Ever watched your grandma spit verses for a crowd? Tou SaiK Lee has. He's one of several younger Hmong-Minnesotans who have collaborated with elders in the last decade, combining folk traditions and newer sounds. In this episode, we follow him to the fields of Thailand and through an internal journey; Tou SaiK continues to learn who he is, how to enrich his community, and how to process the loss of his grandma. This episode also features conversations with Lis Pos, Shawn Mouacheupao, Ernest and Missy Whiteman, and more.

Transcript of Episode 7 — Across Borders, Across Generations: Hmong music in Minnesota

Andrea Swensson: Everyone's heard of sibling bands, from the Andrews Sisters to the Pointer Sisters to the Beach Boys. Some musicians even play with their parents—but it's much less common to share a stage with your grandma.

Tou SaiK Lee: My name is Tou SaiK Lee, a hip-hop recording artist, spoken word artist, and I do various things, but I also work in the community, mainly in the Frogtown neighborhood.

Andrea Swensson: Tou SaiK is also a Hmong-American. And he and his grandma, Youa Chang, used to light up crowds as the duo Fresh Traditions. For a performance in St. Paul, the two of them had practiced a duet—he would rap his verses, and she would recite kwv txhiaj—traditional Hmong poetry chanting.

[Tou SaiK rapping while Youa Chang recites kwv txhiaj]

Tou SaiK Lee: We performed, and then I would do my four stanzas and then she would do her four stanzas, and then I would do my four stanzas and then she would do her four stanzas. And then the third time I did my four stanzas, and then she just went for like thirty-two stanzas.

[Youa Chang reciting kwv txhiaj]

Tou SaiK Lee: And during that time while she was going, she
was going ham.

[Youa Chang continues]

Tou SaiK Lee: 'Cause I was waving my four fingers in front of her, like, "Remember, Grandma, we said four stanzas." But she just kept going. She just ignored me. I realized that she was freestyling, and she was just going off, and at that time I was a little stressed out, but afterwards the audience clapped.

We still did our collaborative performance, and I asked her right after. I was like, "Grandma, what happened? We said four stanzas each." And then she just ignored me and started talking to her fans because she had all these fans surrounding her, and what I realized was, one—Grandma, she's not that patient, but the other is that just be ready for the freestyle, because it could come at any time.

[Vinyl rewind]

Andrea Swensson: I'm Andrea Swensson, and this is The Current Rewind, the show putting music's unsung stories on the map.

Tou SaiK is one of the more well-known Hmong artists in the Twin Cities music community. In Fresh Traditions, he and his grandmother built a bridge between Hmong folk art and mainstream music, combining poetry chanting and hip-hop. For Tou SaiK, this intergenerational exchange is about more than connecting with an elder relative; it's about identity.

The Twin Cities Hmong community is the largest urban Hmong population in the country. In the 2010 census, there were 71,000 Hmong people living in the Twin Cities metro area, which is more than double the next-largest urban population of Fresno, California. This community is also remarkably young, both in terms of the length of time that its people have lived in Minnesota and in terms of the age of its population.

Hmong people first settled in St. Paul in the 1970s, and the median age for Hmong citizens in MN was estimated at 19.7 in 2010, compared to 37.3 for all of Minnesota. With all of these younger Hmong people being born and growing up in the United States, there is a danger that the art and traditions of Hmong elders and ancestors may be lost.

But Tou SaiK, along with institutions like the Hmong Cultural Center and the Hmong Museum, both located in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, are working to preserve and pass along this history.

For this episode, we spoke to several historians and members of the Hmong music community about the urgency, challenges, and relationships at the center of this work.

Fres Thao: Hmong music is performed because our history is more of an oral history, right?

Andrea Swensson: That's Fres Thao, a hip-hop artist and educator who was part of the first generation of Hmong children to grow up in the U.S. He explains why preserving Hmong history comes with its own set of challenges and customs.

Fres Thao: We don't have much of our history in textbooks— not yet, of course. And whatever literature had documented anything prior to maybe 1950, it was destroyed.

Andrea Swensson: Nevertheless, the Hmong language is starting to make its way into Twin Cities classrooms, as we heard from Koobmeej Lee, a board member of the Hmong Museum.

Koobmeej Lee: There is the Hmong charter school now teaching the Hmong language. There also is also a major university that also picking that up. Now the U of M has a Hmong program, St. Kate has a Hmong program, Concordia has a Hmong program. So that's really becoming very prominent now. Also the St. Paul Public School has a Hmong immersion school. I think they have two. Because when we were growing up we never had a chance to really learn the Hmong language. What these kids now have—to support them and learn the language.

