“I Ain’t Tryin’ to Curse Us”: Remembering Hmong Language and Culture with Youth

• In Event: Reclaiming Selves, Histories, Language, and Culture Through Relational Processes of (Re)membering

Abstract

“Authentic” language and culture production and practice is often used to measure the fluency of heritage language learners and the success of heritage language programs. While, anecdotally speaking, language researchers and educators seem to understand that languages naturally encounter change, most are still relying on traditional practices and values to do language work. These practices and values become “the” culture—that is, a culture framed in time, place, and specific identifiers that some members of a group deem the authentic culture (Leonard, 2012). Authentic language often “gets determined with reference to the practices of older speakers in grammar, vocabulary, and pragmatic norms. This yields problems for younger speakers (or learners), who can be ostracized because their speech exhibits differences that are attributed to influence from world languages and societies” (p. 342). This view of language and culture can position some members of a community as inauthentic or having only partial membership because of their inability to speak the “authentic” language or their lack of “cultural” knowledge (McCarty & Wyman, 2009). The current paper draws from the author’s ethnographic dissertation study of language reclamation design with Hmong youth to re-examine approaches to language work. Through inductive analysis of field notes, participant-generated artifacts, photographs, and semi-structured focus group interviews, the author demonstrates that even when Hmong youth do not produce “authentic” Hmong language, they remember (recall, re-join, and re-embody) Hmong social relations and worldviews in their everyday engagement with one another and the language. They retain a “sense of Hmong” by living Hmong language and culture. “Sense” is used here as the awareness or consciousness of something(s) that distinctively makes them Hmong (Perley, 2011; Nicholas, 2009). In light of this, the author suggests a “re-visioning” (Tuck, 2009) of Hmong youth, where youth are not just treated as passive recipients (Freire, 2005) of a language saved for them to use in some imaginary future, but are actually invited to be part of language reclamation processes alongside adults in the ongoing present (Moua & Vang, 2015). Such re-visioning supports a pedagogy of participatory design, which builds conditions where everyone in the Hmong community can shape what it means to be Hmong (Leonard, 2012) and invites collaborative repair of dismemberment (Perley, 2013) caused by colonial forms of erasure. The findings have implications for world, heritage, and indigenous language activists, teachers, community members, and researchers who are currently fighting to keep their languages in use in their communities.

Author

• Pa Nou Vue, University of California - Berkeley