Nepal’s revamped truth commissions will need to go beyond ‘ritualism’ to deliver justice to civil war victims

Nepal’s attempt to deliver justice and accountability following the country’s  froze more than two years ago with little progress—but a recent development has raised hopes that it could soon be revived and revamped.

In August 2024, the country’s  that sets the stage for appointing a third —and hopefully final—round of truth commissions to carry out investigations into the  that have been collecting dust since the last commissions ended in July 2022.

The two main bodies involved—the  and the —were created by Nepal’s government in 2015 to deal with crimes that were committed during Nepal’s conflict, commonly .”

Tracy Fehr (right, with a woman living in Gorkha, Nepal) is a PhD student in the CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� Department of Sociology who researches Nepal's transitional justice process. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

In 1996, Maoist rebels began an insurgency against the Nepali government in western Nepal that escalated into a 10-year civil war across the country. According to , the conflict resulted in the deaths of 13,000, with 1,300 people still missing and an unknown number of torture and conflict-related sexual violence victims.

The People’s War ended with the signing of the  that, among other obligations, required the Nepal government to create a high-level truth commission.

To date, the commissions have completed two rounds. The first, which collected the majority of the victim cases, began with a two-year mandate in 2015 that the government extended by an additional year three times. The second round, mandated from 2020 to 2022, was shut down for months due to COVID-19.

The commissions were tasked with three main objectives: to reveal the truth about gross human rights violations; to create an environment of peace, trust and reconciliation; and to make legal recommendations for victim reparations and perpetrators from the conflict.

However, despite seven years of work, little progress toward any of these objectives has been made. No case investigations have been completed, no perpetrators have been held accountable, and no victim reparations have been distributed. Reconciliation in a country that still bears the scars of conflict remains a distant thought.

From 2022 to 2023, I conducted research in Nepal about the country’s transitional justice process. During my research, I heard people refer to Nepal’s prolonged process as “a judicial merry-go-round,” “Groundhog Day” and “.”

Many Nepali people I spoke to believe that the government has strategically prolonged the transitional justice process to avoid accountability, hoping that people will eventually tire of the process and forget. Indeed, a heavy cloud of hopelessness and frustration had settled over the commissions as legal and resource limitations and political biases plagued the first two rounds, severely slowing progress and impairing the commissions’ functionality and local trust.

Justice ‘adjourned’

In 2022, I interviewed a conflict victim in the rolling hills of Rolpa, in the country’s west, where . She had submitted her case to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission seven years before but had heard nothing since. “In a way, our complaints are in adjournment,” she said. “They have not ended, yet they are not being forwarded either.”

She was one of approximately  who officially submitted a case of conflict-related sexual violence to the TRC.

A woman looks over the village of Thabang, Rolpa, Nepal. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

However, a former truth commissioner told me that this number may be as high as 1,000 because some victims of sexual violence submitted their case as “torture” to distance themselves from the stigma and shame often associated with sexual violence in Nepal.

I also met leaders at several women’s organizations who have documented thousands of cases of conflict-related sexual violence in Nepal, but they have not yet submitted these cases to the TRC due to ongoing concerns of confidentiality and trust.

The lack of progress by Nepal’s truth commissions suggests that they are being used to carry out what I refer to as “transitional justice ritualism”—the act of a state creating hollow institutions designed without the support to produce actual consequences.

As part of this transitional justice ritualism, I believe that Nepal’s post-conflict coalition government has, up to this point, been using the truth commissions as a political tool to show the international community that it is upholding its obligations under the  and to avoid —that is, the international legal principal that allows other nations to prosecute individuals for serious human rights violations regardless of where the crimes took place.

The threat of universal jurisdiction has been a particular concern for alleged perpetrators in Nepal since 2013 when Colonel Kumar Lama, a former Royal Nepal Army commander during Nepal’s conflict, was apprehended in the United Kingdom on charges of torture and war crimes. While Lama was , the threat of universal jurisdiction for war crimes perpetrators in Nepal  for those in positions of power during the civil war.

A contested step forward

But a  and the passing of the new law, which amended the , mark an opportunity for the government to move beyond transitional justice lip service.

Under the amended law, a third round of appointed commissioners will operate for a period of four years – hopefully enough time to complete their unaccomplished mandates. A government committee is  new truth commissioners before the country’s major holiday Dashain in October 2024. The amended act also provides for creating specialized subunits within the TRC—concerning truth-seeking and investigations, reparations, sexual violence and rape, and victims coordination—that could potentially improve the streamlining of resources and move some of these stalled parts of the commissions forward.

