Sources and method

How this library is built, what it is made of, what it does with its sources, and the rules it holds itself to. If you intend to use anything here in a submission, a filing or an article, this page tells you what you are relying on.

What the sources are

The rules we work to

1. Every article names its sources. At the foot of the page, linked, with dates. If a claim has no source it should not be in an article.
2. A community figure is labelled a community figure. Where our archive gives a number we cannot match to a published series — the 850,000 resettled under Diem, the colonial-era population of 3 to 3.5 million — the text says that it is ours and that we could not confirm it.
3. Disagreement is printed, not resolved quietly. Three founding dates for BAJARAKA, two figures for the 1986 and 1992 resettlements, two totals for the war dead. Where we choose one, we say which and why.
4. The gaps are published. What we do not know lists what is missing. It is meant to shrink, and it is meant to be the first page a hostile reader finds rather than the last.
5. Nothing is published that identifies a person still in the highlands without their consent, even where it would strengthen the case.
6. We do not dress research as testimony. What we read in a report is cited as a report. What somebody told us is attributed as an account.

The DegarWeb archive, specifically

A great deal of the older narrative in this library — the 1946 boundary, the 1951 statute, the pre-colonial territorial account, the post-1975 list of what was done — descends from material published by the Montagnard Foundation, Inc.

That archive is the Foundation's, and its copyright is the Foundation's. DCHO uses it as a source: read, checked where checkable, rewritten in our own words, and cited. We do not republish it verbatim under our own name, and we do not present the Foundation's research as our own reporting. Where a claim rests on it alone, the article says so.

Some of that material carries the marks of machine translation and of retelling, and we have corrected obvious damage where the meaning was recoverable — a passage rendering Dega as "dough", a chronology in which a release preceded the arrests it followed. Corrections of that kind are made silently; corrections of substance are noted on the page.

Language and terms

This library says Dega throughout, and Montagnard where it quotes or points at a source that uses it — which is most of the human rights literature, most of the American military record, and most of the resettlement paperwork. The reasons are in who are the Dega, and they are not sentimental: the choice of word decides which body of international law applies.

Spellings vary because the sources vary. Names and words carries the variants, and anyone searching the records needs them.

Corrections

We would rather be corrected than left alone, and a correction costs us nothing.

• If a date, a name, a figure or a spelling here is wrong, tell us. We will change it and say what changed.
• If you are named in the prisoner records, or your family is, and you want an entry corrected or removed, we will do it on request from the family and will not ask why.
• If you closed one of the gaps on what we do not know, we will record that it was closed, and credit you unless you ask us not to.
• How to reach us. Read reporting safely first if you are inside Vietnam.

Compiled September 2026. This page describes practice as at that date; where the library falls short of it, that is a fault to be reported rather than a change of policy.