DROKPA:

The Nomadic Mountain People of Tibet. (By Diane Barker)

Reproduced here with the kind permission of Caduceus Magasine

Tibet is well known as "a land of snows", having the youngest and therefore some of the highest mountains on earth. Journeying there I have found a landscape of awesome beauty with an average altitude of 14,000 feet and enjoying an extreme and savage climate. It struck me that it takes a tough and resilient people to flourish in these conditions, and also that perhaps the vastness and solitude of the landscape had given encouragement to the Tibetan's natural bent to visionary mysticism and to their unique brand of Buddhism.

I have been photographing Tibetans, both inside and outside Tibet, for about ten years. Deeply inspired by a culture that places spirituality at the heart of life, I was also impressed by the gutsy yet peaceful way that the Tibetans were preserving this culture in exile, becoming arguably one of the most successful refugee groups in the world.

However I have been most moved by the Drokpa, or nomads, living inside Tibet. Drokpa means "people of the solitudes" and they are truly a mountain people, herding livestock on high altitude pastures for millennia. They live a holistic lifestyle in harmony with nature and the seasons, and one which has remained, unchanged, over centuries - making them the repository of original Tibetan culture.

On two trips to Tibet in 2000 and 2001 I was privileged to be able to stay with nomad families in Amdo and in Kham in eastern Tibet, and found myself totally smitten by their wild earthiness and independent spirit, as well as their friendliness, hospitality and sense of fun. I felt all the nomad people that I met had an unusual, primordial sort of power and dignity, whilst also being refreshingly simple and uncomplicated. They have a raw energy, a tremendous vitality that I rarely find in Western culture.

The drokpa men reminded me of cowboys or Native American Indians in their proud appearance and in their outdoor life of freedom, riding the open range. The small local towns frequented for trading also had a flavour of the Wild West, with horses tied to hitching rails on the street and drokpa men comparing guns in the tiny cafes.

However it was the women who really impressed me, holding life together and doing most of the work. I had the sense that the women were the unsung heroines who have been particularly important in keeping faith, hope and Tibetan culture alive in recent decades. I really enjoyed hanging out with them in the black yak hair tents, the warm heart of nomad life - the place for eating, sleeping, making butter, cheese and curd, socialising, saying prayers, making and having babies, dying. Among the women Tashi was my favourite - always laughing. We had a lot of fun together miming earthy jokes. I think she is extraordinarily beautiful, of which she is totally unaware. It's something to do with her open heart and sense of joy.

Loving them as I do I worry about what the future holds for the drokpa people. Due to the remote nature of the areas suitable for nomad life their culture has survived so far, but there is a very real danger that the drokpa could experience the same fate as other indigenous peoples like the Native Americans, the Aboriginal of Australia and the Bushmen of South Africa, due to the lack of value of their culture by the ruling body and to attempts to settle, and thus control them. There is a very real clash of culture between a ruling society dominated (as we in the west are) by considerations of time and money, and the drokpa lifestyle which is governed by the seasons, and by a mystical consciousness that very much lives for the moment.

Maybe there is hope. As Zara Fleming, friend and former Chair of the Tibet Society, puts so eloquently: "Indigenous tribes and their environment are vanishing all over the world and yet despite the rigors of Chinese communism and the harsh conditions under which they live, the nomads of Tibet have managed to survive. They represent one of the last great examples of the nomadic pastoral way of life and they have succeeded in preserving their unique nomadic culture with a truly indomitable spirit."

For Diane Barker's photographs of Tibetan nomads (Drokpa) and other Tibetans in the Tibetan diaspora click here.