CULTURE PROFILE| << | CHAPTER |
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HMONG
AN INTRODUCTION TO THEIR HISTORY AND CULTURE
CULTURE PROFILE |
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CONTENTS | ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | INTRODUCTION | PEOPLE | HISTORY | LIFE IN LAOS | EXPERIENCE IN THAILAND | LITERACY | RESETTLEMENT | LANGUAGE | WORDS, PHRASES, SAYINGS | BIBLIOGRAPHY | ||||
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SCROLL TO: Literacy and Education in Laos |
Literacy and Education The popular notion of the Hmong is that they are an oral or “preliterate” people, lacking an alphabet and knowledge of basic literacy processes. In this account, most Hmong people did not read and write as late as the 1950s, and many had never seen books or even held pencils. Such characterizations are not altogether inaccurate. The Hmong scholar Yang Dao has reported that in some provinces of Laos in the 1970s, the rate of Hmong who did not read or write was as high as 99%, while a 1986 study by Karen Green and Steven Reder of 20 Hmong refugee families in the United States indicated that 80% of those surveyed could not read or write Lao, and 70% could not read Hmong. Yet to think of the Hmong as a preliterate people oversimplifies the past and ignores the present. Far from being a people unfamiliar with writing, the Hmong have long been aware of the powers and potentials of written language. Moreover, they have experienced diverse forms of literacy in multiple languages over the last century. In recent years, Hmong men and women in the United States have developed new literacy skills in English and Hmong, while thousands of young Hmong have graduated from secondary schools and colleges. Many have earned graduate degrees. The Power of LiteracyHmong stories reveal a preoccupation with the power of written language. According to Hmong legends, the Hmong once ruled a kingdom in China where they possessed their own lands, their own armies, and their own indigenous Hmong alphabet. In the continuous warfare against the expansionist Chinese, however, the Hmong king was killed, his family butchered, and great numbers of Hmong people driven south. In the course of their escape, the Hmong “book”—the symbol for their Hmong alphabet and knowledge of writing—fell into the waters of the Yellow River and was lost. In another version of this story, it was eaten by horses as the Hmong slept, exhausted from their flight. In a third version, it was eaten by the Hmong themselves, who were starving. |
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The vast majority of people in Laos received little or no education. |
Literacy and Education in LaosBy the end of the 19th century, thousands of Hmong refugees from China had settled in northern Vietnam and Laos, where they lived in remote mountainous regions. Public schooling was largely unavailable in these areas. In fact, schooling throughout Laos was extremely limited. The educational policy of the French colonial government, Yang Dao has written, was to create an aristocracy of peoples, with a highly trained elite at the top and the minority ethnic peoples such as the Hmong kept in a condition of “intellectual inferiority” at the bottom. In six decades of French rule, not a single high school was constructed in Laos, and by 1940, only 7,000 Laotian students were attending primary schools in a colony of approximately 1 million people. Very few of these students were Hmong. Nor did the situation change significantly after Laos achieved independence, when ethnic minorities were still more likely to be denied schooling than to receive it. In the educational system sponsored by the Royal Lao Government, students from the wealthiest classes were favored over students from low-income sectors of Laotian society. This meant that the vast majority of people in Laos received little or no education. A 1973 study of the Laotian educational system showed that while students from the wealthiest classes constituted less than 1% of the total Lao population in 1968–1969, they totaled 24% of the enrollment in Lao schools, while the poorest classes, which accounted for 98% of the total population, made up only .4% of school attendance. By the early 1960s, a two-tier educational system was firmly in place. While the children of the wealthy, urbanized, French-educated Lao elite had access to schooling, the vast majority of children in Laos received limited or no schooling at all. The situation was even worse for the Hmong, the overwhelming majority of whom had no access to public schools. For example, while the ethnic Lao accounted for roughly half the population of Laos in the 1950s, they made up 88% of the enrollment in secular schools. The Hmong, in contrast, accounted for less than 4% of the school population, even though they constituted about 8% of the total population of Laos. The late 1960s saw an effort to provide more educational opportunities for non-French-speaking children with the introduction of the Lao-medium FaNgum middle and secondary schools. Because these schools were located in lowland urban areas, however, few Hmong students attended. |
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The prospects for Hmong literacy development began to change in the 1950s and 1960s. |
New OpportunitiesThe prospects for Hmong literacy development began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, however, with the ascendancy in Laos of two very different powers with very different reasons for seeking out the Hmong: the United States CIA and Christian missionaries. Literacy and the CIA As the Hmong army became central to the CIA’s secret war in Laos, Hmong leadership found they had greater leverage to make certain demands upon the Royal Lao Government and its patron, the United States. One of the demands was for greater access to education. In response, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) financed an intensive school construction program for Hmong students in the context of a nation-building effort designed to support U.S. goals in Laos. Under the direction of Edgar “Pop” Buell, a retired Indiana farmer who had come to Laos with the International Voluntary Services, USAID built hundreds of schoolhouses in remote Hmong