Maoist victims protest in Kathmandu, Nepal, in 2023. (Photo: Tracy Fehr)

Nonetheless, hope has been tempered by apprehension and uncertainty. Some , while  provisions they argue could undermine justice, especially by protecting perpetrators with decreased sentencing.

 have recognized positive and long-awaited amendments to the existing law, but also warn of serious accountability gaps that could undermine the transitional justice process.

U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk  revised law was “an important step forward” but added: “It is imperative that the legislation is interpreted and implemented in a manner that upholds victims’ rights, including to truth, justice and reparations, and that guarantees accountability in full compliance with international human rights standards.”

Potential for international support

Although it seems the transitional justice process will still be Nepali-led, doors may be opening for international support in the form of financial or technical assistance—marking a significant shift in the process.

The ” to finance the investigations process and victim reparations that will be supported by the Nepali government and is open to contributions from other national and international organizations.

Sushil Pyakurel, a former member of Nepal’s National Human Rights Commission, is among a group of human rights defenders, lawyers and victims establishing a civil monitoring committee to serve as a watchdog for the revived process. Pyakurel stressed the need for Nepali civil society, alongside the international community, to pressure the government to fulfill its promises of a victim-centric implementation.

“You can make whatever law you want, but it is how you implement it that really matters,” Pyakurel told me. “Although the law is different, if the mentality remains the same, then nothing will change.”

The revival of Nepal’s truth commissions provides the government a chance to demonstrate a commitment to a transparent and legitimate process. But I believe it must move beyond the transitional justice ritualism of the previous two commissions to actually provide justice and acknowledgment for the country’s civil war victims.

Top image: A Nepali man looks at photographs of people 'disappeared' during Nepal's civil war in Kathmandu Aug. 30, 2017. (Photo: Niranjan Shrestha/AP Photo)

Tracy Fehr is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the .

This article is republished from  under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

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Carole McGranahan, a CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� anthropology professor who has long studied the Tibetan perspective of China’s invasion and occupation of Tibet, joins the Tibetan community to commemorate the location on June 9 at Camp Hale, Colorado

For decades, the to fight Chinese invaders was a state secret, but even after the U.S. government formally acknowledged the CIA-Tibet effort, the exact location of the Tibetan camp remained a mystery.

With the dogged research of anthropologist Carole McGranahan, the precise location is now known. McGranahan, a ����Vlog�ƽ�� anthropology professor who’s been studying the Tibetan perspective on the resistance to China for more than three decades, will soon join Tibetans from Colorado and beyond to commemorate the camp, six decades after it was closed.

The memorial gathering, which is titled “Dumra/The Secret Garden–Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Program at Camp Hale,” will take place at noon on June 9 at .

Carole McGranahan, a CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� anthropology professor, has studied the Tibetan perspective on the resistance to China for more than three decades.

Members of the Tibetan community from around the world and several members of parliament of the Dalai Lama’s exile government in India are scheduled to attend, as is one of his cabinet ministers.

McGranahan said finding the training camp’s actual location now is meaningful for two reasons. “One is that most of the veterans and retired (CIA) agents have passed,” and the other is that the history of the operation had been suppressed and concealed for decades—a condition McGranahan calls “arrested history.”

Tibetans, for instance, have been unable to “celebrate and honor these soldiers in a way that they deserved,” she said. “This service, not just to Tibet but to the Dalai Lama, was the defining moment of their lives.”

For the Tibetan community to know the actual location, she added, “is meaningful in a way that even as a scholar I hadn’t fully appreciated.”

Fraught history

McGranahan’s work adds detail to the history of Tibet and China, which has long been fraught.

In 1949, Mao Zedong won the civil war in China, defeating Chiang Kai-shek. Mao, the first leader of the People’s Republic of China, promised to “liberate” Tibet, which was then an independent country headed by the Dalai Lama, the country’s political and spiritual leader.

Within a year, the Chinese army invaded Tibet and marched on the capital, Lhasa. For the next decade, the Dalai Lama and Tibet’s government sought to negotiate—under military duress—with China. Meanwhile, Tibetan citizens facing Chinese invaders from the east began fighting back.

Initially, they fought with whatever they had from wherever they were. Later, the Tibetans formed a citizens’ army called Chushi Gangdrug, whose mission was to defend the Dalai Lama, Tibet and Buddhism.

