We are recognizing the important intersections of war, migration and the environment. What do these intersections mean to you?
After nearly 30 years as a poet, looking back at my earliest verse to the present, even as my understanding of these intersections was only just beginning to form, it became clear there were indisputable connections. If I look at poems of mine like "Aftermaths" or "Burning Eden One Branch At A Time," or "The Last War Poem" I can see I was always interrogating that question of home, a shattered environment and its consequences, and this continues into my speculative poetry such as my 2016 poem "Narrative of the Nak's Heirs," as I try to articulate what it means for a refugee to assert agency and share our truths that the world might sincerely learn from it. Few realize that over 30% of Laos remains contaminated with US cluster bombs nearly 50 years since the end of the secret bombing, or the continuing impact this has on families trying to rebuild their lives. For those of us who could not remain in our former homelands, what does it mean to spend more of our lives outside of the places we were born, than in it?
In any given year, Laos is subjected to floods and natural disasters, exacerbated by leftover weapons and the effects of chemical defoliants from the Vietnam War-era that limit our access to arable farmland and our natural resources. I discussed the necessity of many households resorting to manufacturing everyday items from war scrap in my poem "Babylon Gallery," many transforming leftover bombs and munitions into silverware, jewelry and other goods for tourists as their only source of income, long after the war ended. There are also questions of gender and culture, and who is sent to clear our contaminated fields even if they had no role in the original conflicts. Who do we risk, who do we invest in? But this is a vast labyrinth, one that could become a huge textbook if we were to fully discuss the issue.
What would you want K12 teachers to know about these untold stories, and why?
Trying to recover these stories and build space in our lives for them can be daunting and complicated because there is a lot of unaddressed trauma and cultural disconnect for many of our youth who come from these families. It's not as simple a task for others to just go up to your parents and grandparents and say, "tell me about the war," or "why are we here in America?"
What has kept my interest over the decades is an appreciation that while the search for common threads between all of our stories and the universal lessons is admirable, it would be short-changing the world to try and compress our stories into neat soundbites and convenient taglines as if a phrase like the Killing Fields, Secret War, or Boat People is an evocative enough reduction of the different Southeast Asian diasporic experiences. Almost every family that came to America arrived in uniquely fascinating ways well worth listening to, and it is relatively easy to make effective curriculum connections even in unexpected disciplines.
At the same time, it can be challenging because you may only get a fragment of the story because it is not ready to be told yet by those who lived it, and we must respect that. What we ARE seeing across the country, however, is a generation after 45 years finally starting to open up with great urgency, and we badly need our youth to have the practice and experience in recording even parts of their family stories because often they are coming out when household members least expect it. As we read in Proust's classic Remembrance of Things Past, even the random scent of a madeleine might trigger an extraordinary trove of recollections in someone. For those of us with roots in Laos, so much will be lost if our K12 students do not have the skills to record and document, to inquire and analyze what they are hearing, what they are reading, what is being shared with them.
In 45 years in the US, Lao Americans have fewer than 45 books in our own words, on our own terms about our own journey. Without a meaningful commitment now to help our emerging storytellers flourish, a vital era of our knowable history will be permanently lost. Unlike many other communities with an extensive literary tradition, once many of our family histories are gone, they're gone.
How have these intersections impacted Guåhan and indigenous Chamoru?
Guåhan has been a U.S. territory (colony) since 1898. The island was actually governed by the U.S. Navy in those years, which began to develop the island into a military base. Moreover, the military government suppressed Chamoru culture and oppressed our people. In the new American schools, for example, kids were punished in school for speaking Chamoru language—a story my grandparents have shared with me.
A traumatic history of Guåhan began on December 8, 1941, when the military of Japan bombed Guåhan—an attack on U.S. forces that paralleled Pearl Harbor. Japan successfully invaded Guåhan, defeated the American military, and occupied the island. Japan also militarized our home island, making it an important base for its imperial ambitions in the Pacific. This occupation lasted for nearly three years, during which many atrocities against Chamorus occurred, including forced labor, rape, torture, land dispossession, and massacres. The U.S. military invaded Guåhan in 1944 and eventually defeated the Japanese forces and reclaimed the island. Both of these invasions, as well as the battle between two empires, devastated the environment and people’s homes. While my grandparents survived the war, they never forgot their traumatic experiences during this violent time.
