With your contribution, you can help us complete the pilot project of our Endangered Cultures Initiative. This new program identifies and gives emerging leaders from underserved and under-recognized cultures around the world the intensive training and support they need to engage in the recovery, retrieval, and sustainability of their threatened traditions and cultural practices.

Dominic Raimondo : Documenting a culture

“If one doesn’t practice his culture, he will end up losing it.”
-Dominic Raimondo

In 2017, The Association for Cultural Equity launched its first Endangered Cultures project in collaboration with a young member of the Didinga Tribe of South Sudan, Dominic Raimondo. Dominic is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, a group of some 20,000 orphaned children who walked from their villages in South Sudan to neighboring borders of Ethiopia and Kenya to escape the rebel armies in the civil war. After living in the United States since 2008, Dominic, with ACE’s support, was able to return to Kakuma, the UN refugee camp. Here he applied the training and skills he received in ethnographic fieldwork and documentation to the recuperation and preservation of Didinga expressive culture. Through Dominic’s impassioned commitment to his cultural traditions, he established proper relationships with tribal elders and families, gathering an extraordinary collection of audio and visual material of Didinga cultural practices.

Now, Dominic is working on completing the cataloging of the cultural documentation he was able to collect. Once completed, it will be returned to its origin community and deposited with a national archive, to serve as a cultural resource for his people and the world’s knowledge of the Didinga.