The gathering in Kalimpong marked the first in-person convergence of participants who had previously only met in virtual space. What unfolded was more than a meeting—it was the beginning of deep human-to-human connection, grounded in the landscapes that shaped each story. Through shared narratives and lived experiences, participants slowly unveiled the personal and collective histories they carried.

At the heart of this convening was the co-creation of a collective map, a living archive of memory and meaning, facilitated by Alyen Foning. This map was not merely cartographic but relational—rooted in stories, belonging, and ancestral ties to land. All the participants gathered together to paint the fabric of the map.

Mentors and participants came together in an intergenerational circle of listening and sharing. Over a span of two and a half days—the longest storytelling session held during the project—space was held for vulnerability, witnessing, and community. Each voice contributed to a growing tapestry of resilience, struggle, and reclamation. Participants were invited to reflect on their positionality: Who am I in relation to this land? What histories do I inherit and carry forward?

One of the most visceral moments was the visit to Bidyang Dah, a sacred site connected to Junu Pandi’s story. The journey itself—bumpy, crowded, and raw—saw thirty participants sharing the back of a truck, traveling through rugged terrain to reach the site. Upon arrival, participants offered small gifts brought from their respective story sites—tokens of gratitude, connection, and reciprocity. In the presence of family members and Elders, Junu led a storytelling session that allowed the sacred to surface through orality, presence, and community. She wrote after we returned to Buddha Padha, that there was a hailstorm on the Dah that we had visited a while ago. We offered it as a blessing from the Dah.

The next day, a smaller group continued the journey to Damsang Gree, guided by Minket Lepcha. This visit was designed as an experiential reflection—not just about hearing the story but stepping into it, sensing the textures and tensions of place. 

As the gathering came to a close, there was a gentle weaving of reflections, dreams, and questions. Discussions began around the future pathway of the project through various group chats. Many participants openly spoke about the challenges they face as Indigenous individuals within this landscape—navigating erasure, cultural loss, and ecological grief—while also recognizing their own capacity to nurture change, carry stories, and reimagine futures.

During the discussion in Kalimpong there were engagements around layered tensions: memory and mobility, politics and place, identity and transition. At its heart was a desire to co-create and reclamation, moving beyond extraction into conversation, and beyond documentation into world-making.

The vision of the discussion was to build an architecture of a digital or narrative platform that includes a thoughtful attempt to structure knowledge ethically, balancing accessibility with protection. There’s an intention to build not just a website but an ecosystem of care—where memory is translated with dignity, and identity is held gently in digital space.

Language is the way we engage with one another and the discussion was led by the conscious decision to use a specific vocabulary and tonality. The following was the collective identity of how the participants wanted to address the project:

• Us / We 
• Anum, Anom, Tyol
• Echoes, Sacred, Bridges
• Roots, Growth, Home
• Journey, Nye Mayel Lyang

These words point to a shared imaginary: an ancestral, affective geography where Nye Mayel Lyang (a Mutanchi Rong philosophy of a sacred ancestral land and interconnectedness) is not just a place but a guiding philosophy. The term does not come from a nationalist or identity based heavy othering but offers a graceful and soft entry into community belonging.

What does it mean to represent a people, a place, or a practice? The group discussions concluded that by decentralizing authorship and foregrounding relationality, we acknowledge the relevance of multiple voices speaking simultaneously as our core strength lies in the community rather than the individual. There was an insistence on multidirectionality—dismantling the hierarchy of knowledge but retaining the respect for those who come with knowledge.

The visit in Kalimpong was rooted in kinship, memory, home-making, and reparation.

In the world we are trying to build, sacredness is not marked by monuments or museums, but by collective meaning-making, quiet voices, and intergenerational trust.

Let this be a compass.

The “Discovering Sacred Lands” team assembled once more on 13th August 2024 with participants, mentors, and co-creators—in the evolving landscape of the Discovering Sacred Lands project. There are moments when you feel time pause—when a room fills with the kind of silence that isn’t empty, but full. 

Full of presence. 

Full of listening. 

Full of people holding something sacred between them.

“How do we co-create?” someone asked.

