Week 2

Thao-Nhi “Jasmine” Vu

A02

Week 2: Marginalization & Miseducation

History is written in the eyes of the winner. The very white, very imperialist “winner”. In my classes and readings, I’ve come to realize that we define the ruling (read: oppressing) societies and communities by their:

1. Victories (the Revolutionary War, D-Day)
2. Accomplishments (the works of the Renaissance, the Space Race)

On the other hand, when describing marginalized (read: outside of European spheres) communities, we most often define them by the struggles they have gone through (slavery, the Vietnam War, the Holocaust) and the suffering they’ve underwent. In focusing on the bad versus the good, history effectively takes away the agency of marginalized communities, making them a passive recipient of the times — that is, weaker and in a sense inferior.

Kaozong’s article, Hmong Does not Mean Free: The Miseducation of Hmong Americans touches upon this problem, which is prevalent even in our own communities. Like many people, Kaozong used to refer to the Hmong as “a group of people who have no written language and no country of their own” — that is, she defined the Hmong by their victimhood. While it’s important to recognize hardships undergone by communities, it is dangerous to write them off as only sufferers because it denies them their agency and their ability to tell us their own story. For Kaozong, her view on the Hmong and their language had been shaped by the academic writings she had been exposed to which, while helpful, were written by outsiders. In reality, Kaozong writes, the Hmong kept their language alive through the paj ntau, patterned cloth upon which the Hmong character set was embroidered and thus preserved (32). Isn’t it funny? By simply reframing the message to focus on the actions of the Hmong rather than what has been done to them, we’ve created a narrative where the Hmong people are the actors and reactors of their own well-being and livelihood.

While reading this passage, I was reminded of a similar situation with Hawai’i. Last quarter, while researching the Hawai’ian language, I learned that the Hawai’ian sovereignty movement had campaigned to be seen as a nation independent of U.S. and had succeeded in having a direct descendant of Queen Lili'uokalani' recognized by the United Nations as the true representative of Hawai’i. Like the Hmong, the Hawai’ian people had — at least in the eyes of white history — been reduced to the events they had undergone throughout the years, and their own actions were ignored.

History is written in the eyes of the winner. However, this doesn’t mean that the lived experiences of the losers should be lost. Education and outsider-dominated academic writing has done wrong to the marginalized. It is crucial that we now turn to the people themselves and learn from them, so that they may keep their story alive.

QUESTION: So much of history lies in the older generation. How can we, the new generation, bridge the gap to our elders so that their lived experiences are not lost?

Even today, native Hawai'ians continue to protest and organize in favor of having their nation rule itself. 

SOURCES

Mouavangsou, K. N. (2016). The Mis-Education of the Hmong in America (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Davis).

Bernadette Grafton (Photographer) (2005, August 11). Hawaiian Rights Activists Line Kuhio Highway [digital image]. Retrieved from https://ejatlas.org/conflict/tourism-and-indigenous-rights-in-hawaii-usa