"Tell It Like It Is": Digital Stories From The Youth Movement

There are places where silence roars, but no one hears it.

Where 12-year-old Walles lives there is no running water or electricity. But there is conflict. The rural, rocky landscape of Big Mountain, Az. is the heart of a political land battle between the Peabody Coal Mine Company, and the Hopi and Dineh nations. Walles has seen her brother arrested and her home demolished in forced relocation schemes by the mining company. And for a long time, no one heard her story.

But six months ago Walles and 19 other youth organizers from across the country were given a digital camera, a computer and a chance to record their experiences. In late August they gathered together for a three-day long convergence in which they learned how to turn their work into short documentaries on their movements. And on the following Saturday night at the Youth Empowerment Center in Oakland, Calif., around 300 youth activists from around the country gathered to watch a showcase of these "digital stories."

The conference was organized through a partnership between Third World Majority, a new media women of color collective, and the Active Element Foundation, a funding organization for youth movements. They reached out to 20 different organizations from around the country, and sponsored an older and younger activist from each group to fly into Oakland to learn the skills of new media organizing. The training focused around community-based digital storytelling, and involved a three-day workshop process that integrated aspects of popular education, creative writing, oral history and filmmaking. Once there, the diverse group of young activists spent three days in intense training, sometimes all night, working on their video footage.

		Walles has seen her brother arrested and her home demolished in forced relocation schemes by the mining company. And for a long time, no one heard her story.

"There is a split in how the movement uses this new technology," said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, one of the conference organizers from Third World Majority. New media technology is a novelty in many communities of color, many of whom are unaware of the ways to use it to their advantage within the movement, she explained.

In many communities of color, certain technologies have a history that makes technology hard to trust. "Almost all this technology has a political legacy that was used violently against us," Soundararajan said. "Whether the camera or the Internet -- they were used for military purposes... surveillance, policing, colonial ethnography. We had little control over how technology could be used for our own self-determination," she said.

For almost all of the youth in attendance, this was their first time working with video-making production technology. But the end product left many awe stuck. "The youth produced absolutely empowering digital stories of the problems facing their communities and the ways they organize for social change," said Bernadette "Anpao" Moreno, 18, a conference organizer from Active Element.

Bridging the Digital Divide

Laura "Ya Ya" Ruiz, a 20-year-old organizer with JustAct, a San-Francisco based youth global justice organization, attended the conference, and praised Active Element and Third World Majority for bringing the groups together. "I think it's important for people that have resources to open up doors for those that don't so that they can work against injustices in their communities," Ruiz said. "That's how it should be more often in life -- finding way that young people, especially low-income people of color, can express their experiences in a way that is true to their culture."

This expression is what attracted organizers like Soundararajan to using the technology in the movement. "Many of us are marginalized as people of color in this [technology] field, and especially as women of color... But we are learning this not to get jobs in some company, but as tools to help our communities evolve, to tells our stories," Soundararajan said.