CALLING WISCONSIN HOME. Dr. Kong Pheng Pha, an assistant professor at UW-Eau Claire, is organizing a community-based traveling exhibit in 2025 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hmong resettlement to Wisconsin. (Photo via IMC)

A community-based traveling exhibit will launch in January 2025 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Hmong resettlement to Wisconsin thanks to the work of a UW-Eau Claire professor and a team of scholars, experts, and specialists from throughout the state. “Hmong people have been a part of Wisconsin for nearly five decades, and many younger Hmong now call Wisconsin their permanent home,” says Dr. Kong Pheng Pha, a UW-Eau Claire assistant professor of critical Hmong studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies who is co-directing the project. “This exhibit honors the extraordinary experiences of all Hmong eople while forcing us all to think about the larger humanities questions of survival, healing and what it means to be human in these times.” The Hmong population in Wisconsin grew following the U.S. “Secret War” in Laos when Hmong were given refugee status after helping the U.S. fight communist forces as proxy soldiers. The exhibit, “Cia Siab (Hope) in Wisconsin: A HMoob (Hmong) Story,” will encourage important conversations among people regardless of whether they are familiar or unfamiliar with Hmong people or America’s secret war in Laos, Pha says. In August, the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Humanities Project awarded Pha and Dr. Mai See Thao, assistant professor of anthropology and director of Hmong studies at UW-Oshkosh, a $74,418 grant to support the traveling exhibit. Pha describes the grant as a “game changer” because the project team now can pay community collaborators and involve students at UW-Eau Claire and UW Oshkosh in their work collecting stories and artifacts for the exhibit.

Learn more about the project at www.facebook.com/ciasiabwi.