On a sunny Fresno afternoon, a Hmong elder beckons and shows her daughter which plant in her garden is medicinal and how to best prepare it with chicken soup. With her guidance, the daughter learns cultural knowledge that has been passed down for generations through only word of mouth.
One day, the daughter may also pass down what she’s learned to her child in the way of oral tradition. This is one of the main cultural practices that the Hmong people grew up with in their communities, dating back over thousands of years from China and even after many had fled to Southeast Asia to avoid further political persecution and the banning of Hmong language.
From the mid-1970s to 2004, hundreds of thousands of Hmong immigrated from Laos and Thailand to the United States due to their part in the Vietnam War. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had recruited the Hmong to help fight alongside American soldiers against the North Vietnamese and communist Pathet Laos. Today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are now about 360,000 Hmong Americans across the country.
“For the people who are not familiar with the Hmong people, we have a history that’s really tied with displacement, and, with displacement comes the inability for us to be in one place,” said Dan Yang, the director and camera operator for the media platform Across the Mountains. “That’s just woven into our history, but that also means that we place a really big dependence and big emphasis on oral history. And so, you’ll see that when written, woven into our paj ntaub.”
However, despite the increase in population count of Hmong residing in the United States, there has been an ongoing decline in oral tradition being practiced in Hmong American communities.
What is Oral Tradition?
Oral tradition is a system for preserving and sharing cultural history, knowledge, customs, and beliefs through speech from parent to children and onward across family generations. Folklore indicates that the Hmong once…
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