After the war, the U.S. military continued its efforts to turn Guåhan into “an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” or what some have referred to as “USS Guam.” The military displaced many Chamorus from our ancestral lands to make way for military bases, munitions and fuel storage facilities, military housing, and live firing ranges. Today, thirty percent of the landmass on Guåhan is occupied by the military. This ongoing militarization has led to profound environmental damage to our lands and waters. Studies have found more than a dozen contaminated and toxic sites on Guåhan (including “Superfund” sites) due to military dumpsites and the leaching of chemicals. The air force base in northern Guåhan has been found to have leached “forever chemicals” into the main aquifer. Moreover, the entire island was exposed to radiation because Guåhan is located “downwind” from the nuclear testing that occurred in the Marshall Islands. During the war in Vietnam, Agent Orange were stored in drums on Guåhan and leached in the soil. This history of environmental contamination due to militarism has resulted in high rates of cancer on Guåhan and Chamorus suffer from significantly higher rates of cancer than other ethnic groups.
Militarism and environmental injustice intersects with Chamoru migration in several ways. First, it is important to note that Chamorus became U.S. citizens in 1950 as a result of the Organic Act of Guam. In the subsequent decades, Chamorus would be drafted or voluntarily enlist in the armed forces. Chamoru soldiers, along with their families, would be stationed at bases throughout the states. For example, Chamorus ended up in cities near military bases, such as San Diego, CA; Tacoma, WA, and Corpus Christi, TX. Today, Chamorus have extremely high enlistment rates, and military service is still the number one reason why Chamorus migrate. The other reasons why Chamorus migrate include economic and educational opportunities and health care. Sadly, these are sometimes related to the environment and militarism. Many Chamorus who migrate to receive better healthcare often suffer from cancer. Other Chamorus who migrate for work are often landless Chamorus and struggle to survive in Guåhan due to the high cost of living on island. Unfortunately, so many Chamorus have migrated over the last fifty years that those of us off-island now outnumber our on-island kin. There are even generations of Chamorus who have been born in the states and have never even been to Guåhan. According to the 2010 census, Chamorus are the most “geographically dispersed” Pacific Islander population in the U.S. The largest Chamoru diasporic population lives in California (44,000), with Washington (14,000) and Texas (10,000). I live in Hawaiʻi along with 6,600 other Chamorus.
Read Craig’s poem, “Off-Island Chamorros” and watch Bryan read “Missoula, 1976.” With students, use the following questions from Re-Imagining Migration’s Learning Arc for discussion in the classroom.
What is my story of migration and what is yours?
To support this driving question, use these supporting questions to guide a discussion using Craig’s and Bryan’s poems as context:
In what ways do stories of migration help us understand who we are? What can we learn from the many visible and invisible stories of migration around us? How can we approach the sharing of stories of migration with understanding and compassion?
Meet Bryan Thao Worra, a Lao American writer, poet, activist, and educator. He has published works that dive into themes of identity, transience, and home, and is an active community leader serving Hmong and Lao American communities in Minnesota.
We are recognizing the important intersections of war, migration and the environment. What do these intersections mean to you?
After nearly 30 years as a poet, looking back at my earliest verse to the present, even as my understanding of these intersections was only just beginning to form, it became clear there were indisputable connections. If I look at poems of mine like "Aftermaths" or "Burning Eden One Branch At A Time," or "The Last War Poem" I can see I was always interrogating that question of home, a shattered environment and its consequences, and this continues into my speculative poetry such as my 2016 poem "Narrative of the Nak's Heirs," as I try to articulate what it means for a refugee to assert agency and share our truths that the world might sincerely learn from it. Few realize that over 30% of Laos remains contaminated with US cluster bombs nearly 50 years since the end of the secret bombing, or the continuing impact this has on families trying to rebuild their lives. For those of us who could not remain in our former homelands, what does it mean to spend more of our lives outside of the places we were born, than in it?
