Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2015 An Iowa anomaly: Robert Ray and the Indochinese refugees Matthew yaR n Walsh Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Asian American Studies Commons, Asian History Commons, Asian Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Walsh, Matthew Ryan, "An Iowa anomaly: Robert Ray and the Indochinese refugees" (2015). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 14724. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/14724 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. An Iowa anomaly: Robert Ray and the Indochinese refugees by Matthew Ryan Walsh A dissertation submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Major: Rural, Agricultural, Technological, and Environmental Program of Study Committee: Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Major Professor Jana Byars Julie Courtwright Jane Dusselier John Monroe Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2015 Copyright © Matthew Ryan Walsh, 2015. All rights reserved. ii DEDICATION This work is dedicated to the Indochinese refugees and to the men and women who helped resettle them. Without the active support of the Iowa community, this dissertation would not have been possible. I thank all of the individuals who shared their amazing stories with me. For their contributions to this project, I would like to specifically recognize Tai Dam community members Som Baccam, Siang Bachti, Matsalyn Brown, and Dinh VanLo. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page LIST OF FIGURES iv ABSTRACT v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: AN IOWA ANOMALY 1 CHAPTER 2. BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS AT DIEN BIEN PHU 7 CHAPTER 3. BENDING THE RULES OF FEDERAL REFUGEE POLICY 34 CHAPTER 4. GROWING PAINS OF THE IOWA REFUGEE SERVICE CENTER. 66 CHAPTER 5. ETHNIC ORIGINS OF THE TAI DAM 98 CHAPTER 6. THE BOAT PEOPLE COME TO IOWA 135 CHAPTER 7. IOWA SHARES AND THE CAMBODIAN REFUGEES 171 CHAPTER 8. THE LITTLEST VICTIMS 195 CHAPTER 9. YOUTHS AS CULTURAL GO BETWEENS 223 CHAPTER 10. CONCLUSION: ROBERT RAY AND THE REFUGEES 253 REFERENCES 285 iv LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Paining of a Tai Dam Noble 6 Figure 2. Linguistic Map of the Tai in Vietnam 11 Figure 3. Tai Dam Political Overview 12 Figure 4. Tai Dam Refugee Timeline 37 Figure 5. Robert and Billie Ray Leave the Hospital after the 1968 Plane Crash 42 Figure 6. Nga Baccam in Laos 54 Figure 7. Colleen Shearer Director of the Iowa Refugee Service Center 72 Figure 8. Houng Baccam & Kimphung Nguyen Host Southeast Asian Radio Station 112 Figure 9. Cambodian Refugees 176 Figure 10. Student Illustration of a Soldier 201 Figure 11. Student Illustration of their Home near the Mountains 227 Figure 12. Student Illustration about the Struggles of Learning a New Culture 236 Figure 13. Robert Ray at the Tai Village Dedication 284 v ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the formation and maturation of the state of Iowa’s refugee resettlement program (1975-2010) during the governorship of Robert D. Ray. Though other Indochinese communities are studied, particular attention is devoted to the Tai Dam because the state resettled them as a cluster. Reasons for starting the program, the legacy of the Vietnam War, and Iowans’ varied responses to refugee intake are detailed. It will be proven that Robert Ray wielded more influence over Indochinese refugee resettlement and relief than any other governor. He established his own resettlement agency, admitted 1,500 boat people, influenced the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, and launched a Cambodian relief program that generated over $540,000. In addition to using archival sources, oral history interviews were conducted with more than thirty refugees and public officials. These oral histories bring to light the Tai Dam’s experiences in Southeast Asia as well as in Iowa. The Tai Dam actively influenced the resettlement process by campaigning for relocation to Iowa as a group. Their cultural background helps to explain the Tai Dam’s successful adaptation to the American Midwest. 