Andrea Swensson: Tou SaiK Lee grew up speaking mostly English, and struggled with the Hmong language as a kid in Minnesota. But when his grandma arrived in St. Paul, he had a new incentive to learn.

Tou SaiK Lee: I was born in the refugee camp. So I was only two months old when my family came to the United States. My father had to do paperwork and then eventually were sponsored over after ten years of waiting on that process. And so Grandma came over, and I remember my father, he told us, "When we see Grandma, go up to her and hug her and tell her how much we miss her." And we had never met her. So we're like, "Okay."

I remember the day she arrived, and we were too shy to hug her, but we said "Nyob zoo pog," meaning "Hello, Grandma," and we welcomed her. And at that time I couldn't really speak Hmong—my own language—that well. I mean I could say a few words, like "Nyob zoo" and "Noj mov," [which] means "I want to eat," or "Sib ntsib dua," meaning "I want to see you again," or "Ua tsaug," meaning "Thank you."

So those are a lot of basic ways of communicating, but with Grandma, once we got more comfortable, we wanted to hear her stories, because Grandma was a great storyteller, and through her storytelling, that's when we started learning more and getting more comfortable with the language.

Andrea Swensson: Youa Chang passed away in 2017. But Tou SaiK's memories of her are so vivid that he generally uses the present tense when talking about her.

Tou SaiK Lee: The way I know my grandma is she's very social. She's very humorous. She likes to meet people. She likes to tell stories. She likes to experience things, and I just think she was just down for anything.

Andrea Swensson: Youa also made a strong impression on filmmaker Justin Schell, who met her while making the documentary "We Rock Long Distance."

Justin Schell: My name is Justin Schell. I directed the documentary "We Rock Long Distance," which tells the stories of three immigrant and refugee and hip-hop artists who lived in Minnesota but have roots far beyond the state's borders.

Tou SaiK is—he can be kind of a goofball, and it's something that I love about him. But his grandmother is—was—could be so serious, but then would also have this sort of mischievous streak too. And so it was great to see them interact.

I remember we did a fundraiser for the trip to Thailand, and everyone donated their time—all the performers—except Grandma. We needed to pay her because she was not performing for free.

Andrea Swensson: During their trip to Thailand, Tou SaiK used his Hmong language skills.

Tou SaiK Lee: I was able to write with three different musicians: a guitar player, a singer and another Hmong person who was trying out rap for the first time. He was actually my cousin, and so he saw that I was doing hip-hop and he wanted to try it out, so we would write verses together.

[Tou SaiK rapping "United Worldwide" in Hmong]

Tou SaiK Lee: But that was the first time I wrote like a hip-hop verse in the Hmong language and performed it onstage, and that was huge for me because I've been doing hip-hop in the English language for over ten years before that, and that was me challenging myself from someone who struggled to speak Hmong to writing a whole song.

I would say I'm competent in the Hmong language now, but I had to work my way to get to this point, which is good. I mean I'm proud of that. And I'm hoping that I can inspire those Hmong that have lost their language or didn't grow up around speaking the language as much, that they can motivate themselves to learn it even as a young adult.

Andrea Swensson: In addition to learning the language itself, Tou SaiK also challenged himself to recite kwv txhiaj.

[Tou Saik learning kwv txhiaj from his aunt in "We Rock Long Distance"]

Andrea Swensson: While in Thailand, Tou SaiK came to understand kwv txhiaj more deeply.

Tou SaiK Lee: I had this experience when I was staying in a village in Thailand, where an elder just came out of her house and she just started singing kwv txhiaj in an open field with no audience. And I was sitting with her son. We were just hanging out, having conversation, and I asked "Oh, what's your mother doing?" And he said that his mother was singing about a past trauma, and that was her way of healing—her form of healing is to come out and sing her kwv txhiaj. And for me it was a moment where I really understood that—well, art's just not for entertainment, right?

Andrea Swensson: After learning about kwv txhiaj from Tou SaiK, we wanted to know more about other Hmong folk art forms. So we paid a visit to the Hmong Cultural Center for a special tour.

Txongpao Lee: My name is Txongpao Lee. I am the executive director Hmong Cultural Center here for many year.

Andrea Swensson: The Hmong Cultural Center is tucked into the upper level of a building on University Avenue in St. Paul. Not only do they run a museum space dedicated to the history of Hmong-Minnesotans, and hold English and citizenship classes for adults, but they offer programs teaching young people about the qeej, one of the most iconic instruments in Hmong culture and a symbol of Hmong identity.