In any given year, Laos is subjected to floods and natural disasters, exacerbated by leftover weapons and the effects of chemical defoliants from the Vietnam War-era that limit our access to arable farmland and our natural resources. I discussed the necessity of many households resorting to manufacturing everyday items from war scrap in my poem "Babylon Gallery," many transforming leftover bombs and munitions into silverware, jewelry and other goods for tourists as their only source of income, long after the war ended. There are also questions of gender and culture, and who is sent to clear our contaminated fields even if they had no role in the original conflicts. Who do we risk, who do we invest in? But this is a vast labyrinth, one that could become a huge textbook if we were to fully discuss the issue.
What are the untold stories of migration out of Southeast Asia that need more recognition?
At the risk of sounding obvious, a conflict isn't just about the veterans or the politicians and protesters. It's also about the doctors and nurses, the teachers and monks, our beauties and bakers, the farmers and artists, those with disabilities and even those who don't quite fit into the society, but so often, our narratives are erased by editors or misplace the focus on what drove and motivated them. Most people don't realize how many cultures are a part of Laos. Besides ethnic Lao and Hmong, there are the Tai Dam, the Khmu, the Iu Mien, the Lue and many others whose elders' stories are being permanently lost every month even as we have only just begun to understand how complex their journeys were, and what they can teach our next generation.
What would you want K12 teachers to know about these untold stories, and why?
Trying to recover these stories and build space in our lives for them can be daunting and complicated because there is a lot of unaddressed trauma and cultural disconnect for many of our youth who come from these families. It's not as simple a task for others to just go up to your parents and grandparents and say, "tell me about the war," or "why are we here in America?"
What has kept my interest over the decades is an appreciation that while the search for common threads between all of our stories and the universal lessons is admirable, it would be short-changing the world to try and compress our stories into neat soundbites and convenient taglines as if a phrase like the Killing Fields, Secret War, or Boat People is an evocative enough reduction of the different Southeast Asian diasporic experiences. Almost every family that came to America arrived in uniquely fascinating ways well worth listening to, and it is relatively easy to make effective curriculum connections even in unexpected disciplines.
At the same time, it can be challenging because you may only get a fragment of the story because it is not ready to be told yet by those who lived it, and we must respect that. What we ARE seeing across the country, however, is a generation after 45 years finally starting to open up with great urgency, and we badly need our youth to have the practice and experience in recording even parts of their family stories because often they are coming out when household members least expect it. As we read in Proust's classic Remembrance of Things Past, even the random scent of a madeleine might trigger an extraordinary trove of recollections in someone. For those of us with roots in Laos, so much will be lost if our K12 students do not have the skills to record and document, to inquire and analyze what they are hearing, what they are reading, what is being shared with them.
In 45 years in the US, Lao Americans have fewer than 45 books in our own words, on our own terms about our own journey. Without a meaningful commitment now to help our emerging storytellers flourish, a vital era of our knowable history will be permanently lost. Unlike many other communities with an extensive literary tradition, once many of our family histories are gone, they're gone.
Next, let’s meet Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru writer, poet, activist, environmentalist, and educator from the island of Guåhan (Guam). Craig is a professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hawai’i Mānoa and has published works about life in the Pacific, immigration to the US, diasporic movements, and colonialism.
We are recognizing the important intersections of war, migration and the environment. What do these intersections mean to you?
As an indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), the intersections of war, migration, and the environment are very meaningful to me. In the Asia-Pacific region, we have witnessed how hot, cold, and hybrid wars have polluted, contaminated, irradiated, and destroyed our fragile and sacred environments. War and its environmental aftermath has of course led to migrations of peoples whose homes and lands are too often violently sacrificed. In the Pacific, however, we can’t just talk about war, but we also have to address militarism. Many of our islands and the surrounding ocean have been and continue to be exploited as military bases, weapons storage and training, nuclear testing, and live fire and bombing ranges. The “slow violence” of ongoing militarism has also led to migration and environmental injustice.
How have these intersections impacted Guåhan and indigenous Chamoru?
Guåhan has been a U.S. territory (colony) since 1898. The island was actually governed by the U.S. Navy in those years, which began to develop the island into a military base. Moreover, the military government suppressed Chamoru culture and oppressed our people. In the new American schools, for example, kids were punished in school for speaking Chamoru language—a story my grandparents have shared with me.
