2026 Fellowship Cohort
The inaugural HCWN Fellowship brings together six Indigenous and community-rooted storytellers working across the Himalayan region. Through three months of learning, independent field research, community engagement and editorial development, the fellows are documenting environmental change through the knowledge systems, histories and lived realities of the communities they are connected to. Their work spans oral ecological knowledge, pastoralism, traditional medicine, agriculture, sacred landscapes, disaster preparedness and post-disaster recovery.
Chhaya Namchu
Chhaya Namchu
Chhaya is from the Lepcha community in Sikkim, India. Her fellowship work explores the Kanchenjunga landscape through Lepcha creation histories, sacred geography and relationships with the River Teesta, bringing Indigenous knowledge into conversation with hydropower, climate governance and contemporary environmental change.
Dawa Dolma
Dawa Dolma
Dawa is part of the Tibetan refugee community in Ladakh, India. Through the HCWN Fellowship, she is exploring how climate volatility is reshaping apricot cultivation in Ladakh’s Sham Valley, bringing together farmers’ observations, oral traditions, agricultural knowledge and changing environmental conditions.
Ehsam Ullah Baig
Ehsam Ullah Baig
Ehsam comes from the Wakhi community in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan. His fellowship research examines community-rooted knowledge of floods and disaster preparedness, asking how the observations and warning practices of mountain communities can work alongside formal early-warning systems.
Mohd Irfan
Mohd Irfan
Irfan belongs and works across Pahari and Gujjar community contexts in Jammu & Kashmir, India. His HCWN research explores Baramah, a twelve-month Gojri folk-song cycle, as a living archive of seasonal, pastoral and ecological knowledge, and how that knowledge is changing alongside climate and transhumance in the Pir Panjal.
Sushan Bhattarai
Sushan Bhattarai
Sushan belongs to Khasa Community and is working with communities in Upper Humla, Nepal, where his fellowship research focuses on Amchi medicine and the ecological knowledge surrounding medicinal plants. His story examines how climate change, healthcare access and the weakening transmission of knowledge between generations are affecting this community-rooted system of healing.
Yalember Dewan
Yalember Dewan
Yalember is from the Yakha/Kirat community and is based in Sikkim, India. His fellowship research follows communities along the Teesta River in the years after the 2023 flood, exploring recovery, changing livelihoods, disaster governance and how local ecological knowledge informs adaptation to continuing environmental uncertainty.
Walk with us
If you are an Indigenous storyteller, researcher, community leader, media platform, university, funder, or ally connected to this vision, we would be glad to hear from you.
