GUWAHATI:
A Guwahati girl will present voices of 1,000 indigenous people and organisations of the Northeast in the 50th year commemoration of the Stockholm Declaration of UN General Assembly, slated to be held in Sweden, on June 2 and 3.
Bhavna Choudhury, the founder of a Paris-based international youth-led organisation, The Indegenous, will present the voices through multimedia mediums, including audio-visual, written and spoken submissions in the international platform to include indigenous voices in the fight against climate change.
“The organisation is now doing what the government has failed to do. The last census in India that included information on indigenous people, tribal population was in 1962, and all these communities are largely unrepresented and invisible in data ecosystems, resulting in indigenous peoples’ policies being established without consultation or discussion of what they would like to see in their lives as progression,” Bhavna said.
The youth-led organisation aims to put the Stockholm Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ statements into practice and push for the de-coupling of indigenous people with local communities in the IPLC categorization so that indigenous people’s voices aren’t silenced.
“How can a country make policies about people they know very little about? In Northeast, we’ve worked directly with indigenous youth to provide assistance and collect statistics about tribal people. We asked that the Assam government to take a look at the work that the organisation has already done,” she added.
The organisation is now urging all young tribal people of Northeast to participate in public consultations with the them.