Necklace of Freedom

    by Xay Kaignavongsa and Hugh Fincher

The drawing portrays a family group of Meo who have just come down to the valley from their home on top of the hills in the background. They are wearing the silver typical of their tribe. The Meo, or Hmong as they prefer to be called, are among the bravest people in the world. They live just below the summits of the mountains, near the sources of the springs, and pure water comes down to their houses in split bamboo pipes.

There is an exhilarating feeling of freedom when one stands on a high mountain and looks out over the valleys and the lower hills beyond. But the Hmong have not always been so free. They have a memory of the time when they lived in the land where each year had but one day. Like any day anywhere, half of this year-long day was light, and half was in darkness. So one can surmise that they lived at one time above the Arctic Circle where the year is divided into light and darkness in the way they remember.

The tribe must have come southward with their sturdy little Mongolian ponies. They settled in China and grew paddy rice in the lowlands until stronger (by reason of numbers) people took their paddy fields and drove them up into the hills. They grew upland rice in forest clearings where they felled the trees and burned them, a far more arduous and less productive type of agriculture than paddy farming. Even then, the stronger people would sometimes raid their villages and steal as many as they could catch to makes slaves of them. The captured Hmong were made to wear iron collars in their servitude while those still free fought back as best they could.

So the silver necklace of the Hmong is a reminder to those who wear it and to all who see it, that people, even though they were once slaves, can be free, and that freedom is even more precious than silver.

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