Ma Bata Hami: Building a Decolonial Space for Indigenous Girls in Nepal, Collective Well-being, and Resistance

Sabnam Lama-Tamang • October 19, 2026

It was an evening in March in 2024. We were at a gathering organized by an Indigenous community, about a year after we actively began organizing Focus for Indigenous Girls (FIG), the first and only organization dedicated to Indigenous young women and girls in Nepal. 


After a year of pouring our emotional and mental labor entirely on cultivating this space—navigating the Indigenous peoples' movement and organizations, our identities as young indigenous girls, figuring out how to build a platform for Indigenous girls—we were overwhelmed. We were passionate but also hopeless, tired, confused and burnt out. Standing as young women trying to build the first Indigenous girls dedicated space and reclaiming heritage within a heavily NGO-projectized setting, often every system are designed fail you. The ways things are put an immense load on your shoulders. As young women and first-time founders, we were doing immense emotional labors in not just building these spaces but also in holding them.


That evening, surrounded by so many Indigenous activists, my co-founder and friend, Akina Singh Suwal, and I spotted Sheelasha Didi, an Indigenous queer feminist artist and an older sister to us. We had a realization. Longing, mixed with excitement, holding each other's hands, we said, "It’s been such a long time; we really need a dedicated space where we can rant. We have so much going on." When I try to recall this exact moment, I can’t remember which one of us verbalized it first but it doesn’t really matter. It was a shared realization born out of anticipation, urgency and even more significantly, a collective calling for a shared space. There was so much frustration, and without a dedicated space, young women would continue to never have an opportunity to unpack those experiences we have never talked. We needed a space where we weren’t required to immediately turn our experiences into a political demand or justify them. It was a simple and profound need to begin with ourselves: to recognise our lived experiences and articulate them. For us as founders, that frustration and longing were at their peak.

Building a space “म बाट हामी “ (Ma Bata Hami)
That conversation sparked an idea. We began designing the first gathering alongside Sheelasha and her Indigenous artist collectives Artree Nepal, Kalakulo and Untamable Dankini, an initiative by Sheelasha that anchors itself in rest, play, and sensory joy to navigate and challenge the complex interplay between identity and structural power. Also, in Newa: community, ‘Dankini’ often denotes an outspoken feminist women.

As we were brainstorming, and to give it a name, a question came to my mind: What do we want this space to cultivate for Indigenous girls?


I envision it as a room where Indigenous women and girls enter as (isolated) individuals carrying their own separate stories as ‘Me/I” and leave with a collective feeling of “we/us.” After a grounding conversation, a ranting session, shared reflection and a collective effort toward decolonizing and collective healing, that's how the name म बाट हामी (From 'Me' to 'We') was born.

Since then, म बाट हामी  (Ma Bata Hami) has been a bi-monthly safe sharing space cultivated by and for Indigenous women and girls. The first session, in collaboration with Sheelasha as: "Uncovering our Indigenous Identities: An afternoon of reverie and art with Untamable Dankini." Initially, we planned it to be an hour or two. This first closed-group gathering used art to acknowledge pain, resistance, love, history, memory, epistemology, and cosmological lineages are passed down within Indigenous and marginalized communities.

Unpacking Hegemony, Shame and Repression

That first session was profoundly impactful. Sitting in a comfortable circle with cushions, playing with toys and nail polishes, we opened with simple prompts:


"When did you first hear the term 'Indigenous'?"


"When did you realize that you were Indigenous?"


With just those questions, so much surfaced. We spoke about growing up not knowing our identities, how education curricula failed to teach us or actively misrepresented us, and how our classmates and teachers spoke subtle and sometimes direct discriminatory language, stigma, misogyny, and stereotypes at us. We unpacked our trauma, discomfort, shame and repressed questions and queries we had while realizing how these things toll down on young indigenous women and girls. We ranted, laughed, we cried, and we got angry together—and at the core, decolonizing our identities.

At the end, Sheelasha facilitated an exercise where each of us wrote down our thoughts, our anger, our pain, or fatigue we carrying onto a paper. We passed the papers around the circle to complete it through writing or drawings. It was about harmonizing our anger: turning frustration into shared emotion and a collective power. Indeed, we parted as "we" indigenous girls.


