Indigenous community is an exploration to promote and raise awareness about other Indigenous groups daily lifestyle, culture, and history. To do this we have to go and explore the places they were living in. It was 7 weeks project for us to go on a trip with the goal to create a book. We have two main trips to Kampong Speu Province and Mondulkiri.
Trip to Kampong Speu
A group photo with ingenious community of Souy
We have interviewed so many indigenous people and learned about their daily life. In Kampong Speu, we met an indigenous group called “Suoy”. There are so many interesting folklore and taboo they practice which was very interesting. After interviewing them we also visited a very famous place called Hot spring that has very popular folklore from the souy community.
Trip to Ratanakiri
This is Tompoun Weaver house, but they don’t use it right now. They do the weaver at their house
Besides going to Kampong Speu, we spend 5 days in Ratanakiri. We didn’t only visit one indigenous minority group but we visited 4 indigenous community such as Kachok, Tompoun, Jarai, kroeung, and an organization. One of my highlights would be their handmade product which is very beautiful and helpful for daily life even without modern technology. Furthermore, some of the house of the community and the way they lived together is very unique.
For Ratanakiri, itself is a precious province with a lot of mountain and nature surrounding us. The mountain some are high and short with forest yellow flower planted on the top. The sound of nature in the morning was relaxing and also very nice to be away from all the technology in the city.
What we have learned?
During the trip to Kampong Speu, every student have a different task for interviewing such as geography, population, history, language, folklore, story, belief, culture tradition, food, sonorm, and art. A skill we were developing was interviewing skill with strangers. While we were interviewing, due to the different language it isn’t always easy to speak. Fortunately, they are very friendly toward us and after speaking together for a while they share a lot of story with us.
Their daily life was very interesting and follow as it adapts to the place they live. They have believed in their ancestor and most of the group are very strict about all the believes. A fascinating fact about the indigenous community that lives near each other, some of them are very similar to the culture and taboo. I’ve interviewed a lot of people in different community but some of them even have the same last name. Lastly, our final product was a documentary book and blog you can visit.