1 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: AN IOWA ANOMALY On the Northside of Des Moines, Iowa, a Tai Dam priest has just returned home from tending the sick one afternoon in March of 2014. Khouang Luong learned the craft from his uncle, a longtime priest who helped heal many Tai Dam in Iowa. However, when Khouang’s uncle fell sick, nobody could be found to perform the proper rituals so his uncle taught him. In the Tai Chronicle, which tells the sacred origins of the Tai Dam, the Luong family is designated as the priestly class.1 According to their traditional beliefs, each human body is comprised of thirty-two spirits that represent major organs of the body. Khouang heals the sick by recalling their wayward spirits, which have fled the body and caused the illness. He reads from a sacred text and invites the spirits to take part in a feast prepared to appease them. Luong is one of the few Tai Dam priests healing the sick in the Western Hemisphere. How did Iowa become home to the largest Tai Dam population outside of Asia? Answers to this question begin to emerge when reading through the list of voluntary agencies (VOLAGS) responsible for resettling refugees in the United States following the Vietnam War. Separate from that group of eight, the State Department listed an odd ninth in a footnote: the state of Iowa.2 From the close of the Vietnam War to 2010, Iowa alone consistently resettled refugees as a state-run voluntary agency. Iowa’s unique role in relocating refugees began when Governor Robert D. Ray created the Governor’s Task Force for Indochinese Refugees in 1975; he charged it with bringing the Tai Dam to Iowa. The goal of this research is 1 “Grandfather Prince Leuang was made Shaman” as translated by John Hartmann “Computations on a Tai Dam Origin Myth” Anthropological Linguistics Vol 23 No 5 May 1981. 2 U.S. Voluntary Agencies: The Major Actors, State Department Booklet, pg. 70 in Ray Papers Resettlement Box 1: Conference Meetings Workshops UN Conference on Refugees Geneva Switzerland July 1979. VOLAGS=USCC, International Rescue Committee, LIRS, American Council for Nationalities Service, Church World Services, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, American Fund for Czechoslovak Refugees, Tolstoy Foundation, Iowa State resettlement agency. 2 to remove Iowa’s peculiar role from the footnote of history by examining how the state resettled Indochinese refugees during the governorship of Robert Ray. As of today, this peculiarity of Iowa history has yet to be told in detail. Average Iowans may know that Ray helped bring the Tai Dam to Iowa, but these same folks may wrongly think Ray brought all Tai Dam, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees to the state. Little more than surface level knowledge of Iowa’s relationship with the Indochinese is understandable because no scholar has fully explored the Iowa anomaly. Dorothy Schwieder, “the Dean of Iowa history,” wrote the definitive work on the state’s past: Iowa: the Middle Land. However, Schwieder devotes only two pages to the Southeast Asians in Iowa.3 Jon Bowermaster compiled the testimonials of roughly two hundred-fifty persons in route to publishing Governor: an Oral Biography of Robert D. Ray.4 Though useful for addressing the political climate and background information of the Ray years, “The Refugees,” at a mere five pages, is one of the shortest chapters in the book. Mary Hutchinson Tone’s “On the Road to Ioway” is an excellent article on how the Tai Dam fled Laos for Iowa, but it does not address refugee resettlement and policy in detail.5 To date, the sixty minute Iowa Public Television production, “A Promise Called Iowa,” remains the best introduction to this topic.6 The gap in the history of Southeast Asians in Iowa can largely be applied to the Midwest as well. Initially, immigration histories focused on the uprooted Europeans who flocked to America.7 By the latter half of the twentieth-century, scholars began to explore Asian American 3 Dorothy Schwieder, Iowa: the Middle Land. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), pg. 311-312. 4 Jon Bowermaster, Governor: an Oral Biography of Robert D. Ray. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1987). 5 Mary Hutchinson Tone, “On the Road to Ioway,” The Iowan 29 (1980), pg. 37. 6 A Promise Called Iowa, dir. Iowa Public Television, (PBS; 2007 DVD). 7 Oscar Handlin. The Uprooted: the Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Watts: 1951). 3 history.8 Yet within this growing literature on Asian “strangers from a different shore,” stories about groups that trace their ancestry from China and Japan proliferated at the expense of Southeast Asia.9 Tragically, the upsurge in attention to Southeast Asians came about in part due to America’s waging its longest war in Vietnam, and a natural interest in studying the horrors committed in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Most histories of Indochinese refugees focus on their transition to life in places like California. The largest body of literature on refugees in the Midwest has discussed the Hmong, an ethnic group used by the C.I.A. in a secret war on communism.10 Aside from fine studies by linguistic scholars, the Tai Dam remain an understudied and misunderstood group.11 Writers have consistently portrayed the Tai Dam, an ethnic minority from northwest Vietnam, as backwards or pure.