A traumatic history of Guåhan began on December 8, 1941, when the military of Japan bombed Guåhan—an attack on U.S. forces that paralleled Pearl Harbor. Japan successfully invaded Guåhan, defeated the American military, and occupied the island. Japan also militarized our home island, making it an important base for its imperial ambitions in the Pacific. This occupation lasted for nearly three years, during which many atrocities against Chamorus occurred, including forced labor, rape, torture, land dispossession, and massacres. The U.S. military invaded Guåhan in 1944 and eventually defeated the Japanese forces and reclaimed the island. Both of these invasions, as well as the battle between two empires, devastated the environment and people’s homes. While my grandparents survived the war, they never forgot their traumatic experiences during this violent time.
After the war, the U.S. military continued its efforts to turn Guåhan into “an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” or what some have referred to as “USS Guam.” The military displaced many Chamorus from our ancestral lands to make way for military bases, munitions and fuel storage facilities, military housing, and live firing ranges. Today, thirty percent of the landmass on Guåhan is occupied by the military. This ongoing militarization has led to profound environmental damage to our lands and waters. Studies have found more than a dozen contaminated and toxic sites on Guåhan (including “Superfund” sites) due to military dumpsites and the leaching of chemicals. The air force base in northern Guåhan has been found to have leached “forever chemicals” into the main aquifer. Moreover, the entire island was exposed to radiation because Guåhan is located “downwind” from the nuclear testing that occurred in the Marshall Islands. During the war in Vietnam, Agent Orange were stored in drums on Guåhan and leached in the soil. This history of environmental contamination due to militarism has resulted in high rates of cancer on Gua and Chamorus suffer from significantly higher rates of cancer than other ethnic groups.
Militarism and environmental injustice intersects with Chamoru migration in several ways. First, it is important to note that Chamorus became U.S. citizens in 1950 as a result of the Organic Act of Guam. In the subsequent decades, Chamorus would be drafted or voluntarily enlist in the armed forces. Chamoru soldiers, along with their families, would be stationed at bases throughout the states. For example, Chamorus ended up in cities near military bases, such as San Diego, CA; Tacoma, WA, and Corpus Christi, TX. Today, Chamorus have extremely high enlistment rates, and military service is still the number one reason why Chamorus migrate. The other reasons why Chamorus migrate include economic and educational opportunities and health care. Sadly, these are sometimes related to the environment and militarism. Many Chamorus who migrate to receive better healthcare often suffer from cancer. Other Chamorus who migrate for work are often landless Chamorus and struggle to survive in Guåhan due to the high cost of living on island. Unfortunately, so many Chamorus have migrated over the last fifty years that those of us off-island now outnumber our on-island kin. There are even generations of Chamorus who have been born in the states and have never even been to Guåhan. According to the 2010 census, Chamorus are the most “geographically dispersed” Pacific Islander population in the U.S. The largest Chamoru diasporic population lives in California (44,000), with Washington (14,000) and Texas (10,000). I live in Hawaiʻi along with 6,600 other Chamorus.
What would you want K12 teachers to know about these impacts, and why?
I would want educators to know the basics of Guåhan’s history and how it has been colonized by the United States. I would also want them to know how militarism has impacted our lands and waters, and how it has led to a vast Chamoru diaspora. This is important to know because Chamorus and other Pacific Islanders are one of the fastest growing migrant populations with the U.S., yet very little is known about our histories, cultures, and reasons for migration. I believe that cultural understanding can lead to deeper empathy for Pacific Islanders. I think this knowledge is also important for K12 teachers because they may have Chamorus and other Pacific Islanders in their classrooms, and it would be transformative and empowering for our peoples to see ourselves in the curriculum.
Read Craig’s poem, “Off-Island Chamorros” and watch Bryan read “Missoula, 1976.” With students, use the following questions from Re-Imagining Migration’s Learning Arc for discussion in the classroom.
What is my story of migration and what is yours?
To support this driving question, use these supporting questions to guide a discussion using Craig’s and Bryan’s poems as context:
In what ways do stories of migration help us understand who we are? What can we learn from the many visible and invisible stories of migration around us? How can we approach the sharing of stories of migration with understanding and compassion?
