Sisterhood of the snow leopard protectors
Kunda Dixit
One of the most powerful recent examples of hyperlocal conservation in the Himalaya is the effort by two sisters from Dolpo, Tshiring Lhamu Lama and Sonam Choekyi Lama, to protect Nepal’s snow leopards.
Their decade-long work to save the endangered and elusive Himalayan cat in this distant district in Nepal is now featured in a compelling new documentary.
The Snow Leopard Sisters has been doing the rounds of film festivals in North America to critical acclaim since its world premiere at SXSW in Austin in March, and has been screened at Telluride and other festivals.
The documentary received much praise for its many-layered depiction of the struggle between ecology and economics, tradition and modernity, indigenous and mainstream, spiritualism and materialism, between gender equality and entrenched patriarchy, and conservation versus livelihoods.
The sisters in The Snow Leopard Sisters are actually not Tshiring Lhamu and Sonam Choekyi.Tshiring is the documentary’s main protagonist, and her sister Sonam is the film’s co-director currently based in New York.
Sisters refers to Tshiring’s Lhamu and 17-year-old Tenzin Bhuti whom she takes on as an apprentice for snow leopard research in Upper Dolpo. Tenzin’s women-led household had just lost 40 of its goats to a snow leopard attack, and Tshiring knows that snow leopards cannot be saved unless the Dolpopa learn to live with the cats.
The nocturnal predators have this cruel habit of entering livestock corrals and killing for the sake of killing many more goats and yaks than they can possibly eat. But snow leopards are also regarded as sacred ‘pets of the gods’ in the Buddhist regions of northern Nepal.
There are only about 400 snow leopards in Nepal, 90 of them in Shey-Phoksundo National Park in Dolpo where their numbers are shrinking because of retaliatory poisoning by herders to protect livestock and climate breakdown.
Ever since she was growing up, Tshiring Lhamu harboured a deep spiritual affinity for snow leopards. At the beginning of the film, we see Tshiring playing back a camera trap clip of the trail above Phoksundo Lake when she sees a pair of snow leopards ambling past the field of vision.
She lets out an ecstatic shriek, and narrates: “The first time I saw snow leopards, I fell in love.” Tshiring Lhamu quit her job with the national park and struck off on her lonely quest to find ways to save the cats from revenge attacks of herders.
The film follows a parallel plot of Tenzin, who has just lost a sister she was close to, the family’s goat herd has been massacred by snow leopards, and her father is jailed. She is under pressure from her grandfather to get married “because it is our culture and karma”.
The stories of the two women then converge: Tshiring Lhamu takes Tenzin under her wing as a trainee. Because her family is angry with snow leopards, it will help if she can convince Tenzin about the importance of conservation which she can then pass on to her community.
But the family gives Tenzin a two-week ultimatum, she will have to get married to a cousin after the apprenticeship is over.
Directors Sonam Choekyi Lama, Ben Ayers and Andrew Lynch have used Dolpo’s stunning landscape as a backdrop for a nuanced and sensitive portrayal of the bond between the two women in their quest to find snow leopards — with Tshiring’s baby son Sontse strapped to her back.
There are spectacular drone shots of the three as they cross the high passes to Komang and Shey Gompa. The cinematography evokes the sweeping scenery of films shot in Dolpo like Éric Valli’s 1999 documentary Caravan, and Min Bahadur Bham’s Shambhala last year.
The snow leopard is up there in the crags somewhere, sleeping. But in the mornings and evenings, they are so well camouflaged they are invisible. All this is also reminiscent of Peter Matthiessen’s 1974 book The Snow Leopard about his unsuccessful quest with zoologist George Schaller to sight the animal in Dolpo. The snow leopard becomes a spiritual and existential symbol of something much greater than just the cat.
There is a similar transcendental undertone in Snow Leopard Sisters, as the camera follows the two scouring the jagged horizon through binoculars. Tshiring patiently mentors Tenzin about data-keeping, analysing tracks in the snow, sniffing urinary markers, deciphering fresh scat, finding fur stuck to rocks, and installing cameras.
Tshiring Lhamu and Tenzin Bhuti pin their hope on monks, hoping that they can convince their congregation not to kill the predators. But in Shey-Saldang, monk Tondup Lama tells the two women the snow leopard is a “demon, possessed by the devil … it has only sin its heart”.
The dejected women and baby press on over the 5,010m Shey Pass to where head monk Lopan Dawa Tenzin in Tsakang Monastery has declared Dolpo a haven for all animals. “Everywhere people are violating the rights of animals, we destroy forests, we hunt, we set fires, fight wars, and drive animals away,” the monk says. “People have too much greed.”
It is karma that has brought the two women together, he tells them, and their karma is now intertwined with the karma of the snow leopard.
As the two-week internship nears its end, the prospect of marriage looms for Tenzin. But it is clear that the time with Tshiring has empowered her, she is now more confident and is determined not to get married. She visits her father in the prison in Dunai, who does not insist on marriage anymore.
In an abrupt change of scenery, we see Tshring walking down a street in San Francisco with Sontse in a baby carrier on her back. Instead of towering mountains there are skyscrapers, and a sad snow leopard in the zoo. She is at a Wildlife Conservation Network conference to speak and fundraise for her work in Dolpo.
The Snow Leopard Sisters Impact Campaign is building new leopard-proof corrals for herders in Dolpo made by assembling light weight metal frames and gabion wire designed by Tshiring and Tenzin.
This feature-length documentary needs to be screened in cinemas across Nepal not just to spread awareness about snow leopards, but the essence of what nature conservations means for a society marching mindlessly in the pursuit of ‘development’.
90 min
Cinematography: Sonam Choekyi Lama, Andrew Lynch
Producers: Joanna Natasegara, Ian Davies, Tshiring Lhamu Lama, Torquil Jones