You Didn’t Kill Us All, You Know — Part One

The lived effects of the nam tiến, the euphemistically named ‘march to the south,’ deeply impacted and eroded the numbers and cultures of the Chăm, Khmer Krom, and other groups transformed by conquest from indigenous majorities to ethnic minorities. In the 1830s, the Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng dissolved the last Chăm principality of Paṇḍuraṇga. The emperor’s decision came on the bloodied heels of hundreds of years of massacres, assimilationist policies, and forced relocations of the Chăm. Through the decision to dissolve the last autonomous Chăm territory, Paṇḍuraṇga, Chăm resistance was “broken,” Wong Tze Ken assesses in reference to the final step of the 364-year “absorption” of the kingdom of Champa. Although I do not agree that Chăm resistance was broken in 1835, for a variety of reasons, certainly this time period had devastating effects upon the people. During the 1830s, my maternal village of Palei Uu—known in Vietnamese as Phước Lập—was forcibly moved inland by Minh Mạng, away from the life-sustaining shores of the Biển Đông or ‘East Sea,’ named on US maps as the South China Sea. According to a Chăm anthropologist I know, Minh Mạng moved our village to prevent our possible seaborne contact with other kingdoms. He didn’t want us to access the overseas networks we’d sustained for over 1,500 years as skilled maritime seafarers and merchants on the heavily traveled routes between China and India. So the Vietnamese emperor resettled us inland, in a desert punctuated by prickly pear cacti, where it remains difficult to grow crops to survive.

Our forced relocation in the 1830s severed us from our traditional means of trade in coconuts and subsequently impoverished our village in such a way that we are still one of the poorest Chăm hamlets in the vicinity of present-day Phan Rang-Tháp Chăm, the city named after the southernmost Chăm principality Paṇḍuraṇga and the Chăm towers built there in the 13th century. It is true that our village of Palei Uu has also been impacted by latter-day land seizures and redistribution, since 1975, as have other people across Việt Nam who have voiced complaints to Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and humanitarian agencies. Yet in many ways, the post-1975 deterritorialization of the Chăm has been merely extended through time and place through bureaucratic sanction, as the latter-day features of the longue durée of settler colonialism. That the Chăm became and remain concentrated in the country’s most arid region—where it is most difficult to sustain life—also aligns with standard practices of settler colonialism, where the most fertile and desirable lands are reserved for the ethnic majority population, for those who are meant to survive. Even during my childhood my mother made parallels to how Native Americans live in the US, saying the Vietnamese did to the Chăm what the US government has done to natives here through the reservation system. “We are the Native Americans of Việt Nam,” she taught me, as I tried to understand what differentiated the Urang Campa (or “Chăm people” in the Chăm language) from those residents in Houston’s thriving Vietnamese district, with whom my mother was friendly.

Looking back, I’m not sure how my mother learned about the lives of Native Americans on reservations, as a fairly recently arrived refugee without the ability to read English. Perhaps it was her constant attention to documentaries on PBS, as she became fluent in English while watching TV. However, her analogy helped me to realize that the Chăm shared a particular struggle with Native Americans, well before I had any awareness of concepts like indigeneity or settler colonialism. On a global scale, the Chăm certainly weren’t the only ones dislocated and forced away from our ancestral lands and our means for survival, during the past five hundred years. The same decade that Minh Mạng annexed the last remaining Chăm principality in Việt Nam, Native Americans in the US became subject to President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, which had devastating effects. The Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole were subsequently uprooted from their ancestral lands and forced to march the brutal Trail of Tears to Indian Territory. The disastrous consequences of the violence and death accompanying this process are still felt today, by the ancestors of those who marched to what is now known as Oklahoma and Kansas. The dispossession of indigenous territories is indeed a defining feature of settler colonialism—how else to create terra nullius, or empty land, the key resource sought by settling colonizers? Previous inhabitants must either be killed or forcibly evicted, and often in retrospect all that physically remains of the Natives in their original territories are the buildings built in stone and brick and the sacred monuments which somehow withstood the ravages of war and time.

In both Việt Nam and the US, accusations of indigenous “barbarism” also justified the massacre and assimilation of native inhabitants, despite the irony that campaigns of eradication are the epitome of barbarism—hence the unspeakable horror contained in the very idea of genocide, the systematic and planned extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group, a theater of continuous killing that generally constitutes the worst moral and legal crime to commit against a population. A glut of sources attest to the intentionality of the North American genocide, including Columbus’s own travel diaries which outline his plans to enslave the native inhabitants of the Caribbean—“with fifty men I shall subdue them all,” he wrote in anticipation, as he commenced the worst known genocide in human history in hopes of funding the reconquest of Jerusalem. These aren’t the historical details that schoolchildren learn about on Columbus Day, however. As a result, many European Americans and other US settlers and newcomers have inherited a historical amnesia about the origins and the lived effects of genocide in the US, and so remain quite ignorant about the complexity and range of Native American peoples. Many are clueless to the fact that over 500 distinct peoples occupied present-day US for tens of thousands of years before Columbus’ arrival to the so-called New World, and that their descendants continue to live among us. Similarly, many Vietnamese in the US and some in Việt Nam remain uninformed about the existence, complexity, or history of the Chăm kingdom or about the continued imprints of Chăm culture upon the Vietnamese.

