Our topic is on Hmong shaman and our goal is to educate people all around the world about Hmong Shaman.We hope that after putting hard effort in this project, more people will have a better understanding about the Hmong culture and more people will realize who the Hmong people are.

We decided on this topic because we realized that many people know little or nothing about Hmong Shaman. We also wanted to learn more about our culture for ourselves.

A Little Background on the Hmong
There are around 160,000 Hmong’s in the U.S, mostly in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California. However, there are still several million Hmong people in China, Thailand, and Laos, speaking a variety of dialects (Lindsay). They are believed to have originated from China 5000 years ago (Yang). After war and persecution from other ethnic groups, the Hmong were forced to move southward into Indochina. Most Hmong left China around the 19th century to settle near the tops of Indochina like Laos, Thailand, and Burma. (Yang).

From 1960-1975, the Hmong secretly fought against the Vietnamese in the Vietnam War alongside the Americans. As the US pulled out of the war in 1975, Laos fell to the Communists, and the Hmong became the favorite target to North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao (Yang). Pro-American Hmong fields and villages were burned, the animals slaughtered, and the people chased down and killed. Many Hmong fled through the jungles of Laos and crossed the Mekong River into Thailand. There they waited in refugee camps to be placed in countries that would agree to take them in. The United States, Canada, and France were a few of the first choices for the Hmong (Yang). The Hmong’s facing persecution, moved to whatever country accepted them. Although they may have arrived with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, they also brought with them their culture and traditions. Broadening the US’s diversity even further, they introduced their own ways of shamanism.

Click here to read about a real shaman!

The Shaman The God Saub spoke from the sky He threw down the sacred bamboo wood We cal that 'bamboo shaman' Whoever lifts it up Will lead the life of the shaman And will have power to heal... Sometimes an old man gets weaker and weaker and dies His soul climbs the steps to the sky You must follow the soul to the sky when you shake You follow the path to the sick one If the weak soul goes to the sky Maybe it just wants to die It goes to the ancestral family in the sky The soul goes to the place where it can get release And power to be born again And passage to another life... Saub gives you power to help the soul To catch and protect the soul If you follow this way Truly you can catch the soul And the sick one will feel better You go to catch the soul with your two hands And with your heart And you grip the soul After that, the sick one feels better too... (Paja Thao, from "I am a Shaman: A Hmong Life Story with Ethnographic Commentary" Dwight Conquergood, ethnographer.   Southeast Asian Refugee Occasional Papers, Number Eight, Minneapolis, MN, 1989) Becoming a Shaman I became a shaman not because it was my will But because it was the will of my shaman spirits The shaman spirits came to me To make me a shaman... You must follow them They will make you sick Until you become a shaman. If you shake Then you will get better All Hmong know that becoming a shaman Does not come from your will.

(Paja Thao, in Conquergood et al., 1989: 2)

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