Who Are All These People?

To bridge our transition from Thailand to Laos, it’s worth discussing our attempts to learn about the distinctions between nationality, ethnicity, and clan in southeast Asia—distinctions which are quite alive in 2014. We’ve written already about our weekend in a Karen village, and the inhabitants of that village, with whom we toiled and ate lunch for six weeks. That was just the tip of the iceberg. Many self-identifying ethnic groups coexist in Thailand and Laos, including the Karen, Akha, Hmong, Lisu, Khmu, Tai Dam, Tai Lü, Mien (also called Yao), and others. These communities exist across political borders and have spent the last few hundred years migrating to escape political oppression. In this blog, often we’ll say, “a friendly Thai man,” or “a teenage Lao girl”—but in reality many of these people might correct us, saying, “I am Akha”, “I am Hmong”, etc.

What we do know about this subject, in addition to what we’ve absorbed from talking to individuals, we’ve learned largely from several nonprofit educational centers.

Back when we were in Chiang Mai, we made a trip to the Tribal Museum, founded in 2002 and built north of the city, in the middle of a lake. A smiling Thai woman greeted us in English and asked us to change from our outdoor shoes into indoor flip-flops provided by the museum. In the stairwell up to the first exhibit, an animatronic mannequin of a young woman in Akha dress welcomed us with limbs that moved on their own, accompanied by flashing background lights and a recorded speech in Akha. Winding our way through a series of rooms, we examined generous displays of the distinctive clothing, musical instruments, tools, houses, baskets, and so on of eight ethnic minorities currently living in northern Thailand. We saw handmade crossbows, knives, and mousetraps (like the freshly made Karen one in Baan Hoi Hoi), some truly impressive weaving and stitching work, a giant calendar comparing typical village work and celebrations for each ethnic group during any given month, and even a replica of the sacred door-sized gateway that guards the threshold of every Akha village.

Historical Perspective, and a Plea, from Step

The history of how these ethnic minorities came to settle where they settled is a long and complicated one. Each group has their own story, but some gross generalizations can be made. Starting in the 18th century, many members of these groups migrated from southern China (especially Yunnan), due to political unrest (aka discrimination and persecution) and the need for more arable land (the want of which was usually due to said discrimination and persecution). Most settled in the mountainous regions of bordering Southeast Asian countries: Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar, and Thailand.

A Karen woman in traditional dress, circa
1912. (source: R. Lenz/Wikipedia)

Unfortunately, their new homes didn't always treat them well, and many hill tribes in Myanmar and Laos found their way to Thailand. Many Akha left Myanmar during interminable years of civil war; many Hmong left Laos after 1975, when the Pathet Lao came to power in Laos. Though there are many Karen in Thailand who have been here for at least as long as the Ooeys (so 80 years), at least 140,000 recent Karen refugees live in camps along the Thai-Myanmar border, having fled killings, torture, systemic rape, child abduction, landmines, and forced labor in the Karen State of Myanmar, where the longest-running civil war in the world is being waged to this day.

Even in Thailand, many of these minority groups lack citizenship, land rights, and legal representation. The Thai government began seizing Akha land, which has been in use by villages since the early 20th century, under the auspices of protecting the environment from slash-and-burn agricultural techniques. These people were then forcibly relocated in permanent villages on less arable land, in defiance of their semi-nomadic lifestyle, and without any regard for their participation in protected areas management and policy-making. As a result of this and other factors, the Akha have the highest rates of narcotic addiction of any hill tribe and the greatest risk of contracting AIDS, HIV, and any STD (UNESCO).  Moreover, the "ecotourism" scourge that has hit Thailand with its pseudo-responsible tourism pitch has commercialized and commodified their culture, as Western tourists flood into villages to take pictures of the people in the human zoo. Sometimes these villages aren't even asked permission to have tour groups marching through, and even if they are, the odds of appropriate compensation are slim. There are a few minority-owned and operated trekking outfits that combat this problem, but even so the vast majority of tour companies and touts are there to exploit villagers in the name of getting the latest iPhone.