What:Dumra/The Secret Garden–Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Training Program at Camp Hale

When: 12 p.m. June 9

Where:

The Tibetans’ resistance caught the attention of the United States. “This is during the Cold War, so this was roughly 1956, and the Tibetans were on their own, fighting communists,” McGranahan noted.

The U.S. Department of State got involved, as did, secretly, the CIA, which launched a program to train Tibetan soldiers. That program landed in Colorado in 1958 at Camp Hale, near Vail, Colorado, the widely known training ground of the 10^th Mountain Division fighters who served in World War II.

About 300 Tibetan soldiers were trained at Camp Hale from 1959-64. The CIA kept a tight lid on information about the program, and closely guarded entrance to and from the site. The camp closed in 1964, but the CIA continued to support the Tibetan resistance until 1973.

McGranahan began researching the Tibetan resistance in 1993, when she was working on her PhD in history and anthropology at the University of Michigan.

“One of the things I wanted to do was to understand and tell the story of the Tibetan resistance to China from the Tibetan perspective, because in the English language, it had been told almost exclusively as a story about the CIA,” McGranahan noted recently.

That approach clearly left out the Tibetan perspective, which, “frankly, to me, was more interesting and needed to be told,” she said.

In her doctoral research, McGranahan interviewed more than 100 Tibetan veterans, including many who had trained at Camp Hale. She noted that the 300 Tibetans who were trained in Colorado were a small portion of the thousands of fighters in the Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug army.

Though she focused on the Tibetan perspective, she also interviewed about 10 retired CIA officers who had been stationed at Camp Hale. At the time, the CIA operation was still top secret. “Protocol didn’t acknowledge the operation," she said. "There was nothing public about it.”

A view of Dumra from across the valley.

That changed on Sept. 10, 2010, when the U.S. government installed a plaque at Camp Hale formally acknowledging that the CIA had trained Tibetan officers there.

One day prior, on Sept. 9, 2010, Duke University Press released McGranahan’s book, .

The public announcement stemmed from the efforts of Ken Knaus, a retired CIA agent, who enlisted the help of former U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo. Together with Roger McCarthy, Knaus had been in charge of the CIA-Tibet operation, and it had been the lifelong mission of both men to tell the story of the operation and to install a plaque at Camp Hale.

Searching for the garden

McGranahan, who describes herself as the group’s “resident scholar,” joined the dedication ceremony in 2010. After the ceremony, the Tibetan veterans and the CIA officers wanted to find the site of the CIA camp, which CIA officers called “The Ranch” and Tibetans called “Dumra,” meaning garden.

But the group’s desire to see the Dumra location was thwarted by the fact that the CIA had demolished and obscured any trace of the facilities. “The site was made to look as if nothing had been there,” McGranahan observed.

“And to the dismay of the veterans on both sides, they could not find the camp,” she added. “The very camp they had lived in, they couldn’t find. This was very distressing to everyone.”

It’s also understandable. Camp Hale encompasses 53,804 acres, and landmarks that were clearly seen six decades ago could easily be obscured.

Last fall, McGranahan contacted a CU alumnus, Tracy Walters, who lives in the Vail Valley and who does a lot of hiking, camping and bike-riding through Camp Hale. She told him the story of the lost CIA training site, and he offered to help.

Using photos of the CIA site from the early 1960s and comparing them with satellite images, Walters determined where he thought the location was.

She and Walters visited the site in February, strapped on snowshoes to navigate the four feet of snow there, “and we snowshoed out, trying to match up the photographs of the camp with the current landscape, basically 60 years later,” she said.

McGranahan emailed the photographs of the site, new and old, to the one still-living CIA officer, Bruce Walker, who had been stationed at the camp. “He wrote back immediately, ‘Yes, that is the site, and I am the one who took those photographs you’re holding up in the picture.’”

Carole McGranahan holds up an old photo of Dumra to find its precise location in Camp Hale National Monument.

It turns out that U.S. Highway 24, which is near the CIA training site, was not heavily used in the early 60s, and the site couldn’t be seen from the highway. Also, the CIA agents and Tibetan soldiers entered from Colorado Highway 91, near the Climax molybdenum mine at Fremont Pass.

Having found the location, McGranahan contacted members of Chushi Gangdrug or their descendants, who said, “We need to do a ceremony there.” Former agent Walker, now 91, also plans to attend June 9.

McGranahan underscores the significance of identifying the precise location of this chapter of history:

“You can feel the resonance, the poignancy of it, of what it means to be on the place where there was a hope, there was a camaraderie, there was a commitment. Certain aspects of that did come to fruition, certainly the camaraderie, and there’s a hope that remains.”

