What we do not know

Every page in this library carries its sources and says where it is thin. This page collects those admissions in one place: the figures we cannot confirm, the periods we have almost nothing on, the documents we have never seen, and the questions we would most like answered. It is a list of what is missing, kept deliberately, because a record that only shows its strong parts cannot be trusted with its strong parts either.

Figures we cannot confirm

Periods we have almost nothing on

• 1975–1990, the re-education camps. The worst-documented part of our history. The camps sets out what is known for the former South as a whole; for the Dega specifically we have no count, no list of the camps that held highlanders, and no roll of the dead. This is the gap with the shortest remaining time on it.
• Bauxite, after the ground was cleared. Official figures put 404 ethnic minority households at Tan Rai and 15 at Nhan Co. We have no account of where those families went or what the resettlement sites are like. Bauxite
• The dam resettlements, twenty-five years on. The Yali Falls study is from the early 2000s. Nobody has gone back. The dams
• The diaspora outside North Carolina. No current count for France, or for California, Florida, Massachusetts, Rhode Island or Washington; nothing at all on Canada, Australia or the rest of Europe. The wider diaspora
• FULRO in Mondulkiri, 1975–1992. Seventeen years, several thousand people, and almost no internal record. What exists was written by their enemies.
• Village-level retribution after February 2001. The provincial picture is documented. What happened in individual villages in the years afterwards is not.
• Cu Kuin, after the trial. Around a hundred people were convicted at a single sitting in January 2024. We do not have the list of names, the sentences, or where they are held.
• Women's experience throughout. Our sources are overwhelmingly male, because the soldiers, the prisoners and the petitioners in the record are male. Dega women sets out what can be established and the shape of what is missing; it is the gap we are least equipped to close from documents.

Documents we have never seen

• The text of Bao Dai's special statute of 21 May 1951, in the original. We hold it only in translation, at second hand.
• The BAJARAKA letters of May 1958 to France, the United States and the United Nations.
• Records of the Republic of Vietnam's Ministry for the Development of Ethnic Minorities, 1969–1975.
• Any Vietnamese government document setting out the Định canh định cư programme in its own words.
• Disaggregated education, health and population figures for the five highland provinces.
• The tripartite memorandum between Vietnam, Cambodia and UNHCR, and any record of what happened to individual returnees.
• The Kon Tum mission archives and the Paris Foreign Missions records — the richest unexplored source for the nineteenth-century highlands.
• Resettlement and compensation records for the Tan Rai and Nhan Co bauxite projects.
• Land use certificates, refusals, compensation notices and survey maps for highland land — the single most useful class of document that exists for the land claim, and the one most likely to be sitting in a family's house.

Names we are missing

• The fourteen leaders sentenced in September 2001, and the villager killed at Plei Lao on 10 March 2001.
• The people who disappeared during Easter Week 2004. They have never been listed.
• The 62 people in the Gia Lai prisoner records whose whereabouts are unknown or who are feared dead.
• The 68 Montagnards detained in Nonthaburi in February 2025 — we do not know where they are now.
• Everyone imprisoned since 2006, which is where the prisoner records stop.

Where our sources disagree with each other

Two community archives and the published scholarship do not always agree, and we print the disagreement rather than choosing quietly.

• BAJARAKA's founding date — May 1955, 5 January 1958 and 1 May 1958 all appear in print. We cannot resolve it.
• The 1986 and 1992 resettlement numbers — around 200 and 402 in the North Carolina record; 212 and 417 in one community history. The difference is small and we have not established which is right.
• The 1815 Jesuit landing at Danang — in our archive, but the published record dates the first permanent highland mission to Kon Tum from 1851.
• Total war dead — over 200,000 (Hickey) against more than a million (community history). We use Hickey's and say why.

What we will not print

An account we cannot attribute to somebody who was there or to a published source goes on this page rather than into an article. A figure whose origin we have lost is marked as ours rather than dressed as research. A detail that would identify a person still in Vietnam does not appear at all, even where it would strengthen the case. And we do not republish the Montagnard Foundation archive as though it were ours — it is a source, cited as one.

If you can close one of these gaps

Read reporting safely first, then how to document, then how to reach us. A photograph of one document, or one account from somebody who was there, changes more here than any amount of further reading.

Compiled September 2026 and intended to shrink. Each time an item on this page is closed we will say so and name the gap it filled, unless the person who closed it asks us not to.