For this reason Phil and I boycott hill-tribe treks and strongly caution anyone considering one to think very deeply about what exactly they expect to learn from such an endeavor, or if they are really there only to take pictures of people who are different from them. It would be much more constructive to spend that money on any one of the many organizations helping minority hill-tribe refugees, and either read about the hill-tribes that interest you, or go to a non-profit museum. When you're craving a coffee in Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, or Luang Prabang, go to a café run by hill tribe minorities buying from other hill tribe minorities growing coffee and tea instead of their old opium crops. (In Chiang Mai, try Akha Ama, which also organizes an annual "Coffee Journey" to the coffee-growing village; in Chiang Rai Aja Coffee, on the northern street leading away from the clock tower). Avoid buying handicrafts at markets that look like they came from a sweat shop factory in Cambodia, because they probably did; supporting people through the exploitation of other people is never a solution.

A Burmese depiction of the Akha, from the 1900s. (source: Wikipedia)

At these museums, like the Chiang Mai Tribal Museum and Luang Prabang's Tribal Arts and Ethnology Center (TAEC), artifacts and photographs illuminate these different modes of life with great contextual detail, and tribal handicrafts sold in the gift shop are bought from craftspeople for a fair price. The TAEC begins with a classification history surrounding Laos’s ethnic minorities and the relatively recent shift from hazy geographic abstractions—highlanders, midlanders, lowlanders—to four ethnolinguistic groupings extending far beyond national borders. We discovered a beautiful Hmong skirt handmade in my home state of Minnesota. The US has the fourth-largest Hmong population in the world, and the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, where I grew up, has one of the largest concentrations of Hmong people anywhere outside Laos. So I was especially interested to see part of their homeland, as I’ve known many Hmong people in my life. (Step continues to be baffled why of 50 states, they picked the coldest after Alaska.)

An enormous tapestry of cloth assemblage and embroidery by Tcheu Siong at Project Space Luang Prabang

A Hmong New Year's Skirt

Hmong embroidery at the Chiang Mai Tribal Museum

There was an in-depth display of looms, spindles, and other weaving supplies, complete with diagrams breaking down the weaving process. On one Akha headdress, the classic ornamental silver circles had been made of US quarters. We watched a long video about the village life of Katu people, probably the most isolated and distant of all the ethnicities the museum addresses, including a buffalo sacrifice and a wedding ritual. And afterward, we ate some delicious, inexpensive Khmhu, Akha, and Tai Lü dishes at Le Patio, the TAEC’s cafe, which features a full menu of traditional food from all the cultures featured.

Or laam, a Tai Lü stew flavored with sakhaam, wild pepper vine/wood (Piper ribesioides)

That very night, at Tamarind Restaurant, we sprang for a two-course sampler dinner of over twenty small dishes that were unfamiliar to us but common to the people of rural Laos for generations. Step talked about this in the last post, and for Pil, it was some of the weirdest food he’d ever eaten. “What’s so funny about serving this in a fancy restaurant,” Step pointed out, “is that it’s peasant food.” Our young waiter, not a native English speaker, explained how each dish was made and the ingredients gathered. We bragged to him about the mountain rat, ant eggs, and jumping prawns we'd already eaten, and explained that mere hours earlier we had eaten bowls of Tai Lü stew. “Tai Loo?” said Pil, hoping he was pronouncing it right. “Tai Lyuuu?”

“Tai Lü?” the waiter exclaimed, his eyes wide. (Turns out it’s more like Tai Lyo, with a very round o.) He grinned and pointed to himself. “I am Tai Lü!” As far as we could tell, he seemed pretty wowed by our having heard of his clan; maybe it was something else. He said something to one of his passing coworkers in a language not Thai, and pointed at him. “He’s Tai Lü too.” He told us he had grown up in a small village elsewhere in Luang Prabang Province. Pointing at a pile of fried dung beetles on our plate, he explained how sometimes in the afternoons when he was a child he used to pick them out of piles of dung to have later as a fried snack.

Carved birds sitting atop the spirit gate, consecrated by a shaman, which separates the human and animal/spirit worlds.

Obviously, learning about global cultural diversity never stops. All over the globe, people—including you, where you’re reading this now—have always worked with what we had around us, developed traditions directly linked to our specific histories, and pursued our values from the vantage point of our circumstances. In our next post, concerning the weaving organization Ock Pop Tok, we’ll look more closely at how generations-old cultural inheritances can not only have competitive value in a world rushing forward, but indeed can be consciously marshaled to shape the circumstances into which others will be born.