China still controls Tibet, but the two groups—CIA agents and Tibetan fighters—remain committed to each other.

The June 9 ceremony is organized by the CU Department of Anthropology and Tibet Himalaya Initiative together with the Colorado Chushi Gangdrug and Vail Symposium. Co-sponsors for the event are the CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� College of Arts and Sciences, the Departments of Communication, Ethnic Studies, Geography, History, Linguistics, Religious Studies and Sociology, the Center for the American West, the Center for Asian Studies, the Institute for Behavioral Science and the Museum of Natural History. It is also co-sponsored by Nova Guides, Polar Star Properties and 10th Mountain Whiskey

Additionally, on June 7 at the Vail Symposium, McGranahan, India-based filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin, and retired CIA officer Bruce Walker will present a research talk about the secret CIA training camp for Tibetan resistance soldiers at Camp Hale that operated from 1958-1964.

This presentation is the basis for a book they are co-authoring about Camp Hale’s Tibetan history. Their presentation will be live-streamed.

Top image: Tibetan and CIA colleagues at the Dumra training site in the early 1960s. (Photos courtesy Carole McGranahan)

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Recent research by CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� geographer Emily Yeh studies the difference between consent and coercion in ‘voluntary’ resettlement of pastoralists in Tibet’s Nagchu region

The difference between voluntary and involuntary participation may seem clear, but a study from the Tibet Autonomous Region shows the distinction between the two can, in fact, be murky.

In recent years, the Tibet Autonomous Region government has been relocating residents from high-altitude areas to distant, lower-altitude settlements. Officials characterize this resettlement program as “voluntary.” However, they also report that 100 percent of targeted residents have agreed to move. So, how voluntary is it, really?

Researchers at the ����Vlog�ƽ�� explore this and other questions in a published in The China Quarterly. Using official documents and interviews, co-authors Yonten Nyima and Emily Yeh offer a rare look inside this politically sensitive area.

CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� researcher Emily Yeh found complex distinctions between "consent" and "coercion" when studying the resettlement of Tibetan pastoralists.

Yeh is a CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� professor of geography and Nyima, now an independent scholar, earned a doctorate in geography at CU ����Vlog�ƽ��.

“In this case, it’s not like thugs show up and chase people away—it’s a much more subtle process,” says Yeh. “We wanted to explore: Does the division between coercion and consent even make sense in such complicated and power-laden situations? What is consent, actually? What is coercion, actually? And when you start to dig into it, it gets blurry and complicated.”

The resettlement program

The Tibet Autonomous Region is a 471,700-square-mile area of Central Asia governed by the People’s Republic of China. For the study, the researchers focused on a specific region called Nagchu, which has an average elevation of more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Nearly 80 percent of Nagchu’s residents are pastoralists, or nomads who herd yaks, sheep and goats as their primary livelihood.

In 2017, the government launched the “extremely high-altitude ecological resettlement” program to relocate many of Nagchu’s pastoralists to lower elevations. The government gave many reasons for the resettlement, such as protecting the environment, alleviating poverty and strengthening national unity, among others. Their stated reasons, however, do not tell the full story and are in some ways misleading, according to the researchers.

“It’s part of a broad trend toward resettlement because of a very entrenched idea in policymaker circles that rural is backwards and Tibetan areas are backwards and underdeveloped,” says Yeh. “And the fastest way to get them developed is to move them to the city.”

Many of the targeted pastoralists in Nagchu did not want to move, for a variety of reasons. They felt heartbroken at the prospect of leaving their homeland, where their ancestors had lived and to which they have a strong spiritual connection, Yeh says. They didn’t want to part ways with their livestock or their herding livelihoods, which was a major part of their identities. They also worried about finding new jobs and making ends meet in their new homes.

Thought work

But, eventually, they all signed documents agreeing to do so anyway. How and why did they change their minds?

Officials used a three-step process, known as “thought work,” to convince all of the targeted Nagchu pastoralists to move, the researchers find. This process started with incentives before progressing to warnings and intense pressure. In this way, officials manufactured consent, the researchers write.

First, government officials determined the pastoralists’ willingness to move, typically via surveys or meetings. At this stage of the thought work, they presented resettlement as an attractive and voluntary option. Officials also tried to glean the herders’ reasons for not wanting to move so they could figure out how best to persuade them.

