Incomindios UK collaboration

Jermani is a PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American languages and cultures at the University of Texas, Austin. He is a Quechua scholar and is passionate about preserving Quechua language and culture by giving voice to communities of Indigenous people who are suppressed and underrepresented by governments and the media.

Flavio Ayuso, a young Mayan from Muna; a small community in southern Yucatan, is a student of Sociology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).

For the past three years, he has supported Mayan communities in agrarian processes in defence of their territory against megaprojects and real estate developments that violate the collective rights of Mayan communities. He is currently closely supporting the agrarian judicial process of the community of Ixil, Yucatan, in the defence of their ejido territory against businessmen who intend to dispossess more than three thousand hectares of very well-preserved jungle. His topics of interest and research are agrarian law and agrarian sociology.

In 2018 he received an honorable mention inthe “Premio Nacional de Ensayo sobre la Constitución Política del Estado de Yucatán” organized bythe Judicial Power of the State of Yucatan. He has published several mini essays in the Youth Blog of the Magazine of the University of Mexico.

Flavio writes: “I thank the Incomindios-Lippuner Scholarship program, for the opportunity to allow me to strengthen my academic training and above all for giving me the possibility to continue with community work in defense of the land. Thank you very much.”

The 2020 recipient of the scholarship was University of California, Davis student, Brittani Orona.

Brittani is an enrolled member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. She is currently a PhD candidate at UC Davis in Native American Studies with a designated emphasis in human rights.

Brittani completed her Master of Arts in Native American Studies at UC Davis in 2018 and her Master of Arts in Public History at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS) in 2014. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in History from Humboldt State University in 2010.