to the Covid-19 pandemic here rallied for an autonomous “command center” at a Sept. 11 gathering outside the civic center. Organizers, speaking with a megaphone, pressured the Rapid City Police Department representative in attendance at […]
Pandemic and Power on Native Lands
Strengthening the socio-ecological systems of Indigenous communities is an urgent priority for achieving global “sustainable development” and environmental goals. For Indigenous people to remain resilient stewards of ecosystems and culture in the face of anticipated threats like climate change and territorial exploitation, however, as well as unanticipated threats like the COVID-19 pandemic that induced present […]
Covid, Culture and the Codices
This is what is happening, because the Earth is defending herself. The Earth herself is being cleansed.
Spinning a Lifeline in Zapotec lands
High up in the southern sierra of Mexico’s state of Oaxaca, an innovative nonprofit business inspired by Mohandas Gandhi is helping Indigenous Zapotec families to weather the economic storm that COVID-19 has brought to the Mexican countryside. San Sebastian Rio Hondo, a Zapotec highland village like many others, has traditionally supplemented its agrarian way of […]
Reflections from Mapuche Territory
Moira Millán, author, activist and traditional Mapuche weychafe (warrior, guardian) has been living the quarantine in the isolation of her remote lof (community) in the Patagonian mountains, a community slowly being built on stolen land that she and her people have reclaimed. To send this piece she had to face roadblocks, hide from spying neighbors, […]
From Beads to Seeds at the Huichol Center
Last year’s Nobel Peace Prize nomination seemed like the moment Susana Valadez had worked for her whole life. The founder of the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival had spent the past four decades weaving together with painstaking care the components of an organization that provided the Wixárika people with culturally relevant employment and training, a […]
Lakota leaders defy governor’s order to remove Covid-19 checkpoints
Pine Ridge Matriarch’s Mother’s Day message: ‘This is our land, so you cannot say anything!’
#StayAtHome with new Indigenous Media Library
The free 100+ entry Voices of Amerikua Indigenous Film Library was born when #StayAtHome mandates began rolling out across the globe, and Mexican media producer and activist Iván Sawyer García began getting inquiries from friends and readers: Do you have any recommendations for indigenous films we can watch while we are sheltering in place? As a matter of fact he did — as founder of the bilingual collaborative documentary and multimedia lab Voices of Amerikua, indigenous films and media projects are his life.
Uncertainty, crisis, collapse: The (necessary) bardo into a new life
Overnight, the daily life of the majority of the inhabitants of this beautiful Earth-home has vanished, leaving us in a kind of transitory reality between the old and known and the new unknown. After I asked someone how she was doing a couple of weeks ago, she replied: “Mmm, not very well. The most serious […]
"An opportunity to reconnect with our origins"
Due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, many Indigenous people have returned to their ancestral territories. These vulnerable communities are now isolating themselves in efforts to block the entrance of this highly infectious respiratory disease.
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