On January 11-12, 2014, over 20 women and men from the municipality of Huitan, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala took part in a second radio exchange with Radio Acodim Nampix of Ixtahuacán, Huehuetenango. The main goal of the exchange was to guide and motivate the committed community members of Huitan on how to get their radio project up and moving.

Ryann Dear is the newest volunteer on our Community Radio Project team in Guatemala. She is a recent graduate from Boston University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Anthropology and Archaeology. She worked as an intern for the community radio project with the Cultural Survival team in Cambridge for five months this past spring. She was a great fit with Cultural Survival from the beginning, and is now getting the opportunity to see another side of our organization, working alongside Indigenous Community Radio activists and volunteers in Guatemala.

By Chelsey McKnight and Tiffany Poole

The Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage research project (IPinCH) at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada has received an additional $50,000 in funding for the first Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Partnership Award. A previous $2.5 million grant provided the initial funding for the project, which began in 2008. The project explores the rights, values and responsibilities connected to cultural objects and cultural knowledge, as well as the ethics of heritage research.

By Brian McDermott

By Dr. S. Neyooxet Greymorning         

Cultural Survival’s Community Radio Program team is days away from the final event of our project aimed at improving participation and integration of Indigenous youth from Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador through community radio. With the generous support of our donors and FLACSO Costa Rica, FLACSO El Salvador, PNUD, Unión Europea, and PAIRCA II, we participated in and coordinated two successful events in the past five months and are excited to close our project with what we are hoping to be our most fruitful event yet.

By Phoebe Farris

Tonto Canto Pocahontas. Tem Rose Publications. www.temrose.com 2013

Alexei Auld, an alum of Sundance’s Native Writing Workshop, read excerpts of his new novel, Tonto Canto Pocahontas, in November at Fondo del Sol Museum in Washington, DC. Surrounded by paintings and sculptures created by Indigenous artists, Alexei Auld held the multiethnic, multicultural audience spellbound with his humorous reading and insightful responses during the Q&A.

Peter Bol is a 22 year-old community radio volunteer from the Toledo District of Belize. He has been volunteering with the community radio Ak’Kutan Radio for just 4 months now, after meeting another community radio volunteer at a workshop on Mopan Mayan hieroglyphs in August of this year. He was interested in volunteering with the radio due to his awareness of the marginalization experienced by Indigenous communities of the Toledo District. According to Peter, “There have been a lot of barriers between the Mayan culture and the rest of the country, such as language and illiteracy.

On December 2, 2013, the UN Global Compact released “

By Amy Ferguson and Sara Schenkel