Never Said Before: Intergenerational Trauma

As our bi-monthly series continued, we held spaces for lived experiences never shared before with various mediums. Sometimes we watched documentaries and invited Indigenous feminist elder sisters to facilitate dialogues on reclaiming identity, statelessness, land rights, and historical struggles. In each of these spaces, almost all participants were in their very first time being in a space dedicated to Indigenous girls' and women's lived experiences— often dismissed as regressive or casteist-separatist propaganda.


I want to share a moment from one of the sessions where I found myself crying. I hadn't planned to, but the conversation turned to experiences with generational gap and language trauma. For some, language trauma meant being mocked for speaking one’s language or for having an accent; for me, it was the pain of not being able to speak my mother tongue, which was a direct consequence of intergenerational trauma my parents experienced when they moved to Kathmandu city for better work opportunities. It was also my first time speaking about it and naming what it was. Sharing it was raw and intense, but it also felt deeply powerful letting it out while being surrounded by my sisters.

Care as the Core of Movement Building

म बाट हामी  is an essential tool. As young Indigenous women founders, with an academic background in psychology and social work, we understood that care, well-being, and unpacking trauma and identity confusion must be at the centre for Indigenous youth organizing. We live in cities and navigate systems that thrive on our alienation—systems designed to erase our histories and mold us into a singular, homogenized identity of 'unified Nepali'. Our parents were often too busy surviving, our textbooks don't teach about our histories, and dignified media representation is virtually rare. Yet we carry pride, rootedness, and ancestral memories within us; we lack spaces to hold them. म बाट हामी became that exact space.


Over time, they weren't just standalone events; they became an integrated methodology of our broader actions. When we organise trainings for instance on land rights, we commence it with this reflective circle with the belief that spaces with young Indigenous girls must start by unpacking our stories: who we are, how we understand our communities, and what lived experiences we carry. Conversations around identity discomfort, feeling "not indigenous enough", suppression, and confusion must come first, if not first, authentic political agency cannot be unlocked.


We also integrate Mandala-making—using visual drawing and creative expression to process our experiences. During one gathering with over 25 girls, as stories were being shared, deep grief and difficult experiences were shared, and participants cryed together. Unprepared for that degree of emotional release and relatability, we rushed to find some tissues. Since that day, I have always made sure to have tissues on hand. This space we built has grown into rooms that allowed such degrees of vulnerability.

The Realities of Organizing as Young Women

Over the last year, Nepal has undergone major political transitions. FIG has also been stepping into frontline activism and land rights resistance of Indigenous women. Because of these challenging and urgent work, we haven't always maintained the bi-monthly regularity of Ma Bata Hami. I am highlighting a reality honestly: these healing spaces are not easy to organize. They require immense emotional labor, safety, preparedness, and appropriate timing. A contradiction did occur. While we understood care as central to movements, the urgency of resistance, navigating systems and empathy we carry as young women organizers, care has been pushed right back to the margins. 


I continuously talk and advocate for these approaches as essential to the well-being of young Indigenous women and as a path toward decolonization. Its crucial to understand that young Indigenous women and girls do not view care and trauma healing as an activity. We integrate it to the forefront of movement-building, feminist organizing, and resistance. 

I want to say to policymakers, funders, researchers, and, most importantly, our Indigenous elders: identity trauma, cultural disconnection, shame, the feeling of not being "Indigenous enough," and the lack of safe spaces for decolonization sit at the very center of working with Indigenous youth. But recognition isn’t enough. We must ask: Who creates space of care? Whose labour makes it possible and is that labor recognized and resourced?


To truly understand and empower young Indigenous people, we must intentionally care for these lived experiences, embedding creative, safe, community-rooted well-being into every step. Spaces like Ma Bata Hami is not simply a space to vent; it can be a space where young Indigenous and marginalized peoples can make sense of our lived experiences, understand what we carry and determine what collective actions is needed for our rightsm liberation and healing. 

Sabnam Lama is a Tamang Indigenous feminist, student, youth activist, researcher and community organizer from Nepal. Over 3 years now, she has been leading Focus for Indigenous Girls (FIG), an Indigenous girls-led organization to connect and reclaim with their identities, share lived experiences, capacitate and organise for collective-feminist rights and movement building. 

Her work centres Indigenous women’s and girls’ lived experiences, leadership, resistance and intergenerational struggles. She brings the role of care and collective well-being within the movements she actively organizes: feminist, youth, indigenous, climate and especially the Gen-Z movement in Nepal. Recently, Sabnam completed her BA in Social Work and Psychology from St. Xavier’s College, Maitighar in Nepal. 

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