Mannhi Tran interned with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center during the fall months of 2019 and created the outline for this spring feature. Mannhi shares why this topic is important to her, and why she hopes K12 teachers will find it important, too.
Before my exposure to Vietnamese American literature as a senior in college, my knowledge of the Vietnam War was limited to AP U.S. History and the novels of Tim O’Brien. Reading my first Vietnamese American novel (Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer) was an emotional experience—it was the first time I was provoked to question the historical, social, and political context of my physical existence and identity formation in the United States. The totalizing mechanism of what we encounter as “official” national histories marginalizes a whole multitude of other stories and experiences. The war affected all of Southeast Asia as a region, but the name “Vietnam War” won’t tell or remind us of that.
I think that discussing war, migration, and the environment together decenters the dominant narrative, reorienting a more inclusive and just history around real people and real lived experiences. I also think that the intersecting topics give us a larger historical framework (one that both includes and predates the Vietnam War era), reminding us that Southeast Asia existed independently long before any Western imperial presence—back when winds and monsoons instead of national borders shaped the region’s maritime movement and interdependency. I think it’s important to know the whole story.
P.S. If you haven’t already, please read Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous!
We are recognizing the important intersections of war, migration and the environment. What do these intersections mean to you?
After nearly 30 years as a poet, looking back at my earliest verse to the present, even as my understanding of these intersections was only just beginning to form, it became clear there were indisputable connections. If I look at poems of mine like "Aftermaths" or "Burning Eden One Branch At A Time," or "The Last War Poem" I can see I was always interrogating that question of home, a shattered environment and its consequences, and this continues into my speculative poetry such as my 2016 poem "Narrative of the Nak's Heirs," as I try to articulate what it means for a refugee to assert agency and share our truths that the world might sincerely learn from it. Few realize that over 30% of Laos remains contaminated with US cluster bombs nearly 50 years since the end of the secret bombing, or the continuing impact this has on families trying to rebuild their lives. For those of us who could not remain in our former homelands, what does it mean to spend more of our lives outside of the places we were born, than in it?
In any given year, Laos is subjected to floods and natural disasters, exacerbated by leftover weapons and the effects of chemical defoliants from the Vietnam War-era that limit our access to arable farmland and our natural resources. I discussed the necessity of many households resorting to manufacturing everyday items from war scrap in my poem "Babylon Gallery," many transforming leftover bombs and munitions into silverware, jewelry and other goods for tourists as their only source of income, long after the war ended. There are also questions of gender and culture, and who is sent to clear our contaminated fields even if they had no role in the original conflicts. Who do we risk, who do we invest in? But this is a vast labyrinth, one that could become a huge textbook if we were to fully discuss the issue.
What would you want K12 teachers to know about these untold stories, and why?
Trying to recover these stories and build space in our lives for them can be daunting and complicated because there is a lot of unaddressed trauma and cultural disconnect for many of our youth who come from these families. It's not as simple a task for others to just go up to your parents and grandparents and say, "tell me about the war," or "why are we here in America?"
What has kept my interest over the decades is an appreciation that while the search for common threads between all of our stories and the universal lessons is admirable, it would be short-changing the world to try and compress our stories into neat soundbites and convenient taglines as if a phrase like the Killing Fields, Secret War, or Boat People is an evocative enough reduction of the different Southeast Asian diasporic experiences. Almost every family that came to America arrived in uniquely fascinating ways well worth listening to, and it is relatively easy to make effective curriculum connections even in unexpected disciplines.
At the same time, it can be challenging because you may only get a fragment of the story because it is not ready to be told yet by those who lived it, and we must respect that. What we ARE seeing across the country, however, is a generation after 45 years finally starting to open up with great urgency, and we badly need our youth to have the practice and experience in recording even parts of their family stories because often they are coming out when household members least expect it. As we read in Proust's classic Remembrance of Things Past, even the random scent of a madeleine might trigger an extraordinary trove of recollections in someone. For those of us with roots in Laos, so much will be lost if our K12 students do not have the skills to record and document, to inquire and analyze what they are hearing, what they are reading, what is being shared with them.