villages. According to Don Schanche, a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post, the U.S. school-building program built almost 300 elementary schools, 9 junior high schools, 2 senior high schools, and a teacher training school. A study of Hmong schooling rates in Laos during this period reported that Hmong enrollment in the village schools rose from 1,500 students in 20 schools in 1960, to 10,000 students by 1969. Students in these schools learned to read and write in Lao, studying a curriculum of Lao history, government, and ethics. Those who remained in school beyond a few years were introduced to French language and literacy.5 Missionary Literacy The second major force stimulating Hmong literacy development in Laos was the creation in the 1950s of the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), a writing system designed by Western missionary-linguists for the Hmong language. The RPA was used to translate bibles, prayer books, hymnals and other religious materials into written Hmong and thus facilitate the spread of Christianity. Both Catholic and Protestant missions taught the RPA in bible classes, and some Hmong learned to read and write their native language in such settings. By 1959, for example, small groups of Hmong were studying the system in the area around Sam Neua. Although the Hmong had some access to Lao language literacy in the village schools, the RPA was unique in that it offered Hmong people a chance to become literate in their own language—a compelling prospect for some Hmong. As one man recalled to researcher John Duffy,
While the RPA was known to some in Laos, the alphabet achieved a far more prominent role when it caught on among Hmong refugees in Thailand. As the Hmong were resettled in Western nations across the world, family members, friends, and other loved ones who had been separated needed a way to communicate across distances. Many Hmong turned to the RPA, which was in the Hmong language, was easy to learn and was taught informally in one-to-one settings. In The Mother of Writing, the missionary-linguist William Smalley and two Hmong colleagues estimate that thousands of Hmong learned the RPA this way, and the writing system continues to be used by Hmong in the United States, in China, and elsewhere. 5 In regions not controlled by the Royal Lao Government, the communist Pathet Lao were also providing literacy training. In 1964, the Pathet Lao reported 36,200 children enrolled in “liberated” elementary schools, with another 250 students in secondary schools, according to Joel Halpern and Peter Kunstadter. The Pathet Lao also claimed to have opened four teacher training schools and two adult education schools and to have published 380,000 textbooks. The Pathet Lao also developed and promoted its own writing system for the Hmong language. |
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The RPA offered Hmong people a chance to become literate in their own language. |
While the RPA is the most widely used of the Hmong writing systems, it is only one of many that have been developed. In their book, Smalley and his Hmong colleagues document at least 14 attempts to create a writing system for the Hmong language over the last 100 years, and at least six of these are still in use. These systems have been created by Western missionaries, who used literacy as a tool for spreading Christian doctrine; by governments in China and Southeast Asia, who viewed literacy as a means for promoting national identity and diminishing ethnicity; and by Hmong people themselves, who in the last 40 years have produced at least seven independent writing systems for their language, most of which have been linked to complex political and cosmological visions. |
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Literacy and Education in Thailand Hmong continued to acquire literacy skills in first-asylum refugee camps in Thailand, where children attended Thai and Hmong schools, where adults obtained English and vocational training, where missionary work using the RPA continued, and where many Hmong received training for the clerical and administrative work necessary to maintain the large and functioning bureaucracy that managed the Ban Vinai refugee camp, home to most Hmong refugees. As part of their preparation for life in the United States, Hmong refugees who had been accepted for resettlement received several months of training in English at the U.S. Department of State-funded Overseas Refugee Training Program at the Phanat Nikhom Refugee Processing Center. It is estimated that more than 20,000 Hmong refugees also studied Hmong literacy at the processing center’s Native Language Literacy program. |
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Literacy and Education in the United States Since the Hmong began arriving in the United States in the 1970s, thousands have attended U.S. schools, earning high school diplomas, master’s degrees, and doctorates. In addition, many Hmong men and women have acquired English literacy in adult ESL classes and Hmong literacy in community-based language programs. One measure of the growing importance of literacy for the Hmong is the increasingly active role Hmong are taking in the civic life of their communities, using literacy as a means to engage in questions of race, citizenship, and the place of newcomers in American cities. A recent study by John Duffy of Hmong literacy development in a Midwestern U.S. city examined how Hmong residents used their English language literacy skills for writing letters, editorials, press releases, and other texts to advance increasingly differentiated political and cultural agendas. Thus, the recent history of the Hmong undermines the conventional notion of the Hmong as preliterate people. While it is true that many Hmong people in Laos did not learn to read and write until the latter part of the 20th century, many other Hmong in the same period were exposed to literacy in several languages and in different writing systems. In this sense, the literacy experiences of the Hmong are far richer and more complex than commonly acknowledged |
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The Cultural Orientation Project--http://www.culturalorientation.net,
for more information contact sanja@cal.org |