[Qeej being played]

Txongpao Lee: When they're ten years old or nine years old, they come here. First they are very shy, and they not concentrate what is the music play about. But when they come here for at least a couple month they get into it and they're very interested, and they want to play because the music is more like a part of their duty and they have to learn.

But majority of the student who come here, the parents very active, and they want their kid to learn how the traditional music like. So that is what they're very proud of—their son or daughter who come to the music class, and they're very supportive of that.

Koobmeej Lee: My parents actually forced me to learn this traditional instrument.

Andrea Swensson: Koobmeej Lee's qeej lessons deepened his relationships with older people in the Hmong community.

Koobmeej Lee: And it's how I got the most contact with elders. So the traditional instrument is called qeej; it's spelled Q-E-E-J. I've been learning that for—I don't know,
ever since I was third or fourth grade.

Andrea Swensson: The qeej is a very distinctive instrument. It's large—the full-size versions are a few feet long—made out of bamboo reeds and a copper mouthpiece. It's played by placing your fingers over the holes like a recorder and blowing in and out like the bagpipes.

[Qeej being played, birds chirping in background]

Koobmeej Lee: And when you're learning it you're always learning it just kind of like we said before. It's orally or you have to do it physically. There's no notes for you to read or things like that, so you had to learn it and you had to memorize it.

Andrea Swensson: At the Hmong Cultural Center, we asked Pao what the gender breakdown of qeej students looks like.

Txongpao Lee: Majority are male. In the past, like 5-10 year ago there were five female—young female come into the class. They were one of the best because they're younger, they're marvelous. So many people in the community so proud of "Wow, there's these young ladies has break the ice, because traditional music is particularly the only men and boy play.

Those young lady, when they were teenage, they were enjoy playing, but when they grow older they felt they not part of that, so they totally drop out after they finish high school and they marry, so they stop perform any after.

Mai Vang: My name is Mai Vang, and I am founder of the Hmong Museum.

Andrea Swensson: We asked Mai about the ways gender roles influenced her upbringing.

Mai Vang: Yeah, there's definitely gender expectations for a Hmong girl. And things that my older aunts and my mom thought that I needed to know as a girl in order to have a good life and a good family and those kinds of things.

But I also—I mean I was born here in the United States. So my parents put a lot of emphasis also on education. So even while they were teaching me these skills at home and, you know, kind of training me to be a good wife and good mother, they also encouraged me to go to school.

And so if I was doing homework, then they didn't have me cook, where I know that some of my friends— it was an expectation that they had to do, like they'd just come home from school and then they'd have to cook and clean and all that. And my parents were a little bit different in that way.

And I have also seen the way that my mom's perspective on gender roles have changed over the years. 20-some years ago she would've been like, "Why are you going out? You can't go out late at night," or, "You can't be seen with another man," or, "You can't be doing those kinds of things."

But just recently I've heard her say things like, "Women are not toys for me," and, "You need to treat the girls with a little bit more respect." And she doesn't have that kind of mentality anymore where women can't do things, or they are relegated to a certain place or space.

Andrea Swensson: In Minnesota, you don't see as many women or non-binary musicians as men in the Hmong community. Alicia Thao, Sonic Rain, Mona Moua, and Oskar Ly are a few artists in the public eye, but many more women and non-binary people tend to sing at home, church, or karaoke bars. That said, trailblazing musician Lis Pos says that he's noticed an increase in opportunities for young women musicians.

Lis Pos: I say that because I have a few father that asked me to write song for their daughter, or they ask me my permission to allow their daughter to sing my song or record my song.

Andrea Swensson: Lis Pos was one of the first people to use Western instruments and sing in Hmong. In 1978, he taught himself guitar and began singing with the Phooj Ywg Band in Nongkhai, Thailand.

["Hlub Tso Cia" by Phooj Ywg]

Andrea Swensson: Since moving to the States, he has recorded several albums, and he performed at one of the first full-fledged Hmong New Year celebrations in the United States, in Stockton, California, in 1984.

Lis Pos: Hmong New Year, it's a celebration once in a year in the Hmong community, and it's a time that we show respect to the elder, to the ancestor, and to the spirit world. Every single family will have a New Year or spiritual feast, and then a lot of incense, and they will do the soul calling for their family, and after that then they will have meal, then they will ask bless from the ancestor to protect the family for the coming years. Then the following days people will have parties for entertaining.

Andrea Swensson: Lis Pos lives in Fresno, California now, but he travels all over the world to perform for his fans in the diaspora.

