The People & Nature Collectives (PNC)

The end goal of The People & Nature Collectives is to facilitate inter-generational knowledge transfer through communication between vibrant communities of practice and a constant flow of students and researchers to the collective. Thus, the PNC will be a knowledge resource centre for various stakeholders having an accessible and retrievable archive generated from Keystone’s three decades of work. It will be a hub for indigenous culture, knowledge and art, led by the community and a repository and an enabler of Community Foundations in area centres. It aims to host a leadership/fellowship programme that enables more holistic conversations around leadership to generate interest in researching and revitalising traditional knowledge and practices.

The centre will serve as a space where communities can create their own knowledge pools and have a place to access and practice. A learning centre for communities to store, share, create and propagate their knowledge systems. Music, language, food cultures, agricultural patterns, festivals and social gatherings and many more facets of indigenous community life are undergoing change. These aspects could be documented and made available to people to initiate dialogue and enable practice in the spirit of a cultural revival. The space is aimed at allowing communities to interact with their own and each other’s narratives and lifeway strategies—especially in the context of modern modes of interfacing with external communities and mainstream knowledge processes.

The centre would host two kinds of archives—an organisational archive focussing extensively on information present within the knowledge structures of Keystone and a community archive, focussing entirely on indigenous and traditional knowledge, to be utilised primarily by indigenous communities for storing, transmitting and retrieving specialised and commonly-available knowledge.