With an NEH grant, the Catawba County Library System (CCLS) celebrated and preserved the heritage of its local Hmong community, among the nation’s largest proportionally. Library branches in Newton, Conover, and St. Stephens and a local Hmong church hosted five digitization days, to which locals brought photos, documents, correspondence, and family heirlooms to be digitized. Participants recorded stories associated with the items and shared them online through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. CCLS also held several events celebrating Hmong culture, ultimately fostering appreciation of it and enhancing the local population’s sense of belonging in the community.
“I want [my great-grandchildren] to know how much we gave up and what we went through so that they could make their own choices and have a better life.”
–Project participant/panelist
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The NEH grant helped both CCLS and the History Museum of Catawba County build bridges with each other and the local Hmong community. The partnership helped the museum build a collection that represents the Hmong community and provided CCLS staff with the knowledge to properly handle and digitize fragile items. Meanwhile, CCLS hired a local Hmong schoolteacher to coordinate outreach to her community and build support for the project. She recruited a local restaurant and traditional Hmong dance troupe to participate in a kick-off event, and organized a May Day event that included performances by a traditional song poet and musician. Both events helped increase participation in the digitization project.
The project offered local Hmong residents opportunities to share poignant reflections on their journeys to North Carolina as refugees from war-torn Southeast Asia, increasing understanding across generations and cultures. The library offered a discussion of the Hmong-American memoir, The Song Poet, and a panel presentation in which local Hmong residents shared moving stories of childhood years spent in refugee camps to a sizeable non-Hmong audience. “We wanted to build trust with this community,” says project director Siobhan Loendorf. “What I kept hearing was that they were so happy that we were reaching out and acknowledging them.”