Lis Pos: When I started I don't expect that it will be well known or famous all over, that to tell you, to share with you and with the community. My song is—it's heard and it's popular all over in the Hmong community, including Hmong in China; in Thailand; in Vietnam.

Andrea Swensson: And not long ago, he met a young Minnesotan musician who asked him to collaborate on a beautiful new song.

Shawn Mouacheupao: My name is Shawn Mouacheupao. I'm a drummer and composer. I live in St. Paul, was born and raised in Minnesota.

Andrea Swensson: Shawn grew up playing drums in church, and he says there were so few Hmong drummers in the Twin Cities that he ended up playing with basically everyone.

Shawn Mouacheupao: Good or bad, it didn't matter. I was in the band.

Andrea Swensson: One of those bands was PosNoSys, which he shared with Tou SaiK Lee and a few others.

Shawn Mouacheupao: It was kind of like Red Hot Chili Peppers meets like Brother Ali type of thing. So I was kind of like very lyrically based, but also like the vibe was very like in your face a little bit.

["Sunshine" by PosNoSys]

Shawn Mouacheupao: We kind of got to go all over and meet all different types of Hmong people, and that's when I was like, "Oh man, I really like this." So I graduated high school and I just moved to St. Paul.

Shawn Mouacheupao: PosNoSys is no longer active, but Shawn runs a small home studio and works with all sorts of musicians, from rock artists to MCs to fusion artists. Our producer, Cecilia, got pretty excited when he mentioned Lis Pos.

Shawn Mouacheupao: There's like this legend. His name is like Lis Pos.

Cecilia Johnson: I know—dude! Tell me everything.

Shawn Mouacheupao: I met him. I was playing a show in California, and I
got coffee with him. So I was like, "Oh, that's awesome." So we're just hanging out talking music, and then I realized—I was like man, he's super passionate about music. He's not just like diva or something. He's like actually just enjoys music.

And so I wrote this song. And I was trying to think of who I'd want on there, and I was like, "Dude, what if I asked Lis Pos?" I sent him the song, and I was like, "Hey, what do you think? You want to sing on this?" And he was like, "That song's beautiful. I'll do it." And I was like "Yes!"

Cecilia Johnson: [gasps] No way!

["Forever, My Dear" by Shawn Mouacheupao (feat. Lis Pos)]

Shawn Mouacheupao: And so I picked him up from the airport and we went to my house and we just tracked it out in a couple hours. We didn't know what to expect, but it turned out great.

["Forever, My Dear" by Shawn Mouacheupao (feat. Lis Pos)]

Lis Pos: I love the way he play. It's different from what we played back in the '80s—even now I stay more on traditional. But I listen to his music and I said "Oh, I can do something with that." It's a very sad song, and it's relate to love—how beautiful their relationship, how beautiful their friendship. I'm asking God to bless the relationship.

Andrea Swensson: Lis Pos would love to see more collaborations and experiments like "Forever, My Dear."

Lis Pos: I wish—and I want all the young generations to appreciate the old, the
traditional Hmong music, like the flute, the qeej, the ncas, and the kwv txhiaj and then can always compose with the new music and that will make it more beautiful to the Hmong community, and that will bring the Hmong traditional music to another step.

Andrea Swensson: So far, we've learned about Tou SaiK Lee and Shawn Mouacheupao's intergenerational collaborations in the St. Paul area. But we wanted to take a step back and talk about why the Hmong diaspora is so concentrated in the Twin Cities.

Hmong folks are members of an ethnic group with no official "country"; a few million Hmong people live in China, while the rest of the diaspora is spread throughout the U.S., Thailand, France, Australia, and beyond.

An estimated 300,000 Hmong people used to live in Laos. But during the Vietnam War, the CIA recruited tens of thousands of Hmong people—mostly men—to disrupt the communist supply chains running through their country.

After the U.S. ended their intervention in Vietnam, Hmong fighters had to desert their homes or risk being killed. Some Hmong people, particularly those who sided with the Vietnamese communists, still live in Laos. But most of the people who sided with the United States in this quote-unquote "Secret War" fled, whether to refugee camps or to diaspora communities.

Txongpao Lee: After the war's end, many Hmong unable to stay in Laos because of the communist Lao regime. They publicly say that they want to persecute any person who served under CIA and Vang Pao. So that's why create a big issue. Hmong refugee flee from Laos to Thailand for their safety. And in this panels is talk about Hmong refugee who came from Laos and stay in Thailand, and this is one of the largest camp in Thailand—we call Ban Vinai camp.

