Assimilation education

As she prepares to retire, Judy Lewis, director of state and federal programs for the Folsom Cordova Unified School District, had to find a home for the 6,000 Southeast Asian books, government documents and artifacts collected since the early 1980s.

Teachers who had to educate the Hmong, Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees arriving in waves in the early 1980s knew nothing about their culture, Lewis explained. The collection—an education for the educators—eventually grew into a researchers’ library including estate items, wedding garb, Army handbooks, folk tales and government documents on the “Secret War.” The Hmong language was primarily oral until the 1950s, when linguists agreed upon a common written interpretation. The Refugee Educators’ Network even preserved some of these first books and transcribed ceremonial practices written in Hmong.

But recently, Lewis said, things have changed. New teaching standards gave educators less freedom to build their own lessons. “There’s a huge focus on teachers delivering a fairly scripted program,” Lewis explained. Also, as Southeast Asian families settled in, their culture became more familiar. “People felt they knew them,” Lewis said.

She recently found a home for all 6,000 items with the CSUS library.