With tablets and deep-rooted traditions, Indigenous adolescents showcase their culture online
In the Indigenous community of Água Fria, in Uiramutã (Roraima), Brazil, the Territórios Conectados (Connected Territories) project enables adolescents to share on social media what once existed only in the collective memory of local people
Have you ever heard of the swarming of tanajuras or the legends of the Canaimé? If these sound mysterious to you, you can learn more about them on the Instagram profile @cailainterativo. The account exists thanks to the leadership of adolescents from the Água Fria community, located in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Land, in Uiramutã, Roraima, Brazil — leadership made possible by access to connectivity promoted through the Territórios Conectados (Connected Territories) project, an initiative of UNICEF. Through this experience, students from the São Sebastião do Cailã Indigenous State School began using the internet to show the world the cultural richness and daily life of those who live in one of the most fascinating regions of the state.
After living in the community for two years, teacher Ranylson Leocádio dreamed of sharing with the world everything he witnessed there. It was in this context that he met the adolescents Edjane Barbosa, Elano Dias, Leuziane Clementino and Yara Filgueiras. Through Territórios Conectados (Connected Territories), the group turned plans into action and imagination into reality. “When I arrived in Água Fria, I found a place full of peculiarities — ways of life, tales, legends, stories,” the teacher explains. Through digital literacy training and the use of technologies to strengthen education offered by the project, the adolescents began creating content portraying everyday life in the community, such as the preparation of genipap dye, the production of cassava flour, and the meaning of body paintings used in festivities. Over time, however, they went further: they adopted artificial intelligence–based tools to create scripts and recreate images of legends told by elders, transforming this knowledge into content for social media.
“When I arrived in Água Fria, I found a place full of peculiarities — ways of life, tales, legends, stories,”
As part of the digital literacy training and the use of technologies to boost education, the adolescents started producing content that shows daily community life, including the making of genipap dye, cassava flour production, and the significance of body paintings used during celebrations. Soon, they went beyond that and began using artificial intelligence–based tools to develop scripts and recreate images of legends shared by elders, turning these stories into content for the project’s social media platforms.
The search for new content led the adolescents to engage in dialogue with community elders, local researchers and anyone who could help them share fragments of the territory’s vast culture and history with the world. Throughout the project, they also began visiting little-known places, such as sites with drawings engraved on stones, whose origins even the elders cannot explain.
“It is hard to open social media and not find faces and stories that represent me. We really want to show our Macuxi and Ingarikó identity to the world,” says Yara Filgueiras, the adolescent influencer who appears in the Cailã Interativo videos. According to her, students are overcoming their shyness, and now that Cailã Interativo has grown, they are even happier to take part.
About the Territórios Conectados (Connected Territories) initiative
UNICEF works in Brazil to strengthen every girl’s and every boy’s right to be in school and learning. More than ever, it recognizes that the full development of children and adolescents requires access to connectivity and to a comprehensive education that considers and integrates new digital information and communication technologies (ICTs). Since 2021, through the Territórios Conectados (Connected Territories) project, UNICEF has partnered with civil society organizations to develop and document experiences in schools across different regions of Brazil.
The initiative is part of UNICEF’s global Learning Passport programme, which serves as a technical and digital accelerator for several other projects focused on promoting continuous access to digital education.
In 2025, the project worked with 105 schools in the states of Amazonas, Roraima, Ceará, Pernambuco, Maranhão and Rio Grande do Norte. Of these, 47 are Indigenous schools, 28 are quilombola schools, 6 are in settlement areas, and 24 are in small municipalities. In Roraima alone, 34 Indigenous state schools were connected and received digital devices, more than 100 educators were trained, and 5,112 students were reached by the project’s strategies, which include training in digital literacy, communication and youth activism.
In the state, the project is implemented by Casa da Árvore, with institutional support from the State Secretariat of Education and Sports of Roraima (SEED), the State Center for the Training of Education Professionals of Roraima (CEFORR), the Organization of Indigenous Teachers of Roraima (OPIRR) and the Association of Indigenous Peoples of the São Marcos Indigenous Land (APITSM).
For this initiative, UNICEF is supported through a global partnership with F1 and Adyen.
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