Laura Zanotti
Emily Colón
In 2012, the M’bêngôkre-Kayapó community of A’Ukre established a media collective, Djamtire (formerly Kôkôkagõti), to support ongoing localized efforts to document their heritage for and with the community. This effort strengthened other long-term expressions of self-determination, including storytelling as survivance, media as advocacy, and films as self-expression. To sustain this initiative, community leadership developed a transnational, multi-institutional partnership that co-created low-barrier, weather-resilient, and sustainable technology and energy solutions. While the community and filmmakers have been successful in creating an in-house media center and practice, they continue to face persistent archival and storage challenges due to the volume of multi-day, multi-camera raw footage, high humidity and dust, and the ease with which computer viruses can infect equipment. With the influx of interest from new and ongoing partners, and concurrent formation of a M’bêngôkre-Kayapó NGO, the Pykôre Indigenous Association, village leadership has renewed interest in formalizing community protocols and the responsibilities of external partners. This presentation offers a brief reflection from the perspective of non-Indigenous partners involved in both efforts: the technical and institutional challenges of data sovereignty in a virus-rich, high-humidity environment, and the relational sites of protocol making and implementation that center on community standards.