Indigenous youth making media!

Our friends from the Terena nation have stories to tell - listen to them introducing their collective in the video below.

It begins in Etelena, the Terena traditional language, and is translated from 30 seconds in.

Terena youth media project

Our reforestation projects with Indigenous partners began with the Terena nation from Mato Groso do Sul. Young people from across their traditional villages have come together to tell the world about their lives and struggles. They need your help with funding and equipment.

We’re reaching into our networks and helping them draw in the resources they need, and looking at how to link schools and youth projects in Brazil to schools in the UK, to share media and grow new connections. Perhaps you can help with photography training, distribution, schools connections or good ideas?

We’ll share more on this project as it develops.

Info-chemicals

RAIN’s media policy is modelled on how trees communicate with each other via fungal networks beneath the forest floor.

When a tree is attacked by insects, it responds with defence chemicals. It also sends messenger compounds called info-chemicals that travel across the network and trigger the defence response in other trees - including other species. By collaborating, the whole super-organism of the forest becomes more resilient.

Antonio and Alberto Terena, Kali Kopenoty in the middle

We have seen figures on vanishing topsoil and we’ve watched the Amazon burn on Youtube, but this media hasn’t provoked an appropriate response. We’re not listening.

For RAIN, art, music and story-telling are our info-chemicals, because beauty can make people think and develop new behaviours in a way that neither terror nor bar-charts can. Beauty also travels further, as people enjoy sharing it, and - we believe - it moves people to help preserve it.

We invite partners to describe their struggles, but also to share the richness of their histories, their landscapes and their culture, to provoke a response that matches the level of the threat.

By communicating we create community, and communities share resources and burdens.

More on how biomimicry and the fungi beneath the forest floor guide RAIN’s activities in our brochure.