In 45 years in the US, Lao Americans have fewer than 45 books in our own words, on our own terms about our own journey. Without a meaningful commitment now to help our emerging storytellers flourish, a vital era of our knowable history will be permanently lost. Unlike many other communities with an extensive literary tradition, once many of our family histories are gone, they're gone.
How have these intersections impacted Guåhan and indigenous Chamoru?
Guåhan has been a U.S. territory (colony) since 1898. The island was actually governed by the U.S. Navy in those years, which began to develop the island into a military base. Moreover, the military government suppressed Chamoru culture and oppressed our people. In the new American schools, for example, kids were punished in school for speaking Chamoru language—a story my grandparents have shared with me.
A traumatic history of Guåhan began on December 8, 1941, when the military of Japan bombed Guåhan—an attack on U.S. forces that paralleled Pearl Harbor. Japan successfully invaded Guåhan, defeated the American military, and occupied the island. Japan also militarized our home island, making it an important base for its imperial ambitions in the Pacific. This occupation lasted for nearly three years, during which many atrocities against Chamorus occurred, including forced labor, rape, torture, land dispossession, and massacres. The U.S. military invaded Guåhan in 1944 and eventually defeated the Japanese forces and reclaimed the island. Both of these invasions, as well as the battle between two empires, devastated the environment and people’s homes. While my grandparents survived the war, they never forgot their traumatic experiences during this violent time.
After the war, the U.S. military continued its efforts to turn Guåhan into “an unsinkable aircraft carrier,” or what some have referred to as “USS Guam.” The military displaced many Chamorus from our ancestral lands to make way for military bases, munitions and fuel storage facilities, military housing, and live firing ranges. Today, thirty percent of the landmass on Guåhan is occupied by the military. This ongoing militarization has led to profound environmental damage to our lands and waters. Studies have found more than a dozen contaminated and toxic sites on Guåhan (including “Superfund” sites) due to military dumpsites and the leaching of chemicals. The air force base in northern Guåhan has been found to have leached “forever chemicals” into the main aquifer. Moreover, the entire island was exposed to radiation because Guåhan is located “downwind” from the nuclear testing that occurred in the Marshall Islands. During the war in Vietnam, Agent Orange were stored in drums on Guåhan and leached in the soil. This history of environmental contamination due to militarism has resulted in high rates of cancer on Guåhan and Chamorus suffer from significantly higher rates of cancer than other ethnic groups.
Militarism and environmental injustice intersects with Chamoru migration in several ways. First, it is important to note that Chamorus became U.S. citizens in 1950 as a result of the Organic Act of Guam. In the subsequent decades, Chamorus would be drafted or voluntarily enlist in the armed forces. Chamoru soldiers, along with their families, would be stationed at bases throughout the states. For example, Chamorus ended up in cities near military bases, such as San Diego, CA; Tacoma, WA, and Corpus Christi, TX. Today, Chamorus have extremely high enlistment rates, and military service is still the number one reason why Chamorus migrate. The other reasons why Chamorus migrate include economic and educational opportunities and health care. Sadly, these are sometimes related to the environment and militarism. Many Chamorus who migrate to receive better healthcare often suffer from cancer. Other Chamorus who migrate for work are often landless Chamorus and struggle to survive in Guåhan due to the high cost of living on island. Unfortunately, so many Chamorus have migrated over the last fifty years that those of us off-island now outnumber our on-island kin. There are even generations of Chamorus who have been born in the states and have never even been to Guåhan. According to the 2010 census, Chamorus are the most “geographically dispersed” Pacific Islander population in the U.S. The largest Chamoru diasporic population lives in California (44,000), with Washington (14,000) and Texas (10,000). I live in Hawaiʻi along with 6,600 other Chamorus.
Read Craig’s poem, “Off-Island Chamorros” and watch Bryan read “Missoula, 1976.” With students, use the following questions from Re-Imagining Migration’s Learning Arc for discussion in the classroom.
What is my story of migration and what is yours?
To support this driving question, use these supporting questions to guide a discussion using Craig’s and Bryan’s poems as context:
In what ways do stories of migration help us understand who we are? What can we learn from the many visible and invisible stories of migration around us? How can we approach the sharing of stories of migration with understanding and compassion?
