ENV Director Speaks at Atlanta Botanical Garden Sept. 21
Dr. Julie Velásquez Runk and illustrator Frankie Green talk about how they wove and polished the illustrated storybook An Adventure of Wounaan Children and Many Birds with the biocultural team of the Wounaan National Congress and the Foundation for the Development of Wounaan People. Wounaan are an Indigenous people of Panama and Colombia and as part of Wounaan authorities’ project on people, birds, and sustainability in Panama, they leveraged the publication requirement as political intervention and anti-colonial practice. Over 2.5 years, much of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, they storied Wounaan worlds through the everyday adventures of two Wounaan siblings. The result is print and digital audio-illustrated storybooks originally written in Wounaan language (Wounaan meu), and translated into Spanish and English.