Connecting Dots

Up until now I knew I belong to indigenous community and I am an indigenous woman and this was all I knew. Other then that I did not knew anything , did not knew what indigenous community is, what are their beliefs and practices and what are my family indigenous heritage?

 My mother, my grandmother and  all the female from my family wears red clothes, bindi, sindur,potey and that was the narrative I have been believing as our culture but to my surprise it wasn’t our culture. I have been believing the mainstream narrative of Nepali women’s identity to be our identity. Like many other indigenous women I have been surrounded with, all of female from my family have been heavily influenced by majority ethnic women’s culture. And I wonder there might have been other numerous cultures that I have believed to be ours aren’t ours. This really made me want to know about our indigenous culture specially my family indigenous heritage but it became almost impossible to dig my family indigenous history since none of my family member has any valid information relating to our indigenous heritage. There are only few things that are left in my home that truly belong to indigenous culture and they are also slowly disappearing. 

It is believed that everything starts with a dot but for me it became very hard to find the starting dot of my family indigenous heritage and also the remaining dots that connect each other so through this ongoing series ‘Connecting Dots’ I am trying to find, explore and connect those dots that represent my lost indigenous heritage. And with these photographs I m trying to juxtapose the context of what our indigenous heritage is and what is it becoming.

This project was produced for 2020 Indigenous Oral Narratives documentation project conducted by LOOM . For more https://feministnarratives.com/