- For Hmong people, we live so close to the earth, and to the natural environment, that dates and times don't exist.

Only the moon, and the sun, and the seasons exist as part of our lives.

(ambient music) I was born in a refugee camp in 1979, in Laos, three days after my mom crossed the Mekong river, to the safety of the refugee camps in Thailand.

It was called the secret war, because the CIA went into Laos, and recruited the Hmong people to fight for the United States secretly.

My parents are war refugees, they fought for the United States during the secret war.

The refugee camp was a mile radius, and it had 20,000 people living in such closed quarters, and so there were a lot of diseases, and a lot of just bad things that happened, drugs and prostitution.

But for me, as a kid, I felt really safe, I mean I could play all day and not do anything.

You couldn't really call the refugee camp your home, it was just a temporary thing.

The UN was gonna close down the camp, and we didn't really have a choice, and so my dad was like, "Well, we can't go back to Laos, "because the folks that went back to Laos disappeared."

And so he decided that we should come to the United States, and we came to Wisconsin.

(ambient music) I remember landing at the La Crosse airport.

I remember just seeing the amount of lights that were on, and I was just like, "How could there be this many people on this planet?"

I remember just being like, "What kind of reality am I part of of?"

There was a lot of racism, a lot of discrimination, against Hmong people in this area, and we were considered a huge wave of refugees because the camps were closing down.

It felt awful, you didn't have a home, even though you have a house and everything, but you're completely lonely.

When I was an undergrad, I had the opportunity to travel back to Thailand, to home, or what I thought was home.

Going back, even into Laos, it just didn't feel like home.

People talk about their home, and they use such nice words to describe it, and it didn't feel like that.

And it wasn't until years later that I reflected on it, and that I realized that I wanted to come back to this part of Wisconsin because it is my home.

(ambient music) For Hmong people, we're gonna lose who we are within a couple of decades.

In some districts throughout the United States, only about 50% of our kids graduate, and there's a huge amount of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as domestic violence and sexual violence that happens in our community.

And it happens because of the trauma our folks have been through.

The war, it really tore Hmong families apart, it really destroyed the root, what it means to be a Hmong person, our identity, and what it means to be part of a community.

I'm the executive director of the Hmong Mutual Assistance Association.

It's really important that we do the work with the elders, and so our kids can relearn about who they are, and to rebuild their identity of what it means to be a Hmong person in this part of Wisconsin.

Today we're gonna explore another part of what it means to be Hmong, okay.

We learn a lot of stuff about the environment, and being out in the woods, and what that means.

When your parents do it, it's not cool, but when you do it with other people your age, it's pretty cool.

I feel like I'm really part of Wisconsin, and I'm part of making the state better.

Our elders would say that this area of Wisconsin feels like home, because of all the bluffs, and we have this way of saying that the way in which the landscape plays its in our lives, is really important.

And our elders even say that it brings life, that you feel more alive in a certain area, and this area has all those sacred aspects of what it means to be alive.

We believe that all those things are alive, and we have to respect those things, because if we take care of it, it in turn, will take care of us.

(ambient music)