From here, they moved onto the second step of the thought work, which involved educating and guiding the pastoralists toward resettlement, per the researchers. During this phase, officials tried to alleviate the pastoralists’ concerns and elaborated on the benefits of resettlement, such as better access to medical facilities, schools and other social services.

They also took some of the poorest pastoralists on in-person tours of the resettlement locations and arranged meetings with earlier resettlers to hear stories of their “happy life” after resettlement, as one government official told the researchers. Officials also held multiple public meetings to pressure pastoralists into agreeing to move.

If all of this were still not enough to convince the herders to resettle, officials moved on to the third and final stage of the thought work. They visited individual households for multiple one-on-one meetings that involved incentives and warnings. One overarching theme of these conversations was that the government knows best and that pastoralists do not understand what is in their best interests, the researchers write.

‘It’s never that simple’

Over time, all of the targeted pastoralists agreed to move. But many acknowledged they felt they had no choice.

 

The assumption that voluntary means you are a free subject who can do whatever you like with no constraints on your choices…it’s never that simple​."

 

“I would have preferred not to sign if I could refuse … [but] it was really a matter of whether [I] wanted to go against the state, a matter of those with power and those without power,” one pastoralist told the researchers. “Officials would not leave me alone until I signed.”

Under such conditions, the researchers write, there is no clear distinction between voluntary and involuntary or coercion and consent.

“The assumption that voluntary means you are a free subject who can do whatever you like with no constraints on your choices … it’s never that simple,” Yeh adds. “You can’t really disentangle consent and coercion, especially not in contexts of highly uneven power relations such as this one. We’re trying to show that labelling something as voluntary or involuntary hides a lot of things that are actually happening.”

More broadly, the project—and its nuanced findings—is a reflection of geography’s interdisciplinary nature. The field encompasses far more than making maps or memorizing place names, says Yeh.

“Fundamentally, geography is not about where places are, but how those places become what they are physically, culturally, socially and politically,” she adds. “In geography, we look at the relationship between the social and the spatial and between humans and the environment.”

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An online beginning Tibetan language course offered at CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� allows learners worldwide to access contemporary resources for a less-frequently taught language

A new ����Vlog�ƽ�� online language class is aiming to preserve an endangered language and create access to an important aspect of culture and identity.

is the result of a collaboration between the Anderson Language and Technology Center (ALTEC) and the Center for Asian Studies (CAS), and the work of Tenzin Tsepak, a teaching professor of Tibetan in the CAS, and Maggie Rosenau, an ALTEC lecturer of German and learning design expert.

Drawing on Rosenau’s experience creating open educational resources and Tsepak’s expertise in Tibetan and Himalayan studies, the collaborators began designing the free online course in 2021. A significant goal was to create a Tibetan language course highlighting the language’s rich history and cultural significance, as well as addressing issues of accessibility and quality educational resources.

“Most of the resources out there and pedagogical tools for Tibetan that we have now are very traditional, like old-school textbooks and audio recordings that have not been updated for decades,” Tsepak says. “There is certainly nothing really digitally interactive out there for Tibetan language learners.

Tenzin Tsepak contributed expertise in Tibetan and Himalayan studies to developing the online Beginning Tibetan language class.

“And these traditional materials focus mostly on reading and producing one-to-one written translation, not other skills like conversational listening and personal, verbal expression. So now, with this course, we have really interactive materials for students. Learners now have an online tool to better engage with the language. This is very new for Tibetan.” 

Contemporary resources for language learning

Studying endangered and less-commonly taught languages is important for both understanding how languages grow and develop and for preserving the native languages of those who speak them. Since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, enabling access to the Tibetan language has been an important way to protect and preserve Tibetan culture and identity. 

“There are wonderful organizations, institutions and individual educators out there offering important cultural history and language resources,” Rosenau says. “We have included and credited some of these in the course build—like the Tibetan and Himalayan Library, which is a collection hosted by the University of Virginia Library; the Tibet Film Festival in Switzerland; and the Tibetan Equality Project out of the New York/New Jersey area.

“But during my initial research to understand what is available for learners, what really stood out was a gap in contemporary multi-modality we could fill. So, this became a priority within the scaffolding, and I asked a lot of Tsepak for this project. His family even generously contributed to many of our listening dialogue activities. And I have to give a big shout-out and thank you to Tsepak’s spring 2023 first- and second-year students, who contributed blog posts to the unit dedicated to traditional holidays and festivals.”

