This is perhaps the most significant image I have captured, and it was even part of an overland expedition I had planned for three years.
These are the rarely documented Raute forest nomads in western Nepal in the foothills of the Himalayas. They are one of the most undocumented people in the world. For 900 years this isolated tribe lived in the most remote parts of Nepal. They speak a language of unknown origin and have traditions and ideology unique to their 900 year old culture. They hunt Langur monkeys as their only meat and exist with the spirits of forest deities. Outsiders are strictly taboo and often met with violence, so we were the first two foreigners to get to visit their camp since a BBC crew documented them in the late 1990s. This woman is the daughter of the chief.
When we found them, at the invitation of their chief, we anticipated finding 250 individuals in three camps. In January of 2019 we found their last camp and only 65 people. Many had died, almost all the kids, and the rest had dispersed, ending the reign of a culture that once counted in the thousands. In October of 2019 we tried again to find them but, they were gone. Only an abandoned camp remained.
This...is the last known photo of Chatrapuji the last Raute princess. It is the last known image of the Raute people---period.