If not us, then who? Siapa lagi kalau bukan kita?
Our students from Green School, Bali were lucky enough to be involved with the “If not us, then who?” organisation discussing about the importance of film and photography to spread awareness and message to the outside world about the Indigenous people’s lives. Their culture, tradition, and problems. The Indigenous communities around the world suffer similar problems. Deforestation in their territory. Their lands are destroyed for profitable raw materials like wood and palm oil. The indigenous people also suffer the dissolution of their culture, by being influenced by foreign religions.
I met a guy named …. He’s from one of many tribes in Panama. This is what he had to say: “ Our culture is fading out, due to foreign religious influences. We are discriminated in our cities, they see our skin paint art as dirty and rebellious.” .
I personally wasn’t too shocked about his statement. We have the same problems in Indonesia, which very little people realize about. Our traditional clothes and cultural values are in the verge of extinction due to foreign religious influence. This doesn’t really happen in Bali whatsoever, this is because culture and religion are in harmony and collaboration. In other islands in Indonesia, culture and religion fight each other, and more people are influenced by the religion, making the followers of the religion a majority and tradition and cultural values vanashing slowly.
After a long discussion together, we disccused as a group how we can get involved, and the importance of film and photography to spread awareness. The biggest discussion us as students came into is the importance of art. Film and photography is art. We all agreed that art in any form can very affectively spread a message and awareness. Our past experiences as a group spreading awareness through art has been very effective. We would get comments from audiences that we made them realized with our message, making them sharing the message to their friends, then to another friend and then featured in their local newspaper which can spread the message more. We learnt the art of communication, and there is so many ways to communicate. To engage an audience, we need to make our message in the most interesting and acceptable to our audiences. We are extremely grateful for the experience, and we hope to bring back to our community our knowledge that we have taken from this discussion and this trip.