Creating the Beginning Tibetan course was one of the goals supported by a 2020-2023 Undergraduate International Studies and Foreign Language Program grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The grant was awarded to Tim Oakes, a professor in the Department of Geography, and Danielle Rocheleau Salaz, executive director of CAS, in partnership with ALTEC and Director Susanna Pàmies, as well as the departments of anthropology, geography and religious studies.

The grant provides funds to plan, develop and carry out programs to strengthen and improve undergraduate instruction in international studies and foreign languages. It also supports the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, an interdisciplinary hub for research, teaching and public engagement on Tibet and the Himalayas. The center also offers scholarship opportunities for Tibetan and Nepali summer language study and supports Directed Independent Language Study in Tibetan and Nepali through ALTEC.

A worldwide resource

The Beginning Tibetan course is self-paced and includes modules on Tibetan sounds and basic grammar, greetings and introductions, communities, weather, clothing, foods, hospitality, travel, directions, festivals, holidays and customs. It also includes a broad collection of resources including dictionaries, archives, maps, short films, a podcast, social justice organizations and music.

Maggie Rosenau is a learning design expert who will give an online faculty workshop Nov. 7 about the H5P learning platform.

“Traditional textbooks focus just on grammar and maybe a few cultural elements that logically connect to vocabulary,” Tsepak says. “But now, I feel like this new course is like a mandala, you know? We have basically everything circling around this package—interactive learning that is really modern and engaging. And there are amazing, authentic images, contemporary culture, representations of the Tibetan diaspora, music, local Tibetan restaurants in ����Vlog�ƽ��, trans and queer representation and non-binary language elements. Our goal is to better engage our students and make the process of language learning much more fun and inclusive.”

One of the course’s innovative technological features is H5P, integrated on the Canvas learning platform, which helps make the content interactive by providing instant and automatic feedback to users, an essential aspect of effective language learning. Also, as an open-source tool, the H5P content can easily be shared, reused and adapted by others, making it a cost-free resource for interactive online learning.

“Building in Canvas and (open educational resources) for language learning is my love language,” Rosenau says. “I’m especially excited about all the H5P elements built into this resource. My hope is that instructors of Tibetan around the globe will use these materials by integrating the vocab cards, audio recordings and interactive grammar activities into their own educational platforms.”

ALTEC will host an with Rosenau on H5P at 1 p.m. Nov. 7, as well as a roundtable discussion focusing on less commonly taught languages and language acquisition next spring.

Rosenau and Tsepak’s collaborative project offers learners worldwide the opportunity to delve into the Tibetan language and culture and underscores the importance of making less commonly taught languages accessible and available. The is free and can serve as a supplement to other Tibetan courses or as a stand-alone course.  

While the course is not comprehensive, it is a valuable first step in providing more contemporary resources for Tibetan language learning. “It is just a start,” says Tsepak, “and if we have the opportunity to expand the project, then we would love that.”

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How did a fruit farmer’s son in New York’s Hudson Valley come to be a graduate student in ����Vlog�ƽ��’s Religious Studies Department, studying Tibetan Buddhist texts?

As an undergraduate at Siena College, Eben Yonnetti, on a whim, went on a study abroad trip to Nepal to study in the Tibetan and Himalayan Peoples program. Yonnetti lived with a Tibetan exile family who helped him assimilate among the people and learn about their religious community.

Yonnetti eventually became so engaged with Tibetans and Tibetan culture that he decided to study Tibetan language and religious practices and ideas. He is working on a graduate degree in religious studies with a specialization in Tibetan Buddhism—specifically, how Tibetan Buddhism has spread to different parts of the world in the past 50 years.

“I was a lost student floating around in a sea of ideas,” Yonnetti said. “A typical rebel without a cause. That experience started me off, and now here I am.”

During his seminal time in Nepal and India, Yonnetti drew on his musical background playing the bagpipes to connect with Tibetan monastic musicians and explore how Tibetan monastic music is used in a religious context.

His field research project was titled Like the Roar of a Thousand Thunders: Instrumental Music and Creativity in Tibetan Buddhist Ritual. It examined the role of ritual music in Buddhist performance and the ongoing variations and changes to ritual practice through different instrumentations and compositions.

Eben Yonnetti, a master’s student in religious studies, focuses on the contemporary transmission and translation of Tibetan Buddhism. His primary research interests include the contemporary trans-national and trans-linguistic dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as translation and ritual studies more broadly. CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� photo by Patrick Campbell.

