“There is ancestral knowledge in the Sarayaku indigenous community”

The Reframed Stories Project asks people to respond to dominant themes and issues that appear in news coverage about their communities. These stories are reflections by people who are frequently represented by others in the media. Word clouds are created using the Media Cloud platform, a data analysis tool which examines a collection of media outlets over a specific period of time, allowing participants to analyze and discuss the preliminary insights into how they might be represented in the media. The project refrains from making conclusive pronouncements about the data, and instead is a starting point that creates space for discussion about how they can help shape their own media representation through digital media.

Wiliam San Nicolás is a member of the Kichwa Peoples of Sarayaku located in Amazonian Region of Ecuador, and which has held long fights at a national and international level to stop extraction projects in their territory. The following is a transcript of the video of Wiliam's comment of the word cloud for the term “Sarayaku“. Within the word cloud, the lack of the term “educación” (education) attracted Wiliam's attention.

Dominant words from 97 articles published between January 2017 and April 2018 mentioning “Sarayaku” within 3 Media Cloud collections of Ecuador’s Spanish-language media outlets. (view larger image)

Me sorprende que en estas nubes de palabras solo hay conocimientos científicos, mientras que en el pueblo originario sarayaku hay el conocimiento ancestral que viene desde muchos años y que esos conocimientos se han ido perdiendo en la educación. Yo quiero que en estas nubes de palabras aparezca estos conocimiento ancestral.

I’m surprised that there is only scientific knowledge in the word cloud because there is ancestral knowledge in the Sarayaku indigenous community that goes back many years. However, that knowledge has been getting lost, especially in education. I would like to see that ancestral knowledge appear in the word cloud.

This is part of a Rising Frames series developed as part of a workshop organized by the Communications Department of Sarayaku on May 17, 2018 that brought together youth members of the community to examine how they or issues they care about are represented in an Ecuadorian media collection. Following the discussion, they created stories in response to that representation. One of the workshop facilitators, José Santí participated earlier in the Reframed Stories Project and wrote his own story about the representation of Sarayaku.

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