The 82-page, illustrated project report, ‘Building a Library for the Future: Munduruku Craft Practices and Indigenous Knowledge’ (2023), describes an international collaboration between researchers at the Royal College of Art, University of Brasília, and members of the Bragança village, along the lower Tapajós River in Pará - a tributary of the Tapajós River, Amazon. Funded by the British Council’s Crafting Futures Digital Collaboration scheme (2021-2022), the project responds to the scheme’s call to ‘foster important international connections and devise alternative ways of working virtually’, in the context of ‘restrictions on global travel due to Covid-19’.

The Munduruku community crucially led in identifying how the project might be developed. The main project question asks: In what ways might co-identified and cooperative communication practices and digital inclusion methods foster new ways of shared learning that would build upon and ‘rediscover’ Munduruku local craft traditions and Indigenous knowledge? The report presents an overview of the project, describing research processes, modes of critical analysis, findings, and reflections on challenges and successes.

The project centres around the use of technology as a tool for fostering shared learning processes and aims to disseminate Indigenous knowledge emerging out of Munduruku’s cultural practices through visual, auditory, and oral modes. This included the effective use of mobile telecommunication devices, WhatsApp, and digital-based approaches. Collectively, the project team recognized the importance of ensuring a longer-term sustainable process while navigating digital and physical ways in which Indigenous traditional craft knowledge might be collected, documented, and disseminated. As an ethical and applied communication project, researchers developed and delivered with the community [Bragança, Brazil] a virtual library of Munduruku Indigenous craft knowledge and practices.

The project thus fulfils the words of [Chief] Cacique Domingos Munduruku, who reasoned ‘…education, culture and health will only be possible for us Munduruku through a well-structured communication project’.

The authors would like to acknowledge the generosity (in terms of time and knowledge-sharing) of Cacique Domingos Munduruku of the Brazilian Munduruku peoples and the village inhabitants of Bragança-Marituba, Brazil.

©2023 Building a Library for the Future: Munduruku Craft Practice and Indigenous Knowledge by Teal Triggs, Celia Matsunaga and Matt Lewis, is licensed under Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/