Even when settler colonialism implements an official historical amnesia about the effects of conquest, negative stereotypes and prejudice about subjugated peoples often remain, due to the racial hierarchy that persists within the colonial context. My mother’s first husband’s parents, themselves Vietnamese Catholics living in Sài Gòn, did not want their son marrying a Chăm woman when my mother married her first husband in the early 1960s. My mother tried her best to fit in, converting to Catholicism from her native indigenized Hindu faith as Chăm Bà-la-môn, yet her first husband’s parents made life difficult for my mother. Her in-laws later mistreated my eldest brother when my siblings took refuge with their paternal grandparents, after his father was killed in combat and after our mother evacuated Việt Nam for the US in April 1975. My mother attributed this mistreatment to their “looking down” upon us for being Chăm, deduced from previous experiences. Even those not patrolling their family’s bloodline might also express negative perceptions about us. During our childhood, a Vietnamese American friend informed me that the Chăm are “dirty” and “unkempt” according to his parents, the same language used to decry the supposed savagery of natives of North America during Manifest Destiny-fueled civilizing missions to eradicate, assimilate, or otherwise “kill the Indian, and save the man,” in the words of the infamous Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Many non-Natives in the US seem to know little-to-nothing about real Native Americans, outside of Hollywood-implanted “cowboys and Indians” fantasies, the Land O’ Lakes lady offering us butter and land and everything else to her name, and other distortions of mass entertainment and advertising. In all honesty, however, many Vietnamese Americans seem completely unaware that the Chăm even exist, in the past or present, as a hallucination or as a reality. This total lack of awareness is a by-product of the settler colonialism that’s attempted to inhibit our survival in Việt Nam by minimizing and omitting our presence in the historical and cultural record of the country, and a by-product of the lack of education in the US about the multiple ethnicities inhabiting every country in Asia. The Vietnamese often write their history of their campaigns of eradication, wrought by the southern push of the nam tiến, as an inevitable aspect of “escaping” the grasp of China, by doing unto others as they complained China did unto them—including wield accusations of “barbarism” a little too loosely. The way it’s generally told the nam tiến is bloodless, to evacuate moral culpability, or else celebratory for having won. However, the longstanding omissions in Việt Nam about conditions of conquest in the bloody borderland between Champa and Đại Việt has followed the refugees and immigrants from Việt Nam across the Pacific to the US. In the US, the Chăm presence in the Vietnamese American community is often met with blank stares, in the better cases, to sheer incredulity in having actually met an “extinct” people.

Last fall, at a predominantly Vietnamese American gathering in San Francisco, I saw one case of incredulity bolstered by someone’s spontaneous bravado that my people’s kingdom had “lost.” It was a social event for an organization. As we went around the room and introduced ourselves, I explained (among other things) that I am Chăm. I added that we are an indigenous ethnic minority in Việt Nam, to those in the group who didn’t already know. After I spoke, a man from my parents’ generation announced to me, “I didn’t know you were Chăm! You were vanquished!” I sat there for a moment, looking at the stunned faces of those around me, as I gathered my thoughts and considered my options. I wasn’t sure if he just had “no filter,” as the kids say these days, or if he really thought this was an appropriate exclamation after an indigenous person of his motherland acknowledges her presence next to him, even in our shared overlapping US diasporas. I wasn’t there during conquest, though, either in place or in time. So whom was he talking to? My ancestors or me? Through his pronouncement of the subjugation of my ancestral kingdom, through his use of “you” to invoke the inhabitants and descendants of Champa, the word vanquished was meant for all of us, dead and alive, wherever we may be, geographically and temporally.

Even if I am expected to assume a position of defeat in the presence of the conquerors’ descendants, becoming an object lesson—a racial silhouette, with minimal chiaroscuro, that pops up within someone’s tunnel vision when looking at me—has never been my forte. So I had a different take on the matter. “I am not vanquished!” I replied. “I’m sitting right here, aren’t I?!” Subsequent conversations revealed that he had much more insight into the situation of the Chăm than I realized, I am relieved to say, and it shifted something in me to have those follow-up conversations with him. I felt seen and recognized. But bringing up the earlier exchange is fruitful, I think, for others who might also be taken off guard when they meet us. We don’t consider ourselves “vanquished” as a people—and especially not in a way that makes the violence bloodless—just because we no longer hold territory to our name. Our existence as a politically autonomous people is not the only enduring measure of our cultural and historical significance, since the word Champa on a map is not the only measure of our survival or relevance. Some people might claim that an indigenous people’s cultural memory atrophies and disintegrates once we’re “unmapped,” once we lose autonomous territory, and that somehow we disappear into the pages of ancient history rather than deserve ongoing recognition and self-representation. Such a view reinscribes the reductionist logic of the nation-state, a political formation of recent centuries, sometimes erroneously privileged as the only viable container of bodies, identities, and memories.

When the names etched on any political map determine who is meant to survive, when those names decide whose histories and cultures are worth remembering and writing, people deny the lived complexity of the cultural memories of most nations in this world, which are largely multi-racial and multi-ethnic in composition, in favor of a supremacist and nativist perspective that denies the endurance of indigenous peoples and the long intercultural exchange between peoples. Such individuals also deny the permeability, mutability, and arbitrary nature of politically autonomous regions and their borders, something observed in-depth by scholars and commentators. The phenomenon of diaspora, something shared by both Chăm and Vietnamese in the US, challenges both of these denials. Has the cultural memory of those from the Republic of South Việt Nam disappeared—or has it become more enhanced—after the “removal” of South Việt Nam from the political map and the global relocations of hundreds of thousands from the former South? And why should any sort of defeat, conquest, or subjugation, the key ideas within the concept of “vanquish,” be an enduring factor for determining the worth of a people and the viability of their memories, whether cultural or historical? If Southern Vietnamese hold tight to an awareness of their history and culture, hold respect for themselves despite their own so-called defeat in battle, why shouldn’t the Chăm?

This piece originally appeared on the website, www.diacritics.org