Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'diaspora'
Viewing articles tagged 'diaspora'
6 articles
How many Dega there are
There are more of us than there have ever been, and we have never been so small a part of our own country. The state’s own census counted about 768,000 people in the thirteen highland peoples in 1979 and about 2,125,000 in 2019 — almost a trebling in forty years. Over the same span the population of the four highland provinces went from 1.2 mill...
North Carolina
The largest community of our people outside Vietnam is in North Carolina, in Greensboro, Charlotte, Raleigh and New Bern. It is there because the American soldiers we fought beside came home to Fort Bragg and would not let the subject drop, and because when the survivors of the resistance walked out of the forest in 1985 and 1992 those soldiers...
The wider diaspora
North Carolina holds the largest community of our people outside Vietnam, but it is not the only one. There are Dega in at least five other American states, in France, in the refugee neighborhoods of Bangkok, and in Cambodia, where the Jarai and the Bunong were never a diaspora at all, because the border was drawn through them. This page is what...
How to record an elder’s story
Most of our history was never written down. It lives in the memories of people now in their seventies, eighties and nineties, in North Carolina, in Cambodia and in the highlands, and when they die it goes with them unless someone records it. This is a practical guide for families who want to do that. It covers asking permission properly, recordi...
Kok Ksor
A Jarai from Bon Broai who joined BAJARAKA at fourteen, went over the border at seventeen, came home from a war by way of a Khmer Republic training course in Virginia, and spent the second half of his life in a small city in South Carolina making our case in rooms where states have to listen. For thirty years Kok Ksor was the Dega most foreign g...
Beyond North Carolina: Canada and other countries
Most of us who were resettled went to the United States, and a smaller number to Canada. But the second country to take us was not Canada. It was Finland, in May 2005, a month before the first flight to Vancouver, and about seventy-five of our people went there. Nobody has written a word about them in twenty-one years. That is the shape of every...
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