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Gail Morrison describes 40-year project documenting Hmong refugee stories; plans archive release
Summary
Oral historian and author Gail Morrison told a History of Missoula audience about her four-decade effort recording Hmong refugees’ memories of Laos, Thailand and resettlement in the U.S., and said she is preparing the interviews for archival release after redacting sensitive material.
Gail Morrison, an oral historian and author, told a History of Missoula audience that she has spent about 40 years recording interviews with Hmong refugees and plans to place her interview files in an archive after a multi-year redaction process.
Morrison said the project began in the 1970s, when she encountered Hmong students while working as a community-college counselor and then at Lao Family, where she managed an ESL (English as a second language) program. She described using a borrowed tape recorder to collect first-person accounts in the late 1970s and 1980s and later traveling to refugee camps in Thailand and to Hmong communities across the U.S. to expand her collection. “I borrowed a tape recorder from the ESL program… and started interviewing my coworkers,” Morrison said.
The project records wartime experiences in Laos, the 1975 evacuation…
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