Posts by Rudo Kemper
Lands of Freedom: the oral history and cultural heritage of the Matawai Maroons in Suriname
Learn about the oral history and cultural heritage of a Surinamese Afro-descendant community who fought for their right to exist in the rainforest centuries ago. (2020, English and Dutch)
Read MoreA very happy #Hacktoberfest for Terrastories and the Ruby community 🎃
It’s been almost a year and a half since I became acquainted with a wonderful community of open-source Ruby developers. At the time, I was scurrying from one corporate office to another, trying to find the right party to build a geostorytelling application for my organization, the Amazon Conservation Team.
Read MoreFrom the Amazon to the Great Lakes: sharing knowledge and mapping oral histories with First Nations communities in Canada
For many communities across the world, like the indigenous communities of the Americas, oral history storytelling is a cultural tradition imbued with traditional knowledge and associated with practices and values essential to developing personal identity. In many cases expressed primarily in oral form, oral histories are passed down from generation to generation, and can be…
Read MoreMapping and recording place-based oral histories: a methodology
ACT’s oral histories documentation initiative is designed to prevent the irretrievable loss of an invaluable source of historical and cultural knowledge; much like ACT’s flagship Shamans and Apprentices program, it seeks to help halt the loss of traditional knowledge of medicine and healing. As in that latter program, we are not solely interested in documentation…
Read MoreSuriname community uses new open-source app to preserve storytelling traditions
The Matawai of Suriname, a community that once felt forgotten by the rest of the world, is breaking ground by using a new open-source geostorytelling app to create an extraordinary repository of traditional knowledge through oral history storytelling. The goal of the work is to ensure that future generations of Matawai will be able to…
Read MoreImpacts of mining project “Mirador” in the Ecuadorian Amazon
This report focuses on the impacts of open pit copper mining activity in the Ecuadorian Andes Amazon region. (2018, English and Spanish)
Read MoreACT partakes in Ruby for Good 2018 to develop offline geostorytelling app Terrastories for remote communities
At Ruby For Good 2018, a team of programmers in the Ruby language worked to develop the open-source and offline-compatible Terrastories application, designed for remote communities to map their place-based storytelling traditions. ACT will be using this application for oral histories projects with the Matawai Maroons in Suriname and other indigenous communities elsewhere in the Amazon.
Read MoreSarayaku: in defense of territory
Learn about the political and legal struggles of the Sarayaku community in Ecuador against unwanted petroleum exploitation on their ancestral lands. (2016, English and Spanish)
Read MoreKeeng Kumu: indigenous cartographer
Explore the unique life and travels of Keeng Kumu, an indigenous Waiwai mapping expert from the northeast Amazon, through maps, photos, and biographical narrative. (2017, English and Dutch)
Read MoreDesigning and implementing virtual data collection forms with indigenous communities in Suriname
In 2016, the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT) received funding from the Small Grants Fund of Global Forest Watch (GFW) to evaluate the drivers of deforestation in threatened Amazonian ecosystems by training local indigenous communities to use the necessary technologies to ground-truth GFW alerts and collect pertinent field data.
Read More