An Indigenous media production collective making film, radio, and multimedia projects about issues of land dispossession and the importance of traditional knowledge and stewardship
Context
Across South America, logging, mining, and agro-businesses dispossess local people of their land and undermine cultures, knowledges, and ways of life that are closely connected with the land. Many such industries are foreign owned and, as such, extract vast financial wealth only to leave ecosystems, communities, and domestic economies depleted. In the face of such exploitation, many Indigenous peoples preserve and use these traditional land-based knowledges every day, including the Nasa, Awa, Inga, Kamënstá, Quillacinga, and Siona nations of Southwest Colombia. Since the time of the Spanish invasion, and through waves of subsequent European and North American domination, these peoples have suffered extensive colonial and neocolonial violence against their cultures, lands, and natural resources, as well as paramilitary violence and civil war.
Beyond losses of land and natural resources, another aspect of dispossession faced by Indigenous communities concerns Colombia’s media culture. As North American and European powers impose economic dependency, they also import media and broadcast cultures that dominate Colombian ones in what has been dubbed a foreign hegemony on the popular imagination. Such a system leaves little room for a home-grown Colombian mediascape that adequately accounts for the country’s hundreds of Indigenous groups. Where are local productions, imageries, voices, and ways of knowing?
Practice
Creating a media landscape of direct relevance and use to Indigenous people was precisely what the Inga collective Ñambi Rimai started doing in 2019. They saw collective filmmaking as an important step in achieving self-determination, communicating the importance of reclaiming land and natural resources, and raising consciousness about geopolitical injustices against Indigenous groups that further exacerbate the climate crisis through logging, mining, and industrialised agriculture.
Ñambi Rimai operate as an NGO with charity funding and is run collaboratively by 10 Inga leaders. Theyhold workshops, share facilities for producing radio, film and multimedia productions, and offer exchanges and field trips to neighbouring reservations in order to share skills and information. Ñambi Rimai also arrange researchers’ workshops with international partners, including Forensic Architecture and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, with an eye to educating others in Indigenous knowledge.
In an extension of this outreach, the Inga have created a University of the Territory which aims to educate people in Inga language and ways of life (sumak kawsay, or living a good life – buen vivir – in harmony with nature). This aspect is important in overcoming a power differential that often plays out in so-called collaborative cultural production between Indigenous and non-Indigenous or foreign partners, whereby the elision of practical, methodological, political, and aesthetic perspectives under a banner of participation can be reductive. A major reason Ñambi Rimai are able to sidestep such reductive participatory methods is because films are made with and primarily for other Inga and neighbouring groups, not international audiences.
Ñambi Rimai’s collaboration beyond Inga across different Indigenous communities helps create solidarity in a local area subjected to centuries of exploitation, and suggests a mode of localised outreach applicable to other regions whose populations belong to diverse racial, ethnic, cultural or linguistic groups— MST in Brazil constitutes a kindred organisation in this respect. Ñambi Rimai’s embrace of contemporary technology and media infrastructures makes it appealing and relevant to younger generations, especially as its productions can travel to increase international visibility. This embrace of digital media and the internet helps media collectives elsewhere too, including Australia’s Karrabing Film Collective. Ñambi Rimai’s work indicates the importance of understanding the global mediascape as an extension of geographic and built space, and of localising it to serve the common good in situated contexts that are so often marginalised.