One experience became a defining moment for Yonnetti during his trip, when he had an opportunity to observe a ritual performed by monastics at a stupa, or Buddhist shrine. It was a dream come true for Yonnetti, who was mesmerized by red-robed monks chanting and playing horns, cymbals and drums.

One monk, however, sat apart, not participating as the others were. Yonnetti noticed him looking at his phone and gazing out the window. Suddenly, in the middle of the ritual, one of the monks grabbed a handful of rice and chucked it across the room to get the distracted monk’s attention.

“What I thought I knew about Buddhism was totally different when I was thrust into a community of Buddhists,” Yonnetti said. “There’s a hyper-focus on philosophy and meditation that’s emphasized in the U.S. When I thought about Buddhists, I thought they were always mystical, alluring, enlightened with lofty ideals, but in that moment, I realized they are just like us, people living their everyday lives. That was a very grounding experience for me.”

After his study abroad trip ended, Yonnetti spent four months studying Buddhist philosophy at the International Buddhist Academy in Nepal and teaching English to monks at a nearby monastery.

“After that experience, I started to pursue my own study and practice,” he said.

This semester, Yonnetti received a Provost Fellowship for University Libraries to work on the 600 or so volumes of Tibetan-language materials that have been donated to Norlin Library by the Tsadra Foundation. He’s generating bibliographic entries for many works that are not yet cataloged. There isn’t an entry for these works in English anywhere else in the world, Yonnetti said. This treasury of Tibetan texts consists of religious, historical and philosophical materials.

What I thought I knew about Buddhism was totally different when I was thrust into a community of Buddhists."

The gifted texts include the collected works of a number of the great masters of Tibetan Buddhism, whose works are only beginning to be examined in any depth as Tibetan studies expands as a field. The work Yonnetti is conducting on the collection will significantly enhance the repository of information from which scholars worldwide can draw.

Yonnetti is working with Holly Gayley, assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies, compiling an online guide to Tibetan resources at Norlin. One challenge to this project is that there isn’t an extensive history of studying Tibet by Europeans and North Americans, Yonnetti said. Many of the scholars translating Tibetan texts into English are first- or second-generation translators, and many of the translations vary immensely.

“For example, a word that translates to ‘wisdom’ can also mean ‘knowledge’ or ‘the pristine knowledge of the primordial,’” Yonnetti said. “I am interested in why scholars translate in a way that is not consistent.”

Yonnetti has also organized an exhibit on ritual implements, such as the ubiquitous temple bells and their use in Tibetan Buddhist ritual practice. The exhibit went on display in Norlin starting April 12.

“Tibetan study is such a new field,” he said. “The first people working in it in the U.S. academic world have only been doing so since the mid-1970s. One of my advisors told me a story about meeting a well-established scholar in a Tibetan studies library. She asked the scholar what she should study. He told her to crumple a piece of paper and throw it. Whatever it touches in the library likely had not yet been translated and probably nobody has written about it. There’s just so much to do in this field.”

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The Tibet Himalaya Initiative is putting CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� on experts’ map 

����Vlog�ƽ��, Colorado, became a focal point for Tibetan Buddhism and culture in 1974, when Rinpoche founded the school now known as Naropa University.

And for more than a decade, the ����Vlog�ƽ�� has had more tenured and tenure-track faculty who specialize in the study of contemporary Tibet than any other university in North America. No wonder that the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of the world’s Tibetan Buddhists, spoke on campus during a brief U.S. tour in June 2016.

CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� has been hosting Tibet-focused events, exhibits and conferences since 2006, and in 2015, three faculty members — Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Holly Gayley, Emily Yeh, Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography, and Associate Professor of Anthropology Carole McGranahan — decided to create the , with a small grant from the Office of the Chancellor.

Emily Yeh

“We realized we have quite a bit of expertise, and we already had a number of activities going on on campus,” Yeh says. “So we thought we should formalize it, to further highlight and develop our outreach efforts to the broader ����Vlog�ƽ��-Denver communities with their long-standing interest in Tibet, and to build ourselves as a center for research and outreach.”

Since its formation, the initiative has attracted associated CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� faculty and graduate students, as well as visiting scholars with expertise in Tibet and the Himalayas.

Having brought Tibetan Buddhist teacher Ringu Tulku Rinpoche to speak at its September 2015 launch and sponsored Tibet Arts Week — which brought renowned Tibetan artists Gonkar Gyatso and Dorje Tsering Chenaktsang (Jangbu) to campus — on campus in April 2016, THI is poised to host four other major events over the next six months.

