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Hmong to celebrate New Year at college on Saturday, Nov. 9

Nancy J. Ashmore
November 6, 2002

On Saturday, Nov. 9, a college founded 128 years ago to help Norwegian immigrants and their descendants succeed in America will help some of this country's more recent residents celebrate the beginning of a new year.

Mee Moua
Mee Moua
The fifth annual Hmong New Year celebration, hosted by St. Olaf College's Hmong Awareness Group, will take place in the Lion's Pause in Buntrock Commons from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. At 11 a.m., Minnesota Senator Mee Moua will give the keynote speech. In February 2002, Moua, 32, won a special election to fill the state senate seat vacated by Randy Kelly, who was elected mayor of St. Paul; she became the first Hmong elected to a state legislature. She was re-elected to the seat in this week's elections. An attorney, she is married to Yee Chang, a St. Olaf alumnus.

From 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., there will be a lunch of Hmong food. At 1:30 p.m. Mai Neng Moua, a St. Olaf alumna, and others will read from Bamboo Among the Oaks: Contemporary Hmong-American Writing, the first Hmong-American anthology in the U.S. She is the founder of Paj Ntaub Voice, a Hmong literary arts magazine based in the Twin Cities.

The day's activities are free and open to the public.

The New Year has not had a fixed date in Hmong culture, but instead is scheduled, village by village or region by region, to coincide with the completion of the rice harvest. In the United States it is generally celebrated in mid- to late-November. Within the event, however, are contained nearly all of the most important religious and social functions of Hmong culture. Busloads of high school students are expected to be in attendance, as well as a number of families from the Twin Cities.

The Hmong United International Council of Minnesota, Inc. and the Lao Human Rights Council, Inc. estimate that some 80,000 Hmong American people live in Minnesota and another 80,000 in Wisconsin. This is probably the highest population of Hmong outside Asia. Hmong refugees first came to Minnesota after their home country of Laos fell to Communists in the 1970s, but more recent immigrants have come from other U.S. states such as California.

St. Olaf College has a tradition of helping newcomers to Minnesota and the U.S. that harks back to its founding in 1874. Even today, approximately 20% of the students at St. Olaf are first generation college students, including a number of young men and women who are first-generation Americans. Hmong students have attended St. Olaf for the past dozen years, according to HAG adviser Bob Entenmann, professor of history. In 1994, Craig Rice, of St. Olaf's Academic Computing Center, created on campus the web site that has become Hmongnet.org, an official Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library Associate site that is accessed by people around the country and the world.

Contact Nancy J. Ashmore at 507-786-3315 or ashmore@stolaf.edu.