# Nyishi people

The Nyishi community is the largest ethnic group in Arunachal Pradesh in north-eastern India. In Nyishi, their traditional language, Nyi refers to "a human" and the word shi denotes "a being", which combined refers to a human being. They are spread across eight districts of Arunachal Pradesh: Kra Daadi, Kurung Kumey, East Kameng, West Kameng, Papum Pare, parts of Lower Subansiri, Kamle and Pakke Kessang district. The Kurung Kumey and Kra Daadi districts have the largest concentration of Nyishi population who are generally referred to as "Aya Nyasang". The Nyishis also live in the Sonitpur and North Lakhimpur districts of Assam.

## Quotes

* The missionaries do not ask us to practise costly rituals or change our lifestyles, languages or even our wardrobe. Many of the converted tribals, like me, have not even been asked to change names. We have received the gospel of Jesus, enlightenment, education. My own Nyishi tribesmen were rude, uncultured and a warrior tribe. The church has made us better people. What is wrong in that? ... Christianity was born in Central Asia. How can it be foreign?
** Hakam, Bethel Prayer Centre pastor
* Missionaries offer medicine, food grain and cash to the needy on the back of strong funding from outside. Earlier, we were all one. There was no disharmony. But now converted tribals — our own brethren till a couple of years back — look down upon us.
** N. Songtheng, a Lisu tribal working for the preservation of indigenous faith
* They are working for conversion; we are working for education. Their plans are treacherous... Tribal culture ought to be preserved with the same zeal that missionaries display while converting tribals.
** Bindu Nair, a Hindi teacher at Vivekananda Kendra Vidyalaya, Changlang.
** "How churches in Arunachal Pradesh are facing resistance over conversion of tribals", The Economic Times of India (19 November 2017)

### Tribes of India (1982)

       Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1982). Tribes of India : the struggle for survival. University of California Press. p.307 ff, also quoted in in Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar (1993) 227ff and in Decolonizing the Hindu Mind (2001) Elst K.
* [Thus, the Nishi tribe in the North-East finds that in Christian mission schools] “a good many Nishi youths have been converted to Christianity. This in itself need not have created any difficulty, for Nishis, like most tribals, are not greatly concerned about the beliefs of their fellow-tribesmen, and if the Christian converts had been equally tolerant, their rejection of traditional Nishi religion might have been ignored by the great mass of conservative tribesmen. However, the converts seem to have been lacking in tolerance and tact, and educated young men of villages affected by the ideological split to whom I spoke in 1980 complained bitterly that Christians deliberately disrupted the harmony of community life. They allegedly refuse to share the houses of adherents of the old faith, and this meant that old parents were abandoned by their converted children, who claimed that they could not stay in dwellings where ‘devils’ were worshipped. …
* My informants insisted that the missions encouraged the establishment of separate settlements for Christians, and that the Christians refused to participate in village festivals, thereby demonstrating their dissociation from the tribal community. It was alleged, moreover, that converts, not satisfied with this symbolic withdrawal from village life, went a step further by abusing and physically attacking priests as they invoked the gods in the performance of traditional Nishi rituals.”...
* “Nishi teachers at the government high-school in Yazali, who were members of a youth organization formed to promote traditional tribal culture, told me how frustrated they were because they could not match the large sums lavished by the missions on propaganda which is undermining the old Nishi life-style.”