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Submit a Story to the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle

An Invitation to Young Indigenous People

All around the world, young Indigenous people like you are taking the lead in showing ways to live respectfully on Earth. Your languages, your cultures, and your homelands bear the wisdom of generations of ancestors and of your community now — and they have helped make you who you are today. Your people’s wisdom and your own personal experiences are priceless gifts full of much-needed inspiration for the rest of the world. .

We at Terralingua — the world’s leading nonprofit organization devoted to promoting and protecting biocultural diversity — believe that a great way to share these gifts is through personal stories of how young Indigenous people are connecting with their ancestral languages, cultural traditions, and land-based knowledge and practices. That is why we have created the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle, a global online gathering of those stories — and we invite you to be a part of it!

Deadline for Expressions of Interest:  Now Closed

Four Focus Areas

The Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle (IYSC) is an ongoing Terralingua project that aims to collect and publish personal stories from young Indigenous people who are involved in one of more of the following four Focus Areas:

  1. reaffirming cultural identity
  2. breathing new life into their ancestral languages
  3. reconnecting with traditional knowledge and practices, values, and ways of life
  4. reclaiming ancestral links with the land

If you’re a young Indigenous person 18 to 30 years old and would like to share your experiences connecting to your ancestral languages, cultures, and lands, we want to hear from you! Fill out the Expression of Interest form below to let us know you’re interested.

If accepted, your story will be published on our IYSC page and will also have a chance to be included in a future issue of Langscape Magazine. Either way, your story will reach an international audience!

Alternatively, you can propose a story on the specific theme of the next issue of Langscape. Visit the Call for Stories for Langscape to learn more about the magazine’s current theme.

Interested

Here’s How to Submit Your Story to the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle!

You can propose a written text (essays, short fiction, poetry, song lyrics, podcast script, etc.), a photo essay, a video, a recorded story or interview, a music recording, or artwork in digital form.

  1. Read some of the Indigenous youth stories we’ve already published.
  2. Fill out the Expression of Interest form to the right. (If the story you want to propose will be created by several youths, choose just one of them to fill out the form.)
  3. We’ll send you instructions about how to send us your story, depending on its format.
How Will Stories Be Chosen

We’ll review your submission to make sure it addresses the goals of the Indigenous Youth Storytellers Circle. If it does, it will be accepted. As simple as that!

What’s most important is that your contribution be personal and genuine; it does not have to be “perfect” or look like it was done by a professional with lots of experience. We want people who read, look at, or listen to your story to get a strong sense of you as a young Indigenous person.

How will stories by published?

All accepted Indigenous Youth stories will be published on our web pages. In addition, IYSC stories have a chance to be published in Langscape Magazine. Stories selected for Langscape will appear in both the digital and print editions of the magazine.

Youth stories will be published in English, but can also be submitted in French or Spanish — we’ll translate them into English.

Deadlines

We’ll review stories and publish them online on an ongoing basis. But for a chance to have your story selected for publication in Langscape Magazine, please send your Expression of Interest by September 1, 2021, for the Summer/Winter 2022 issue.

Problems or questions? Email Akshara, our Editorial Coordinator.

Expression of Interest

Now Closed

This project has the generous support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation, LUSH Charity Pot, the Lawson Foundation, and the Swift Foundation.

Copyright 2021 Terralingua | All Rights Reserved | Terralingua is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered under U.S.A. tax laws (#38-3291259), and a registered charitable organization in Canada (#85590 3266 RR0001)

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