Creating change through a screen

By Brayden Omeasoo-Steinhauer

MASKWACIS, ALBERTA — I started the first cohort of the eight-week virtual International Aboriginal Youth Internship (IAYI), offered by Canada World Youth, on May 5. Global Affairs Canada sponsors IAYI so that many Indigenous youths like me can participate in international development.

This year, IAYI is being delivered virtually because of these unprecedented times. Before I started the internship, I was wondering to myself: How am I able to positively impact international Indigenous communities through a screen?

After two weeks of orientation, I was assigned a Peruvian counterpart to work with alongside a social project. Our work placement community is an Indigenous community called Cantagallo located in Lima, Peru. Our social project consisted of working with an organization called Colectivo Shipibas Muralistas; a group comprised of muralist women.

Prior to this internship, I understood the concept of sustainable development. I was able to apply and further my knowledge during my time working with the community. My counterpart and I conducted activities in our project to contribute to the economic, social, and health sustainability of this community.

Our first activity provided training to a group of women on the tools and functions of Instagram. My partner and I believed that this training would help them promote their products and services online.

In our second activity, we delivered training on the introduction of Tiktok and audiovisual content management. We were inspired by influencers like Shinanova, Notoriouscree, and Tiamischik because these influencers express their cultures through their content on this worldwide platform. We wanted to show the women that Tiktok is a great tool to express and promote their art and culture, just like these influencers do!

Both pieces of training were successful; the group of women were entertaining themselves by creating audiovisual content and having fun applying filters. I was also able to show them content from the Indigenous influencers, which they appreciated.

One of the challenges of this project was during the middle of our project on June 2. A devastating fire broke out and affected 18 families within the Peruvian community. Tragically enough, the entire community is still economically recovering from a disastrous fire in 2016 that destroyed a large portion of their territory and real estate. Community members were sadly reliving trauma from this tragedy.

The fire made it hard for us to schedule a time to work with the group of women as they were helping the community members who were affected.

We had an English language and Marketing training in place before the fire. My partner and I decided to scrap the training in order to develop ones that align with the sudden needs of the community. With that, we were able to develop activities related to health sustainability; first-aid training and providing children of the community with anti-parasitic medicine to build strong immune systems.

After a week of not meeting with the women, we were eventually able to find an opening date to deliver the training and distribute anti-parasitic medicine. These activities were conducted successfully.

The commencement of these new activities allowed us to work with the women and children of the community, as well as providing a lasting influence by giving the women training which will allow them to be prepared for an emergency.

There are many takeaways from this internship. There were a lot of skills that I developed such as project management, adaptability, facilitation, and presenting. I was also able to build close relationships with my Peruvian counterpart, the women of Colectivo Shipibas Muralistas, all Canadian participants, as well as the program managers.

Working collaboratively with my partner, we were able to present and deliver different educational pieces of training to the women, as well as medicine to the children of the community. All participants from Canada and Peru were able come together to plan, develop, and host a youth forum on Indigenous rights, the different Peruvian and Canadian Indigenous cultures, and a summary of all projects.

The biggest and meaningful takeaway from this internship is that I was able to bring positive change to an international Indigenous community all through a screen! Before this internship, I did not think that it was even possible to do the things that my partner and I did. There may have been restrictions preventing us to physically work internationally but there were no limitations on the quality of work we were providing.