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    Mapuche Songwriter Shares Her Art as a Tool for Native Resilience

    Interview Carina Carriqueo, Mapuche singer from Argentina, by Awasqa, August 2019 Because there is something else which we do not consider and sometimes we forget, is that we are making history. Each one of us is making history, and behind us, on this path that we are marking, on this path, there are children, and…

  • Indigenous people literature / Translations of cultural experiences in writing

    SOURCE: Astrolábio Magazine nº 21 year II set. 2017, English translation: Awasqa Indigenous literature is marked by a narrative tradition with strong traces of orality, amplified by representation systems through graphics, which constitute another narrative, which differs from the strict concept of the printed word. Indigenous graphics are stories and information narratives with their language…

  • Indigenous women and peasants unite for the largest women’s action in Brazil

    SOURCE: MidiaNinja, translated from Portuguese by Awasqa. The Margaridas meeting was attended by 100,000 people in Brasilia. The first march of indigenous women joins the peasants to fight against social setbacks. To resist the current political scenario, indigenous women decided to unify movements. The first March of Indigenous Women will occur simultaneously with the March…

  • Natural Dyes as Part of Mexico’s Cultural and Spiritual Heritage: A Hands-On Workshop

    This spring I had the great privilege of meeting Porfirio Gutiérrez, an educator and social justice activist from Teotitlán del Valle, Oaxaca, who with his Zapotec family is part of an indigenous movement striving to revive the ancient practice of handcrafted dyes for textiles. His sister Juana Gutiérrez Contreras has become a master in the…

  • Osh-Tisch, (picture Indian Country Today)

    Two Spirits, One Heart, Five Genders

    SOURCE: Indian Country Today. Indian Country Today is a daily digital news platform and nonprofit organization that covers the Indigenous world, including American Indians and Alaska Natives. This story was originally published on January 23, 2016. For European settlers the Original Peoples way of life was perplexing, including the Two Spirits tradition. “The New World.”…

  • Language, Our Roots, and Justice

    During most of the 20th century, national states in the US continent, almost without exception, developed policies of forced assimilation of Native peoples. The “democratic” obsession with equality ended by making invisible, and in many cases, lead almost to the extinction of Native peoples’ languages, cultures, and ethnic identities. Economic inequality generated an internalized colonization…

  • Photo: Waorani Resistencia Pastaza

    Indigenous Women Sing to Fight for the Amazon and for their Way of Life

    It was 1973 when the first barrels of Texaco oil was carried on a large military procession from the northern Amazon in Ecuador to the seacoast for its processing and export. The parade included sullen indigenous women sitting above a tank, taken from their territories and families, most likely forcibly. The promotional video shows people…

  • Indigenous Women Sing to Fight for the Amazon and Their Way of Life

    The first barrels of Texaco oil were transported in a large military procession from the northern Amazon in Ecuador to the coast for processing and export in 1973. The parade included two indigenous women sitting on top of a tank, taken, most likely, by force from their territories and families. The promotional video shows people…