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The Plight of the Montagnards,” Hearing Before the Committee of Foreign Relations United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, Second Session (Washington DC: U.S

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The Plight of the Montagnards,” Hearing Before the Committee of Foreign Relations United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, Second Session (Washington DC: U.S Notes 1 Introduction and Afterword 1. Senator Jesse Helms, “The Plight of the Montagnards,” Hearing Before The Committee Of Foreign Relations United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress, Second Session (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 10, 1988), 1, http://frwebgate. access.gpo.gov/cg...senate_hearings&docid=f:47 64.wais, 10-5-99. 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Y’Hin Nie, in ibid., 24. 4. The word “Dega” is used by the refugees in both singular and plural constructions (e.g., “A Dega family arrived from Vietnam this week,” as well as “Many Dega gathered for church.”). 5. For a recent analysis of the historical emergence of names for popula- tion groups in the highlands of Southeast Asia, including the central highlands of Vietnam, see Keyes, “The Peoples of Asia,” 1163–1203. 6. There are no published studies of the Dega refugee community, but see: Cecily Cook, “The Montagnard-Dega Community of North Carolina” (University of North Carolina: MA Thesis in Folklore Studies, 1994); Cheyney Hales and Kay Reibold, Living in Exile, Raleigh (a film pro- duced by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1994); and David L. Driscoll, “We Are the Dega: Ethnic Identification in a Refugee Community” (Wake Forest University: MA Thesis in Anthropology, 1994). Studies of the Hmong include: Robert Downing and D. Olney, eds., The Hmong in the West (Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, 1982); Shelly R. Adler, “Ethnomedical Pathogenesis and Hmong Immigrants’ Sudden Nocturnal Deaths,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 18 (1994): 23–59; Kathleen M. McInnis, Helen E. Petracchi, and Mel Morgenbesser, The Hmong in America: Providing Ethnic-Sensitive Health, Education, and Human Services (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, 1990); and Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). 7. Unfortunately, Hip’s book has not yet found a publisher. 198 NOTES 8. In fact, there are already several texts presenting sympathetic accounts of highland history. See Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, and Free in the Forest. Both volumes were published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1982. Cecily Cook’s master’s thesis culls the long story of the guerilla resistance army through interviews among Dega refugees (“The Montagnard-Dega Community of North Carolina”). See as well the video produced by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Living in Exile (Hales and Reibold, Raleigh, 1994), which many Dega had a hand in making, and a documentary film about Gordon and Laura Smith’s evangelical mission to the central high- lands that offers a very touching portrayal of Christian faith among the highland people. (See Smith, Vietnam Mission.) 9. This research project was approved by the Academic Affairs Institutional Review Board of the University of North Carolina for Research on Human Subjects. 2 Representing the Montagnards 1. Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders. See as well, Keyes, “The Peoples of Asia,” 1163–1203. For years the most comprehensive and authoritative English language history of the cen- tral highlands was Hickey, Sons of the Mountains and Free in the Forest (both published by Yale University Press in 1982). 2. I heard this account of the emergence of the term “Dega” in many of the interviews I conducted among these refugees. See as well Pierre M. K’Briuh, “The Montagnards,” http://www.nccbuscc.org/mrs/pcmr/ asianpac/montag.htm, November 14, 1999; and Salemink, “The King of Fire,” 516. 3. Hickey, Free in the Forest, 251. 4. K’Sor, The Situation of the Montagnard Dega People, 1–3. 5. For a discussion of similar issues involved in naming a group that is the object of an anthropological study, see Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, 3–39; and Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, 86–126. The history of the emergence of the Dega collectivity that I trace in this chapter supports many points in Anderson’s Imagined Communities. 6. Christian Simonnet, a mid-twentieth-century French Catholic mis- sionary in the highlands, provides this historical interpretation for the founding of the Catholic mission in Kontum in his edited version of a nineteenth-century missionary account. See Dourisboure and Simonnet, Vietnam: Mission on the Grand Plateaus. 7. The European term, “savage” carries with it the burden of nineteenth- century anthropological preoccupations with cultural evolution. The Vietnamese term “moi” is perhaps closer to the Chinese idea of “bar- barian,” signifying any and all people living outside the orbit of the Chinese empire, with all the cultural deficiencies that that entailed. NOTES 199 8. See Marr, Vietnam; SarDesia, Vietnam: The Struggle for National Identity; Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam. 9. Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders; Hickey, Free in the Forest, and Sons of the Mountains; Jacques Dournes, Minorities of Central Vietnam: Autochthonous Indochinese Peoples (London: Minority Rights Group, 1980). 10. Ibid., 73–100. See as well Hickey’s discussion of Léopold Sabatier in Sons of the Mountains, 294–308. 11. Colonel Galliéni, Galliéni au Tonkin: 1892–1896, par lui-même, Paris: 1941, 217, quoted in Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders, 64. 12. LaFont, Toloi Djuat: Coutumier de la Tribu Jarai, 12 (my translation). 13. Hickey, Sons of the Mountains, 385–439. 14. Fall, Street Without Joy; and Dalloz, The War in Indo-China. 15. See, e.g., Montagnard Foundation, Inc., Human Rights Violations, 2–4. 16. Hickey, Free in the Forest, 47–89. 17. Ibid., 55. 18. “Declaration du Haut Comité du Front Unifié de Lutte de la Race Opprimée; 20 Septembre 1964,” reprinted in Christie, A Modern History of Southeast Asia, 221–222 (my translation). The source listed for this document is: Front Unifié de Lutte de la Race Opprimée (FULRO) (1965), Historique (Phnom-Penh), 18. See as well LaBrie, “FULRO: The History of Political Tension in the South Vietnamese Highlands.” 19. It was LaFont, Toloi Djuat: Coutumier de la Tribu Jarai. 20. An event organized by Broi Toploi (founder of “Montagnard Cultural Heritage and Research, Inc.”), March 13, 1999, Greensboro Cultural Center, Greensboro, NC. 21. Ironically, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, much hated by the Dega refugee population, is actually pursuing a surprisingly similar project to “save” highland culture. Another article by Oscar Salemink ana- lyzes what he calls the “selective preservation” and “folklorization” of a “Montagnard culture” that is commodified for the tourist trade and purged of elements that the government considers wasteful. Controlled and orchestrated cultural performances of specific rituals and handi- crafts allow the Vietnamese government to describe the pluralistic Vietnamese national culture as “a garden of scented, colorful f lowers” (Salemink, “The King of Fire,” 516). But, as Salemink points out, it is the ethnic Vietnamese who are the “gardeners” of this culture. These cultural performances are decontextualized from the rest of highland life, which is increasingly forced into Vietnamese forms, so that the ethnic Vietnamese people within the national family can help develop and modernize their more backward “younger brothers” (ibid., 507). According to Salemink, Vietnamese policy emphasizes the expressive and aestheticized aspects of culture and works to undermine their relation to the ethical and cognitive (ibid., 518). 200 NOTES The analysis of actual Vietnamese cultural and political programs in the highlands exceeds the bounds of this study, which is concerned with Dega and American representations of the highland people. Significantly, no Dega has ever mentioned this Vietnamese cultural policy nor the problematic Vietnamese rhetoric of a multiethnic state. See as well, Salemink, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central High- landers. For similar discussions (on which Salemink draws), see Evans, “Vietnamese Communist Anthropology,” 116–147; and “Internal Colonialism in the Central Highlands of Vietnam,” 274–304. 22. Condominas, “Ethnics and Comfort,” 4. 23. See Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes; and Lyons, The Uneasy Partnership. 24. Baestrup, “Researchers Aid Thai Rebel Fight,” 7. 25. Walter A. McDougall, “Back to Bedrock: The Eight Traditions of American Statecraft,” Foreign Affairs 76 (1997): 141, as quoted by Marquis, “The Other Warriors,” 79. 26. Mole, The Montagnards of South Vietnam, iii. 27. United States Army Special Warfare School, Montagnard Tribal Groups. This military literature is discussed in greater detail in chap- ter seven in this volume. 28. Wolf and Jorgensen, “Anthropology on the Warpath in Thailand,” 26 – 35. Cr it ica l essays on “Project Ca melot” a re col lected i n Horow it z, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot. See as well Deitchman, The Best-Laid Schemes. 29. In a brief autobiographical introduction to Free in the Forest, Hickey explains that he did his dissertation fieldwork in a Vietnamese village in the Mekong Delta (Village in Vietnam). He was then funded by the RAND Corporation from 1963 to 1973, a position he accepted because of his desire to “participate in the events of history” (Free in the Forest, ix). 30. This controversy was reported in the Wall Street Journal, 11-18-71: 1, and the New York Times 11-21-71: 79 (as cited by Deitchman, The Best Laid Schemes, 307). 31. See Salemink’s discussion of Hickey in, The Ethnography of Vietnam’s Central Highlanders. See as well Seymour Deitchman’s comments in The Best Laid-Schemes, 381. 32. See Montagnard Foundation, Inc., “The Montagnards.” 33. This statistic is cited by a saddened and melancholy Gerald Hickey in his 1993 text, Shattered World. According to Hickey, “When the Vietnam War ended, of the approximately 1 million highlanders . somewhere between 200,000 and 220,000 civilians and military personnel had died” (xxxi). 34. See Fabian, Time and the Other for an analysis of this style in ethno- graphic writing.
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