Talk:Hmong people

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Discussion for: Hmong people • View • Links • Related changes

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Page scope

Hmong people is the page for the Hmong (White Hmong Hmoob, Green Hmong Moob; the older exonym Méo, Meo, Mêo or Maeo), the upland people of southern China, northern Vietnam, Laos and northern Thailand and their diaspora. It covers names, population, language, the migration out of China, opium and the lowland states, the wars in Vietnam and Laos, the flight to Thailand and the camps, Thai hill policy and relocation, farming and the cannabis record: hemp grown for cloth and for the dead, hemp under Thai law, cannabis in Hmong fields of Thailand and Laos and Hmong growers in Siskiyou County, California. The Miao nationality of China, of which the Hmong are one part, is treated as a related people. The growing of hemp in particular places is told on Phop Phra, Mae Rim, Doi Yao–Doi Pha Mon, Doi Langka, Chom Thong, Xayaboury and Bolikhamsai.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

The history, population and naming sections rest mainly on Jean Michaud and Christian Culas, "Les Hmong de la péninsule indochinoise : migrations et histoire" (Autrepart 3, 1997), in the IRD Horizon PDF. Page numbers are the journal's (the PDF's first page is p. 79). Many of their dates and figures are cited by them to earlier authors (Geddes, Savina, Taillard, Stuart-Fox, the Tribal Research Institute); the article says so where it matters.
Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin (revised edition, 2003) is cited from a full-text copy; pages 291 and 350 are taken from the running heads.
The CIA memorandum of October 1971 (ER IM 71-212) is cited from a text copy of the reading-room scan.
The Meo Handbook of the Joint Thai–U.S. Military Research and Development Center (October 1969) and George Binney's second technical report on two White Hmong villages (March 1967) are cited from full-text copies of the scans held by the Defense Technical Information Center. Both were written for a military research programme on the hill peoples during the insurgency in northern Thailand; the article quotes their framing ("so far the most deeply involved in the insurgency") rather than adopting it.
Ardith Eudey, "Hmong Relocated in Northern Thailand" (Cultural Survival Quarterly 12(1), March 1988), is on the publisher's site.
The article quotes or paraphrases short passages of Nicholas Tapp (1989), Ronald Renard (2001) and Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy (2010) and gives no page for them. Chouvy's sentence on cannabis as a border plant in Hmong poppy fields cites Edward F. Anderson, Plants and People of the Golden Triangle (1993), p. 119 and plate 155. Chouvy's sentence may itself quote Anderson, so the article paraphrases it.
The herbarium labels are quoted from the sheet images on the accession pages linked in the text. The Thai news reports, the Thai and Chinese journal articles and the Real Seed Company listings are the same sources, read the same way, as on the place and accession pages that use them.
Radio Free Asia (28 December 2009), the Human Rights Watch letter of 20 January 2010, Bic Ngo's introduction in the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement and the Associated Press report of 10 September 2021 are cited from their own pages. Crossref dates Ngo's DOI to 2015; the journal page prints the volume as 3 (2008), which the article follows.

Meo and Hmong

Older sources and herbarium labels write Méo, Meo, Mêo, Mèo or Maeo. Michaud and Culas (1997, pp. 79–80, 86) treat Méo as a name of the Hmong and note that the Vietnamese of northern Tonkin called the Hmong Méo and the Yao Mán. Filbeck (1987, p. 129) records the change of name in Thailand. The article therefore equates the two names, while quoting the labels and older writers in their own words.

Where the sources disagree

The move of the Hmong of Khiri Rat (Phop Phra) from Omkoi: 1925 in the Highland Research and Development Institute's profile, 1943 in Phrommatham and colleagues (2026). Both are given.
Crévost and Lemarié, reported by Martin (1975), held that the Hmong brought textile hemp from China in the 17th century. Michaud and Culas (1997, p. 86) find no eyewitness or chronicle that places Hmong in the peninsula before the 19th century. They think the older dates for Tonkin come from a confusion of the Vietnamese names for the Yao and the Hmong. The article gives the agronomists' view as theirs.
The forced return of 28 December 2009: 4,371 people from Huay Nam Khao in the figure of the Thai officer in charge (Radio Free Asia); 4,689 from Huay Nam Khao and Nong Khai in the Human Rights Watch letter. The counts cover different groups.
The closing of Wat Tham Krabok: 2004 in Ngo (2008), citing Grigoleit (2006). A date of 2005 also circulates; no primary record of the closing was read.
Population figures come from different years and counts (Laos 2015, Vietnam 1989, Thailand 1990, the United States 2005). No recent census of the Hmong of Vietnam, Thailand or the United States is cited.

The story that the CIA moved the Hmong to northern Thailand

No source says that the Central Intelligence Agency, or the United States, moved or settled Hmong in northern Thailand. Michaud and Culas date Hmong settlement in Siam to the late 19th century. McCoy has Hmong villages near Chiang Mai by the 1920s. McCoy's account of the CIA and the Hmong concerns Laos: the Air America network under Vang Pao and the moving of Hmong villages to camps inside Laos.
What the sources do show for Thailand: Michaud and Culas write that the Thai state's hill-people policies from the 1950s were induced and financed by the United States; the relocations that Eudey describes (1985–1987) were planned by the Royal Forest Department and carried out by the Third Army, with Thai and UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control money, while USAID offered help that was never taken up; the Lao Hmong who fled after 1975 were held in refugee camps, not settled in the hills.
The CIA officer William Young, who recruited hill-people forces in Laos, is not mentioned: the sources found on him tie his work to the Lahu and other groups, not to the Hmong.

Other reports

"Hmong Children: A Changing World in Ban Vinai" (Cultural Survival Quarterly 10(4), December 1986), on Ban Vinai camp: the authors' names are not printed in a form that could be cited with confidence.
Polson and Petersen-Rockney, "Cannabis farmers or criminals?" (California Agriculture 73(3), 2019), and the court order of 12 May 2022 in Lo v. County of Siskiyou: the Associated Press report covers the same events for this page.
A Hmong word for hemp: none appears in the sources.

Open questions

Anderson (1993) is the witness for cannabis in Hmong poppy fields and may say more about its uses.
The sources cited do not give the opening and closing dates of Ban Vinai and the other camps of the 1970s and 1980s.