This week has been a success!

Dearest Friends and Family,

I hope that you are in good health and are having beautiful night or morning. Franco and I have finished our first week of training with an amazing group of twelve young Indigenous youth on digital social networking. It was beyond anything either of us could ever imagine and feel truly blessed to have had such a successful weekend. It was amazing to find out that all of the students already had email addresses and also used a social network called Hi-5. In fact five of the students we trained with had their own lab tops and all of them were very familiar with using computers. It was great! The first day we spent on explaining the Fourth Way and how we could incorporate it into social networking. We each got a chance to share our background and before we met with the students we decided we were going to be as open as possible with our own personal experiences growing up. As many of you know I come from a strong Indigenous background and take great pride in being an Indigenous woman and I really feel that when we openned up and told our stories they really responded! Thanks Bernice for that advice! We showed them many different films and I have attached some of the films we showed as well as the powerpoint presentation and an article by our mentor Jon Ramer on "Deeper Networking." For the most part though we spoke and talked from our hearts! We wanted this weekend to be about them and my father always said, "How do you know what you are going to say to the people until you look into their hearts and listen to their words." We got them all youtube accounts which they wanted and also the best part, we helped them develop a ning site which they have named, "Colorful Ethnic Youth Council." We really encourage everyone to please check out the site. We found amazing translators that were very dedicated in helping us out! In fact, a young wonderful young lady had agreed to work on translating the ning site into Thai so that we can ensure that when we leave this will be an everlasting site. They want to use this site to help get across their issues. Also, we had two beautiful young Indigenous women from India join us and they have also set up a ning site dedicated to connecting their communities back at home. Eventually we want to connect all of the youth council around the world. The best part of the weekend was on the first day in the morning we told the students who are in the middle of finals that if they wanted we could end the day at three and stay around until five for those individuals who wanted more help. Everyone spoke up right away and said, "No, we will all stay until five!" Then at the end of the day which was around 5:40pm some of the students asked if we could start at 8am the next day instead of 9am. Franco and I were amazed and for the rest of the night we could do nothing but talk about how fantastic it was to be with such a motivated group of young people. Another highlight of the weekend included, viewing a young Luha man's video he made last summer with a group of his friends to fund raise for school. He is self taught and has such cool special effects. He was thrilled about putting it on youtube and I also would please ask you all to share it with friends and family! He was amazed to see it already had 16 views since we uploaded it. I have also attached the youtube link below. Next weekend we plan on spending half the day on the Colorful Youth Council which will be translated in Thai and then for the rest of the time we will be filming a Human Rights video on a young Indigenous man who made it all the way to the pro Thailand Tagraw team but when the officials realized he had an Indigenous last name they band him from playing. We wanted to make sure that they realized that we were only their to help facilitate. They got together, brain stormed and came up with a story board. I let them know about the two film festivals taking place in Bangkok, Thailand and they were thrilled. They also want to share it with the world to help other Indigenous communities fighting descrimination. The young man who made the other martial arts film has agreed to take charge in the editing process. Also, we are working as a group in the script, storyboard, filming and editing. On top of that each Individual has voiced a certain area they wish to focus on. At this time I think it is very important as well to give a big Thank-you to Atina who is beautiful and dedicated Indigenous woman from AIPP who truly made all of this possible. She was the first person we met up here and not only helped us find a translator the last minute but also let us use her projector. Her kindess and support will always be greatly remembered! We do apologize to everyone for not being in touch the past few days but although we had internet connection while we were training, the internet was down at our hotel. We send our love and a great big hug to you all! Please check out the sites below! We leave for a village tomorrow and will not have internet connection again until Friday! We hope to connect with you at this time. Also, please share this with our friends and family we have forgotten! Thanks!

Much love and happiness,
With Great Respect and Honor,

Deloria and Franco


1. Colorful Ethnic Youth Council

colorfulethnicyouth.ning.com

2. Metree's Martial Arts Video. This is an ancient Luha story of a young man who takes revenge for his families death. Two of the actors were our students.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ0EcCK8_6A

3. Declaration of Human Rights (Jon Ramer gave showed us this and it is awesome!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTlrSYbCbHE

4. Four Worlds Site (For those of you not a member please sing up. We will eventually have our video blogs on this site as promised and this will be the incubator for our Digital Youth Council which we hope to be up and running in a few months)

https://fwii-site.ning.com/