‘My Grandmother Never Told Me That Before!’

Sarah Turner,Sarah Delisle

doi:10.26686/ce.v4i1.6692

Abstract

Hmong ethnic minority populations in Vietnam’s northern borderlands have a long history of oral tradition and story-telling. Yet with an historical absence of literacy and no self-created written archives, the first-hand knowledge and experiences of Hmong elders is seldom communicated beyond their kin. At the request of a Hmong community member we developed a collaborative, intergenerational oral history project that would allow stories of Hmong elders to be shared on the internet. Concurrently, we trained Hmong youth in research methods, helping to improve their English skills and contribute to inter-generational knowledge transfer. Drawing on debates regarding collaborative North-South ethnography, positionality and critical reflexivity, and feminist fieldwork approaches, we contemplate our roles as two Global North researchers interacting with Global South ethnic minority youth and elders, and the degree to which we were able to help support the creation of subaltern counter-narratives to Vietnamese state discourses of upland minority histories.’

Highlights

The collaborative research project that we reflect upon in this paper emerged from a conversation the first author, Sarah Turner, had with a longtime Hmong woman friend, Shu Tan, in a small town in the northern Vietnam uplands
Sarah T. asked Shu what Sarah could do as an outsider – who had worked alongside Shu for many years – to better champion Hmong culture
State policies and literature continue to be overwhelmingly based on assumptions of primitivism, stagnation, and unproductivity regarding upland minority populations (Lieberman 2010)

Summary

Introduction

The collaborative research project that we reflect upon in this paper emerged from a conversation the first author, Sarah Turner (hereafter Sarah T.), had with a longtime Hmong woman friend, Shu Tan, in a small town in the northern Vietnam uplands. We took this specific approach because oral history is argued to be an important tool for studying the ‘hidden histories and geographies, the place-based lives and memories of disadvantaged people, minority groups, and others whose views have been ignored or whose lives pass quietly, producing few if any written records’ (George and Stratford 2016: 190-191). As Reinke (2019: 100) notes in her field reflections of collaborations with NGOs, we wanted to ‘examine the possibilities of collaboration as a way to subvert asymmetries in access to knowledge production’

Objectives

Discussion

Conclusion