The village sits 100km from Chiang Mai. Four to five hours on roads that progressively narrow, then disappear from Google Maps entirely.
We arrived on a Sunday evening. The church was under renovation, so worship happened in one of the homes — benches arranged in rows, children in their best clothes, a pastor speaking in a language that none of us could follow but all of us could feel.
That was the first lesson. You don't need language to understand reverence.
Over the next four days, we harvested corn. We watched the village teacher explain letters in a script that has no standardised written form. We ate meals we couldn't name but couldn't stop eating. We watched a grandmother weave a pattern she'd learned from her grandmother, who learned it from hers.
Indigenous documentation isn't about data. It's about trust. Every interview, every photograph, every recorded story is a relationship — given by someone who has every reason not to trust you, and has decided to anyway.
The Karen village teacher asked for a laminator. Not for anything sentimental. For school. She needed a laminator to protect the teaching materials she creates by hand.
We brought one. That's also documentation.