Funded through an award from the Archie Green Cultural Documentation Program of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, Documenting Food Access and Cultural Resiliency Among Bhutanese Nepali Refugees in Burlington, Vermont is a twelve month long, collaborative cultural documentation project that explores community strategies for growing cultural relevant foods, the perpetuation of traditional foodways, adaptation of agricultural methods in response to geographic displacement and impacts of climate change, and the critical role traditional foods and agricultural practices hold in community wellbeing.
The twelve month project term provides an opportunity to work with community members across the full cycle of a year—as the intertwined seasonal, ritual and agricultural calendar unfolds. Through this work we will generate a resource for—and with—the Bhutanese Nepali community so that the knowledge and experience of these community elders remains available for future generations.
Audio recordings, transcripts and photographs created through the project will become part of the collections of the Archive of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Vermont Folklife Archive.
Dil Maya Rai in the Rai family garden.