Why Preserving History Matters

Bhuwan Gautam
Springfield,  USA

If you don’t document, it didn’t happen. We hear this lot, right? Identification, creation, and preservation of history and culture is so important among the resettled Bhutanese that if they are not documented, they are lost.

History is often written by the oppressors because they have the power, privilege and unlimited resources. Sadly, the oppressed individuals fall on the vulnerability side since their voices and stories have no place. Moreover, what happened to the Southern Bhutanese history of persecution?

Bhutanese monarch massively destructed the cultural freedom of Southern Bhutanese. Instead of building libraries, they burnt books and banned the use of Nepali language in public schools. Hundreds and thousands of Bhutanese individuals may have written their stories in different forms from the print to electronic media from exile and the country they resettled. Yet, if we search for those records, they don’t all appear online or in press.

According to Hari Khanal, former Editor Chief of Sandesh weekly newspaper, Association of Human Rights Activists (AHURA) Bhutan was the first organization that conducted a robust survey in an effort to digitize Bhutanese history where 50% of 100,000 Bhutanese refugees in seven different camps participated. The collected information was then disseminated in the form of CD and a book Bhutan, a Shangri-La without human rights at different high-level meetings. If we search for the records, neither the organization nor the information is available anywhere virtually.

Bhutaneseliterature.com, Bhutan Media Society/Bhutan News Service and several others have done an outstanding job in creating hundreds of writers, digitizing and archiving their stories in their blog portals. However, if those volunteer-run organizations are dissolved for some reason, we will suffer all those great contents.

“We’re running out of time to document oral history testimonies within the Bhutanese communities in the diaspora. We’ve to document our own history as it is fading away quickly,” said TP Mishra, Executive Director of Bhutan Media Society (BMS). According to Mishra, oral history documentation is one of the biggest projects of BMS.

Now some former Bhutanese leaders realize that we have not done enough in the past to document and preserve our history. “Historical documentation would have been a tremendous source of our past stories, a rolling narrative filled with various experiences, facts, and tales of turmoil and triumph”. Narad Adhikari, Former Senior Human Rights Activist said.

The social media has made it easy for us to share stories and opinions instantly but they are not cited or referenced to draw conclusions, inform policy and generalize findings. However, the professional videotapes and interviews can create a historical record of specific personal events and experiences related to Bhutanese refugees and provide a venue for former refugees to tell their stories.

The Bhutanese college going students and communities may develop a relationship with local universities to find innovative and sustainable ways to document history can have a permanent place to stay and can be found in the literature review. The scientific data plays a critical role in addressing the issues faced by resettled Bhutanese.

Asian American state representatives and academicians in the United States claim that in general, Asian Americans are under the radar of the public policy and racial conversations due to the language and cultural barrier, low literacy rate and other factors affecting census data. In an integration effort, we the Bhutanese community members have the responsibility to find out what other Asian American communities are doing to overcome those challenges and act upon it.

Let’s see how other new American communities in the United States are doing. For example,  Asian and Pacific Islander Americans (APIA) noticed that there was a lack of Asian Pacific Islander American representation at state and national preservation meetings. In 2007, they formed Asian & Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation– which includes educational and community development activities involving the preservation, conservation, and protection of tangible and intangible historic and cultural resources.

It is the time for us to start looking at how other communities have been preserving their heritage from those that are private to public and government to non-government institutions. “In the Philippines, the Chinese-Filipino community has built a museum and a heritage center”, Richard Chu, History Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst said.

In Nepal, Dr. DNS Dhakal, Acting President of Bhutan National Democratic Party and Senior Fellow at Duke Center for International Development has recently established a Museum which features martyrs who lost their lives to their struggle for human rights and democracy in the Bhutanese movement, books and photo galleries. Foreign diplomats: Dr. Susan Banki, Senior Lecturer of the University of Sydney, Devraj Ghimire and Chintan Pathak of Central Committee Member of Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) see this as a unique context for the Bhutanese to keep Bhutanese story live. “There is a need to preserve the history of Bhutanese refugees in eastern Nepal where they have spent more than two decades in camps and lost their friends and relatives”. Dr. Dhakal said.

“In Amherst, they have collaborated with the Jones library to preserve and document their personal mementos, photographs, videos, etc. by involving community members in all phases of the project from conceptualization, planning, managing, implementation, execution, maintenance”, Dr. Chu added.

We all know why history needs to be preserved but it is our duty to find out how to get this done with all of the education, skills, and resources that we have in place now. We cannot advocate for change if we don’t know where to find our history!

Gautam is the researcher with Project Bhalakushari, a study on the well-being of aging Bhutanese in the US and Canada funded by the Harvard Program on Global Demography and Aging and the McGill University Health Center. He is a 2017 MPA Graduate from Westfield State University, Massachusetts.