'Everest’s Erasure': How Colonial Mountaineering Legacy Fuels Climate Crisis & Indigenous Exclusion on Sacred Himalayan Peaks
Original framing: “‘Tenzing biopic made me wonder what he would think if he could return to the mountain today’ – glaciologist and mountaineer” — The Conversation - Global
The review and film erase the *Mani Rimdu* ceremonies performed by Sherpa climbers to appease mountain spirits before ascents, or the 1996 protest by Sherpa monks who blocked a Japanese expedition for disrespecting sacred sites. Tenzing himself, though Nepali Sherpa, was co-opted into the colonial narrative; his later life as a Buddhist monk in Darjeeling—where he advocated for Himalayan environmental protection—is absent. The ‘sacred’ is reduced to a prop for heroism, while indigenous stewardship (e.g., rotational grazing to prevent glacial debris flows) is treated as folklore. Even the name *Chomolungma* (Goddess Mother of the World) is anglicized to ‘Everest,’ erasing its theological weight.
The Everest narrative is a *colonial palimpsest*—layers of imperial extraction, indigenous erasure, and capitalist exploitation now accelerating ecological collapse.
The biopic and review reify the ‘conquest’ myth while obscuring how Sherpa labor, Tibetan spirituality, and Himalayan glaciers are all casualties of the same system: one that treats peaks as property, climbers as heroes, and indigenous knowledge as folklore. The trickster reveals the absurdity in charging $65,000 for a ‘summit’ while Sherpa earn $20/day to carry waste down—yet the solemnity of ‘climate crisis’ framing conceals this injustice. Solutions must begin with *restitution*: returning sacred texts, centering Sherpa women’s voices, and treating *Chomolungma* not as a stage for heroism but as a living deity whose anger is now literalized by melting ice. The mountain’s future depends on unlearning the colonial playbook that brought us here.