Not in theory—but here, now. Across languages, across uneven educational paths, academic and non-academic, literate and non-literate, urban and rural, across cities and mountains and villages. How do we co-create in a world that so often tries to write us into the margins?

We spoke of the weight of being “represented.” Of being written about instead of with.
We shared the struggle of trying to speak when confidence is low and trauma high. Of the ache of wanting to tell your story but fearing you’ll get it “wrong.”

How might co-creation resist extractive documentation?
How do we enable self-representation that is not merely symbolic but materially anchored?

The response was layered:

• Expand modalities: allow for voice, movement, sound, and non-textual forms.
• Create relational infrastructures: spaces where knowledge flows horizontally, not hierarchically.
• Respect the multiplicity of time: intergenerational rhythms must be acknowledged, not rushed. We are late for society but we are right on time for us. 

Co-creation, we realized, isn’t just about making something together.

It’s about building a world where we can live with what we have.

What if youth became the ones to begin the conversation with Elders?

We talked about what it takes to be heard.

Not just volume—but safety.
Not just platforms—but patience.

We dreamed of spaces where no one is mocked for their accent, or their shyness, or their fear. Where stories are not just shared—but welcomed, like returning relatives. Where there was not a constant pressure to prove that we are from this land and our ancestors have walked many lives here to have names for the places. 

We also faced our own mirrors: the egos, the insecurities, the unspoken competitions within the community between the rich and poor, between the educated/qualified and not educated, between the one who knows the language and who does not, between the urban and rural.
We spoke of the “Vai halcha” attitude—that quiet, biting indifference that kills dreams before they start.

We named it. We felt it. Without judgement.

Then we spoke to the urgency of:

• Building confidence in oral expression.
• Countering the internalization of being weak or less. Breaking stereotype comments like “O, how come you speak so much, Lepchas are supposed to be shy.” “O, Lepchas are only busy drinking.”
• Validating alternative mediums: from craft and sport to song and silence.

Beyond individual capacity, the emphasis was on community building support systems where expression is cultivated, not simply expected. Echostream in Gangtok emerged as an example of a co-creative ecology—where artists, entrepreneurs, and thinkers converge periodically.

We didn’t come together to merely finish the project. We came to build something.
A space where old-world wisdom can walk freely into the new, without being diluted, erased, or extracted.

We were there to value each other. To re-value ourselves.

What is the purpose of this knowledge work? Who does it serve, and how is it held?

Suggestions that came up were:

• The construction of a community-controlled knowledge hub.
• Honouring knowledge as both archive and resource.
• Naming the importance of intentional dissemination—resisting both hoarding and oversharing.

Participants proposed a non-open access database model: knowledge must remain in community control, with mechanisms for accountability and permission. They refused the universal access logics of open-source platforms where the community sovereignty is undermined and not acknowledged beyond the project. Community merely becomes a data to get a degree. The participants refused to become data and also iterated the value of relationship.

We sat in a circle and asked this quietly. Because we know what it’s like to have our sacred dance turned into entertainment. Our ceremonial attire stitched into tablecloths. Our words quoted without our name. Our pain published.

We talked about how hard it is to protect oral stories—because the law wasn’t written for us.

The difficulty of tracing cultural authorship in digital contexts was acknowledged. So too was the urgency of developing community-based legal literacy—through workshops, legal partnerships, and the formation of representational entities such as BMCs (Biodiversity Management Committees).

Not all knowledge must circulate. 

Not everything needs to be shared.

Some things are sacred.

And that’s okay.

Workshops were proposed as spaces to debate these distinctions, inviting reflection on collective priorities.

We want to live. But we also want to live with integrity.

What we have begun here is not a project—it is a process.
One in which Indigenous knowledge systems are not simply preserved, but practiced—repeatedly, relationally, and with purpose.

We ended the day not with a conclusion, but with a promise:

To listen more deeply.
To ask more gently.
To share more wisely.
To protect what must be protected.
To create—with love, and with each other.

Each story shared, each art form expressed, belongs to a living person and a living community. The participants agreed that expression should always be contextualized, credited, and treated with care. Not everything is for research. Not everything is for sharing. But everything deserves respect.