On the third day of iStrive Hmong Summer Camp, a dance instructor gave students a choice. Did they want to learn hip-hop, traditional Hmong dance, or line dancing?
By a show of hands, the kids voted for line dancing. They lined up and followed the instructor: step right, step left, step together.
“Even back in Laos, it’s a traditional dance,” explained Linda Cha, the camp director. “Whenever there’s parties, the line dance is just a thing. It’s a way for people to break the tension. People just start line dancing.”
It’s the kind of cultural fluency that iStrive Hmong camp wants to help kids build. It’s been nearly 50 years since the first Hmong refugees arrived in Minnesota. That means that Hmong kids growing up today are several generations removed from their homeland. Many do not speak Hmong at home, and don’t share the same depth of cultural understanding their parents and grandparents carry. And though some Minnesota school districts and charter schools now offer classes in Hmong language and culture, those classes are not universally available throughout the state. Many students come from schools where Hmong students are a small minority.
“So many of the kids now that are coming to the camp, they don’t know how to speak the language anymore,” Cha said. “A lot of them are facing mental health issues and self-esteem issues around belonging and identity.”
For almost two decades, the camp was held at Concordia University in St. Paul. But after some internal changes at Concordia, in 2022 the nonprofit Minnesota Zej Zog took over the program. The two-week camp now serves about 300 students from prekindergarten through high school. And it’s made a few innovations.
The camp is now hosted by North Hennepin Community College in Brooklyn Park, focusing on north and west metro kids. The language curriculum has been streamlined and standardized by professional educators. And it serves traditional Hmong food for lunch — a highlight for many students.
The day starts with all students together in the gym for village time, which includes games, songs and dances, including Simon Says in Hmong and yes, line dancing. Then they break off into classes to learn about language and culture.
Kids say the camp has helped them build community and confidence while connecting with their heritage.
Pakou Moua, a rising senior at Centennial High School where 7% of students are Asian, credited Cha for the program’s mental health focus. Pakou said she had appreciated the opportunity to build community with other high school students.
“This is such a good camp to come to, to just learn about who I am,” she said.
‘I need to learn Hmong’
After Village Time, students split into classrooms by grade level. In one room, third-graders learned the words for parts of the body in Hmong.
“Lub cev,” the teacher instructed, sweeping her hands from her head down to her feet to show the meaning of the word: body.
“Lub cev!” the children replied, mirroring her gesture.
A generation ago, many Hmong kids learned and spoke Hmong at home. But that’s no longer the case, Cha said.
“They crave to learn the language that they’re missing,” she said. “Their parents speak it at home, but they can’t speak it or understand it.”
Ten-year-old Paj Hmoo Vue agreed.
“It teaches me Hmong, and I need to learn Hmong,” she said.
Paj attends Yinghua Academy, a Chinese immersion charter school in Minneapolis. At school, she’d learned a lot of Chinese, she said — but that caused a linguistic disconnect at home.
“My parents are like, ‘You’re not Chinese. Why are you fluent in Chinese? You’re supposed to be fluent in Hmong,’” Paj said.
Education is foundational to Minnesota Zej Zog’s mission. Its co-executive director, Pang Yang, developed a Hmong heritage language program for students at Park Center High School in Brooklyn Park when she taught there. She founded the nonprofit, as well as the National Hmong Language Coalition, to preserve the Hmong language and expand Hmong language education nationwide, and received a prestigious Bush fellowship for her work.
At iStrive, the students have two and a half hours of language instruction per day. Though students attend the language camp for only two weeks, they say it has greatly helped them improve their language skills.
Dresden Yang, a 15-year-old student at Blaine High School, said he had learned a lot of Hmong at the camp last year. He came back for his second year to connect with other kids who want to learn about their culture.
“Sometimes I’m really shy,” he said. “Ever since I’ve come to Hmong camp, it’s helped me improve introducing myself.” Since first coming to camp, he feels more comfortable speaking in both Hmong and English, he said.
‘Clothing tells a story’
The camp isn’t just about learning language — the kids enjoy cultural lessons, too. In a storytelling class, a teacher instructs students on how to use a range of inflection in their voice when telling a folk tale. In an art classroom, kids sketch Hmong symbols they will use to decorate the campus for the duration of camp.
And in one classroom, students are learning about clothing and fashion. Colorful traditional clothing items line tables in the front of the room. Students are sketching fashion designs at their desks.
The previous day, students had divided into groups to put together an outfit: one shirt, one sash, one skirt, said the instructor, Bee Vang-Moua. The students then had to decide: were their classmates dressed correctly?
“They didn’t get it,” said Vang-Moua. “All the outfits were kind of mismatched.”
For these American kids, color was the primary determining factor to determine whether clothing items go together, she said. But the best way to understand Hmong heritage clothing, she explained, is by looking at texture and embroidery patterns. Those patterns can tell a lot about the region someone is from and the dialect they speak.
For example, an embroidered sunburst motif is a specialty of Hmong clothing from Thailand, where Hmong styles from Laos tend to be simpler because that diasporic group spent a long time migrating. “They didn’t have a lot of time to focus on stitching,” Vang-Moua explained.
She encouraged the students to ask their families about their histories to learn more about where they came from — and what traditional clothing is part of their identity.
At a desk, seventh-grader Melody Xiong sketched an outfit for a model. She explained that she was drawing sunbursts on the outfit because that’s traditional for Hmong people in Bangkok, Thailand, where her family is from.
The most interesting thing Melody had learned in the class so far?
“Every clothing tells a story,” she said.
Hmong camp across the country?
In the lunchroom, Pang Yang served traditional Hmong food, catered by the Lucky Pearl Cafe, as students came through the line. On that day, the offerings were a Hmong chicken curry soup, Hmong sausage and rice, and watermelon.
Yang recently retired from teaching to focus on running the nonprofit.
“What I love about the camp is that the kids really look forward to it,” she said. “The kids leave with a sense of pride and so much love.”
As she paused to eat her own lunch, Yang reflected that she had been dreaming about hosting a Hmong camp for more than a decade. When Concordia decided to end its longstanding camp, the opportunity arose.
And now, the idea for the camp is spreading across the country. Elizabeth Thao, a North Carolina entrepreneur, sat at Yang’s table. Thao had recently started her own version of a Hmong camp in North Carolina — home to the fourth largest Hmong community in the country. She’d come to observe how the Minnesota camp operates, and brought her four kids with her.
Thao found the Minnesota camp on social media. Yang shared the curriculum with her. And Thao’s camp started the following year.
It’s a smaller camp, because the community is smaller and the camp is newer. But it’s clear that the idea and enthusiasm for a Hmong language and culture camp is spreading.
