MONTAGNARD MUSIC: VESTIGE OF A VANISHING CULTURE As two dozen Montagnard musicians took their places before a standing-room-only crowd in Raleigh in early June, their traditional ribboned tunics and enormous instruments gleamed. Soon the room was overtaken with loud, ryhthmic music and dancing as the performers — refugees from Vietnam’s Central Highlands — gave the crowd at Quail Ridge Books a glimpse into a vanishing culture.
The Montagnards are an indigenous people who fought alongside US Special Forces in the Vietnam War. Those remaining in the homeland are viciously persecuted by the Vietnamese government for their historic alliance with the US, their Christianity and their claim to ancestral lands. They are forbidden from playing their music or governing themselves, and their numbers are dwindling, from a high of 2 million to about 800,000 today.
“It’s basically ethnic cleansing that’s going on there right now,” said Raleigh’s Dr. Surry Roberts, an organizer of the event. Roberts served as a doctor with the US Army 5th Special Forces Group during the Vietnam War and came to know and respect the Montagnard people. Now retired from medicine — and virtually blind due to a rare disease — he serves as an adviser to the Montagnard community in Raleigh and is a major supporter of the Montagnard Human Rights Organization here.
He and several other former Special Forces soldiers in North Carolina were instrumental in helping to gain political refugee status for the Montagnards and bringing them to the state in the late 1980s. Today, North Carolina’s Montagnard population tops 6000, more than live anywhere outside their homeland. Many of them risked their lives to get here, leaving home in the dark of night, walking through the jungle to Cambodia with limited resources and ultimately seeking visas to the US.
While some of the Montagnard music is loud — cacophonous, actually, involving the clanging of as many as 15 brass gongs dangled from arm-thick bamboo poles — other pieces are quiet and considered. Y Pritnie, an 84-year-old refugee who spent a decade as a political prisoner in a Hanoi jail, stole the show with his poignant “song of homesickness” played on a primitive flute. With impeccable posture and a dapper mien, Pritnie’s dignity was uncompromised by the rustle of bookstore purchases or the ring of an errant cell phone.
Carol Dukes, a teacher of English as a Second Language at Broughton High School, was in the audience to support her students, two of whom performed with the group. She currently teaches 15 Montagnards and knows a handful of their community’s adult men who work as custodians at the school.
“Every year, I ask my students what they like best about America,” she said. “The Montagnards always say the same thing: freedom of religion.”
Soon they will have a place of their own to worship: Roberts is part of a group planning to build the Montagnards a church on Poole Road in Raleigh later in the year. He hopes the group’s music will perform an instrumental role in raising funds for its construction.
—Liza Roberts
Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette understands
all too well the crimes of academic and literary lynch mobs like the Duke 88.
He experienced an organized campaign to block publication of
his first novel The Bridge (2001) by a cadre of activists in Hillsborough and
Chapel Hill. Marlette’s latest, Magic Time, tells the story of a Mississippi
writer drawn home from New York City when a case from the 1960’s civil rights
era resurfaces. Marlette’s political cartoons can be accessed at www.dougmarlette.com.
Marlette also draws the cartoon strip Kudzu.
WOUNDED WARRIORS
Members of the President's Commission on Care for America's Returning Wounded Warriors held brief media appearances June 19 following their day tour of Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune. Since mid-April, the Commission has traveled to more than a dozen military and VA facilities to hear firsthand how injured and wounded service members are navigating the healthcare system. The visit was arranged to provide Commissioners with a look at the types of programs and services available for servicemen and women recovering from wounds and injures and how they transition back to active duty service or civilian life. The nine-member Commission was established by President Bush to "conduct a comprehensive review of the care America is providing our wounded servicemen and women returning from the battlefield." For more information, go to www.pccww.gov.
LONG LOST DOCUMENT RETURNS TO RALEIGH
North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States was stolen by Federal forces from the State Capitol in 1865 and recently recovered in an undercover operation in 2003 (go to the Metro Magazine Web site and click archives for the full story online at www.metronc.com). The famous and well-traveled document will be on display at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh Sept. 17-23 as part of “Liberty and Freedom: North Carolina’s Tour of the Bill of Rights,” a statewide traveling display that runs through the fall, featuring speakers who discuss the exhibition and a particular amendment.
The fragile document, made of parchment and measuring approximately 31 3/8 inches by 26 1/2 inches, was conserved and framed after its recovery in 2003. Signatures on the North Carolina copy include Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg as speaker of the House of Representatives and John Adams as US vice president and president of the Senate. The document also has the signatures of John Beckley, clerk of the House of Representatives and Samuel A. Otis, secretary of the Senate.
BROUGHTON BAND MARCHING FOR THE ROSES
Raleigh’s Needham B. Broughton High School Marching Band has been invited to perform in the 119th Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA, New Year’s Day 2008. The band, the first from Raleigh to participate in the parade, will march five miles in front of one million spectators and a television audience of 400 million. The 185 band members and their friends and supporters need to raise $400,000 for travel expenses, trucking charges and band equipment.
Checks are payable to Broughton Band Boosters, Inc. Please mail to: Jeffrey Richardson, Broughton High School, 723 St. Mary’s St., Raleigh, NC 27605.
FAZIO OPENS NEW COURSE
Renowned golf course architect Tom Fazio met with the golf press in June to introduce his new course set to open in the fall at the posh and environmentally engineered Hasentree community near Wakefield in Northern Wake County. Said Fazio: “Who wouldn’t want to live in North Carolina, and especially here in the Research Triangle area?”