• On April 17, Jacob Dalton, Khyentse Professor of Tibetan Buddhism at the University of California, Berkeley, will speak on,  The lecture will be held in the British Studies Room on fifth Floor of Norlin Library. A reception and exhibit on Tantric Ritual in Tibetan Buddhism will begin at 5 p.m., and the lecture will start at 5:30 p.m.
• The THI will co-sponsor the May 31-June 3 at the law school. Gayley serves on the steering committee and will lead a session at the conference, which features workshops and discussions for representatives from 78 Tibetan Buddhist communities, translation groups and universities.
• And Sept. 1-4, CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� will host the , which is held every two years. Keynote speakers will be author Manjushree Thapa, whose works of fiction and non-fiction explore current events in Nepal and themes of war and peace, development and diaspora, and scholar and writer Lama Jabb, a research fellow at Oxford University, whose research focuses on modern Tibetan literature and its interface with oral traditions.
• As a pre-conference event, Charles Ramble of Oxford University and the Sorbonne will deliver the fifth annual Trungpa Lecture in Buddhist Studies, a collaboration between Naropa and CU ����Vlog�ƽ��. His lecture on Sacred Landscapes in the Himalaya will take place in the evening of Thursday, August 31st.

“When prominent people come to campus for these kinds of intensive and high-level events it brings a lot of attention to what CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� offers in terms of Tibetan and Himalayan studies,” Gayley says.

Holly Gayley

Still in its infancy, the CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� initiative has gratefully “piggybacked” on events held at Columbia University in New York, such as the visits of Khenpos Sodargye and Tsultrim Lodrö, prominent cleric-scholars from Larung Gar in eastern Tibet, who visited campus in 2014 and 2015.

“We don’t yet have the resources to bring people from overseas. But Columbia has money and has brought a lot of interesting people from Tibet, filmmakers, poets, authors, scholars, and artists,” Yeh says. “That’s given us an amazing opportunity to bring them here.”

Increasing repression within the People’s Republic of China has made it challenging for Tibetans to get passports and visas to visit the West, Yeh says, especially following a series of high-profile 2008 protests and self-immolations that began in 2009 in Tibet. 

In 2016, the Chinese government began the demolition of buildings at the Larung Gar, one of the largest centers of Buddhist learning in Tibet, with the goal of reducing its population of monks and nuns, according to Radio Free Asia. (A 2015 photo essay by Gayley on Larung Gar can be found .)

Carole McGranahan

“There is still a lot of religious repression in China. Tibetan Buddhist leaders are subject to many restrictions and are always in a precarious position ,” Yeh says. “Larung Gar was long a very exceptional space where 10,000 monks and nuns lived and studied.”

The Tibet Himalaya Initiative hopes to build on both past and upcoming events to raise its profile and expand Tibet-Himalaya studies—including Nepal, Bhutan and Himalayan areas of India—at CU ����Vlog�ƽ��. At the top of the wish list, Gayley and Yeh say, is hiring an instructor in contemporary Tibetan language. Currently, Naropa offers instruction in classical Tibetan and a native Tibetan speaker meets with THI graduate students weekly through the Directed Independent Language Study program at the Anderson Language Technology Center.

“We’d like to be able to offer colloquial modern Tibetan. That’s our biggest goal, along with continuing to bring high profile speakers and other guests” Yeh says. “We want to allow not just for teaching language, but also offer literature and other contemporary coursework offerings.”

A bit further down the road, the initiative’s founders hope it will lead to more formalized curricular offerings.

“We want to expand its reach in terms of the number of students,” Gayley says. “Eventually, we hope to develop a Tibetan and Himalayan studies certificate or even program.”

THI is also working with the ����Vlog�ƽ��-based , which supports the work of Tibetan-language scholars and translators, to bring a master translator to ����Vlog�ƽ�� a few weeks each year to work with CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� and Naropa students, and the possibility of a translation institute of some kind is under discussion.

The library exhibit on Tantric Ritual in Tibetan Buddhism, in part, celebrates the collaboration of Tsadra and CU, since the iconography on display relate to a ritual found in texts recently donated to the University Libraries by Tsadra.

The exhibit, which opened this month on the second floor of Norlin, was designed by Eben Yonnetti, an MA student in Religious Studies and Provost Fellow for the University Libraries.

CU ����Vlog�ƽ�� “is really emerging on the horizon as an important university where Tibet-Himalaya studies is happening,” Yeh says. “And it’s all coming together through the foundation of the Tibet-Himalaya Initiative.”

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