Video course
Mby'a-Guaraní
Charlotte Eichhorn from
The Guaraní are an indigenous people with millennia-old roots in the Amazon, who later moved to southern regions.
In In the north-eastern Argentine province of Misiones, about 3,000 indigenous people live in 74 communities, working to preserve their culture and the biodiversity in the forests. Through the internet and social media, they now have the opportunity to represent their concerns directly to the white world of the Milei government, though they occasionally require more technical knowledge and support.
https://tekoaarandu.wixsite.com/sitioficial
https://mapcarta.com/N4590740610
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiO1c51jy2E
for their roots
Since my co-author Sandra Weiss and I have been creating documentaries about the Guarani people for decades, I was asked in Argentina's Misiones province, where I am well-known and enjoy the trust of the indigenous people, to offer a video course for young people. The objective is to make it easier for them to use their somewhat older mobile phones so that they can independently create videos about their indigenous situation and publish them online.
Given the lack of Mby'a Guaraní journalists in the area, the young people have the opportunity to develop somejournalistic skills, so they could potentially work as paid "stringers" to assist international journalists. Such collaboration would be ideal in order to present indigenous issues from Argentina in a way that is also understandable for European audiences.
The course students all come from remote regions and different communities.
Young and old use the free Internet connection in front of the school at any time of the day or night.
Jorgelina, a well-respected representative of the Guarani people in five countries, has organised a video course for me to present to the young people who also exist in indigenous communities.
As I was only available as a course leader after the official holidays, the challenge was for her to pull some students away from their school or university. One of the young people even came from a Mby'a Guaraní community in Brazil.
The facienda of Dr Mariana, a doctor who had been responsible for several indigenous communities in Misiones before her retirement and continues to look after them, served as accommodation.
After a few days of theory, the students began to use my own camera and the rest of my professional equipment under the supervision of my indigenous assistant Luz. This was a welcome and frequently used opportunity for them to work professionally for once , although in future they will have to do so with their own mobile phones, which are not always the most modern.
I usually watched them for hours without interfering too much, as they filmed somewhere on the facienda on their own, arranged interviews - sometimes even at night - or inspected their own material.
On the second last day, we visited a nearby Mb'ya community to facilitate the transition from theory to practical production.
I admit that I may have been a little too optimistic, a little premature with my conclusion in the video above about the positive price trend:
Indigenous youth, despite their current connection to the modern world and access to the internet, still have their own unique sense of time, which differs from that of the Western world.I specifically waited half a year to publish this report, hoping to discover new contributions from them online, waiting to see if they would contact me with new reports that I might have been able to sell for them in 🇪🇺 Europe or 🇨🇭 Switzerland.
Unfortunately, I haven't seen or heard anything more from the participants so far and can only show the incomplete training sample from the course in Guaraní,
But, as has always been the case in every society, young people are primarily occupied with themselves and their daily lives. The course participants often already have jobs and/or attend university courses and sometimes they already have a family. So their silence probably doesn't have much to do with the indigenous mentality, nor with the fact that - despite many years of friendship - I have remained a white woman for them. Nor is it due to the 60-year age difference between the youngest and me:
Because it's usually the young people who explain the use of mobile phones to the old people, and not the other way round..🤣😂😜'"
