In the highland town of Seppa, young hands are keeping ancient fire alive — and Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister Pema Khandu was there to witness it. On Thursday, 13 November 2026, Khandu attended the Indigenous Faith Youth Festival 2026 in Seppa, headquarters of East Kameng district, where students from Nyubu Nyvgam Yerko School, Rang performed traditional prayers as young Nyibus — indigenous shamans — before the Chief Minister.

Young Nyibus of Rang carry forward a living tradition

Khandu described the moment as 'truly humbling,' saying that receiving blessings through sacred prayers performed by the young shamans filled him with 'immense joy and hope.' The students belong to Nyubu Nyvgam Yerko School in Rang, an institution dedicated to training the next generation in the shamanic traditions of Arunachal Pradesh's tribal communities. Nyibus are the custodians of oral liturgy, healing rituals, and cosmological knowledge that have guided indigenous communities across the state for centuries.

'Seeing these young students carrying forward the sacred traditions of our ancestors is reassuring,' Khandu wrote, underscoring the significance of indigenous knowledge and spiritual heritage being transmitted generationally. It is a transmission that many tribal elders and scholars have feared might be broken — by urbanisation, by formal schooling disconnected from local practice, and by the steady spread of outside religious influences into the region's villages.

Seppa festival as a bulwark against cultural erosion

The Indigenous Faith Youth Festival is an annual gathering designed precisely to counter that erosion. Arunachal Pradesh is home to dozens of distinct tribal communities — among them the Nyishi, Adi, and Tagin — each with its own shamanic lineage, ritual calendar, and oral archive. State governments have over the years supported documentation and formal transmission of these faiths alongside mainstream education, recognising that once an oral tradition loses its last practitioner, it is effectively extinct. A festival that places young Nyibus at its centre is, in that light, a statement of institutional intent.

What makes this year's edition notable is the visibility it has earned at the highest political level. When a Chief Minister publicly frames a youth shamanic performance as a source of personal blessing — not merely a cultural showcase — it signals that indigenous faith is being treated as living heritage rather than museum exhibit. That framing matters for policy: it creates political cover for curricula reforms, language preservation budgets, and community-led knowledge centres.

What follows the festival will be the real test

The question practitioners and educators in East Kameng will now ask is whether the Chief Minister's visible endorsement translates into concrete steps — the incorporation of indigenous knowledge modules into state school syllabi, sustained funding for schools like Nyubu Nyvgam Yerko, and structured mentorship pathways that let young Nyibus practise alongside senior shamans without sacrificing formal education. Those decisions, made quietly in Itanagar's secretariat after the festival flags come down, will determine whether Thursday's moment in Seppa was a turning point or a beautiful photograph.

For now, the image of schoolchildren performing ancestral prayers before an audience that includes their state's most senior elected leader is itself a form of cultural validation — the kind that communities in the Northeast have long asked for and rarely received so plainly.