Online Via Zoom
Drawing on nearly two decades of engaging with ancient Mutanchi (Lepcha) stories and on anthropological fieldwork respectively, Minket Lepcha and Jenny Bentley take a closer look at the Teesta River and concepts of risk, nurture, and interaction with other-than-humans among the Mutanchi of Sikkim, Darjeeling and Kalimpong Hills. Minket will share the ancestral narrative on how the creation of the River Teesta is associated with love and floods – its origin initiating intimate reciprocal relations between people, the river, and other-than-humans. Jenny then will embed the narrative within the wider ritual practice of risk assessment and disaster mitigation derived from Mutanchi world view. To conclude they will tie these perceptions of risk to a current discourse on river ecologies, livelihoods, infrastructure as well as the October 2024 glacier lake outburst flood and its aftermath – including Minket’s recent findings and reflections on after-flood stories of people and landscape.
Minket Lepcha is a PhD candidate in Environment and Geography at the University of Manitoba, Canada. With a multidisciplinary background in advertising, education, marketing, storytelling and curating, she has been actively participating in and formulating action-oriented methodologies to build water narratives across transnational communities for the last two decades. Her film ‘Voices of Teesta’, a part of NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) Project, addresses hydro dam impacts, cultural relations, indigenous beliefs, and transboundary geopolitics. For this she won the Young Green Filmmaker 2016 award at Woodpecker International Film Festival, and also earned second position in the All-India Indigenous Film Festival called “Samuday ke Saath”. Interested in decolonial modes of storytelling, her works have been featured in the Living Waters Museum and Northeast Water Talks.
Jenny Bentley is a socio-cultural anthropologist (PhD, University of Zurich) with 15 years of fieldwork experience with the Mutanchi community in Sikkim and West Bengal, India. Her PhD research (funded by the Forschungskredit of the University of Zurich and the Janggen Poehn Stiftung) offers analytical insights into the Mutanchi understanding of an enchanted landscape, ritualized interactions with other-than-human beings, and epistemologies of protection and endangerment within the fragile Himalayan environment. Besides academic publications in Asian Ethnicity, Bulletin of Tibetology, etc., her applied/engaged works include an ecotourism project based on Indigenous Knowledge processes (funded by the Swissunivserisity Knowledge to Action). From 2021–2024 she has collaborated with University of Toronto and Minket Lepcha on curating a workshop project in which forty Lepcha youths will be discovering their Sacred Lands and collecting stories from the region of Darjeeling and Sikkim.
