Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact many Indigenous communities at different levels, Cultural Survival's Indigenous Community Media Youth Fellows are dedicated to making communication accessible for their communities, offering multilingual materials, facilitating workshops, and organizing trainings to continue to strengthen their cultures, traditions, languages, and stories while creating safe spaces for Indigenous youth and children’s leadership.
Our Indigenous Community Media Youth Fellowship Program supports young Indigenous leaders between the ages of 18-25, who are eager to learn about technology, program development, journalism, community radio, media, and Indigenous Peoples’ rights advocacy. 2022 is the fifth year of the Fellowship Program, which has awarded grants to 43 youth to date. The capacity of the fellows is built through training, community radio station exchanges, and conference attendance. This fellowship is an opportunity to assist fellows to represent the voices of their communities and bring awareness of local issues to global conversations through their proposed projects, all the while strengthening their cultural identities and leadership.
Youth Fellow Ishey Angmo, 24, is from a small village Martselang in Union Territory of Ladakh in North India. Currently, she is participating in a program from the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), working with the college academic team and media team.
Since childhood Ishey has been interested in radio and in 2015 she joined SECMOL where she has the opportunity to participate at the campus radio station, working on a quarterly newsletter and producing a TV program allowing students to gain audio-visual skills and experience. She strongly believes that the media plays a crucial role in educating, and mobilizing the people of Ladakh. “I want to do this to make sure whatever is ours, remains ours, saved and protected.”
Her fellowship project, titled “Youth Empowerment Through Media to Protect Indigenous Culture, Tradition and Land,” aims to bring change in Ishey’s community through media and uplift the voices of the younger Ladakh generation. Through this project, Ishey provides capacity building in radio programming, audiovisual, and internet use to youth with a goal of strengthening, protecting, and promoting Indigenous cultures and traditions. The workshops are a platform for youth to communicate their aspirations and apprehensions, learn about their rights and how to be effective mediators in promoting the Indigenous wisdom and socially important issues impacting their community.
Harhsa Nagaraju in the blue jacket; an artist, a Buddhist practitioner and researcher; guiding the students at Nyerma. He is being interviewed by Stanzin Nurbu a faculty staff at SECMOL.
In February 2022, Ishey formed a media team of around 15 students. Many radio programs created by the students were broadcasted on SECMOL’s radio station. They were able to get a taste and experience the process of radio broadcasting: from collecting interviews around campus, editing, to writing dialogues to make a whole skit and much more.
There were radio broadcasts every other day in which a student or two would read the news. Sometimes they aired radio skits addressing social issues and other times they played songs, Ladakhi legend stories, jokes, and poems told by the students. Many students had opportunities to get hands-on experience in radio production. They also created video news which were also telecasted on SECMOL’s TV channel.
Students during their site visit to Nyerma in Thiksey. The place where the first university of Ladakh used to be.
To close her fellowship process in February, Ishey made several visits to historical places, ruins, and protected areas in Ladakh. Thirty-five students and a few staff members participated in those trips. The students completed their one year course with Ishey on February 28, 2022. Currently, a new cohort of students started their training at the end of April.
Harsha Nagaraju speaking to the students of SECMOL at Shey. He is explaining about Shey Khar, the palace was known as the glass palace due to the fact that the hill it was built on shined very bright in the daylight. He is being recorded by Stanzin Nurbu, a faculty staff of SECMOL - Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh.
Students and staff of SECMOL climbing to a place in Nyerma where the village deity rests.
Top photo: Students being guided by Harsha Nagaraju at the main temple in Shey Khar palace. He is explaining the wall paintings to them, which are very common in Buddhist temples
All photos by Ishey Angmo.