Fres Thao: It really goes back to the Secret War, and even before that, and just the Hmong community in general through thousands of years, has never really had a homeland.

Andrea Swensson: Fres Thao was the director of CHAT—the Center for Hmong Arts and Talent—between 2011 and 2017.

Fres Thao: So there never really has been this base that we can say, this is where Hmong folks claim home to be. So in that sense there is no place that has yet developed a Hollywood or a Broadway or a hub for the arts. But there hasn't been a place as relevant as the Twin Cities, however.

Txongpao Lee: In terms of the Hmong population in the state of Minnesota, Hmong never concentrate like California or Wisconsin. In California, Hmong spreaded throughout the whole state. Wisconsin, Hmong concentrate in many different city in Wisconsin.

But in Minnesota Hmong concentrate only in the Twin Cities here: St. Paul, Minneapolis. The reason why Hmong concentrate here—because Hmong be able to put their kid in the St. Paul public school, and Minneapolis public school system, and we love to stay close. We can help one another.

Andrea Swensson: Hmong cultural institutions are also concentrated in the Twin Cities. Mai Vang has been working on getting the Hmong Museum up and running. So far, they've built digital collections, thrown community-building events, and held paj ntaub stitching workshops. The Hmong Museum does not have a physical exhibit space yet, but they're raising money for a building in St. Paul.

Mai Vang: I didn't grow up going to museums because it wasn't something that my parents do as refugee parents. But I learned more about museums when I was at the University of Minnesota, and I took a museums studies class, and one of our projects was to go out and visit as many different kinds as possible, and I went to the archives at the U of M, and it's a huge archives. It's four football fields deep underground, and I was amazed how well they cared for all of these pieces of paper, and it's all history.

And I remembered looking at a book that the archivists pulled out, and just thinking this author wrote this book—hand written book—a hundred or some years ago, and I still have this connection to this author, but I didn't have that kind of connection with my parents. Even though they're here and they're real, I didn't know anything about their experiences, and I didn't know anything about why they were here in the United States. I didn't have a clear understanding of Hmong history.

So since that time I've been dreaming about a museum—as a place to bring these stories and this history to life. And in 2010 I moved back to the Twin Cities and began talking to people in the community about this possibility of a museum, a Hmong museum, so that we can begin archiving and preserving Hmong history and sharing it with kids who are just like me, who grew up and didn't have that kind of history in schools. And in 2014 I finally got a group of people together who were interested and who wanted to form a board, and so we became a more organized group.

Andrea Swensson: According to Mai, the Hmong Museum hosted the last Fresh Traditions performance before Youa passed.

[At the Hmong Museum, Tou SaiK introduces his grandmother and Youa begins chanting]

Mai Vang: So we had museum members who were there who were older, and white members, and they were learning about the kwv txhiaj and learning about this story, and then we had young kids who were there with their aunts and we had families there. Parents were there with their kids, and this was all in downtown St. Paul.

It was just really incredible, the energy that was in the room, and afterwards people were coming up and saying, "We need to see this again." And that was our very first collaborative that we did—intergenerational collaborative for that project—and that's when I knew that this was something that the community is yearning for and wanting.

Andrea Swensson: As with many immigrant communities in Minnesota, the Hmong population in the Twin Cities is still quite segregated from the majority-white population. But because St. Paul has such a significant percentage of Hmong people—they're about 10% of the total population—those outside the diaspora community have gradually become more aware of the culture, and started to seek out and appreciate Hmong arts.

Jasmine Tierra is an African American singer, originally from Illinois, who first learned about Hmong music when she came to St. Paul and attended Arlington High School. She made her stage debut at the 2010 Hmong New Year, singing in the Hmong language.

["Our Love Was Real" by Jasmine Tierra]

Jasmine Tierra: Prior to moving to Minnesota I had no knowledge of the Hmong population at all. So the high school I went to was 55 percent Hmong, and that was how I got introduced to the Hmong culture and the music.

Andrea Swensson: Jasmine was already singing R&B and gospel, along with her family. But she became attracted to what she was hearing from her friends.

Jasmine Tierra: I couldn't help but to be staying over at my friend's house or so, and then I'd hear music in the basement, and it's like the grandmother may be playing Hmong [unintelligible] and so I'd pick up on that song, "Ooh, I like the sound of that. Let me go downstairs and hear it some more," and then figure who the artist is and play it on my own.

I was first introduced to Hmong music—Hmong artists Jeff & Cicily, and they actually sang Christian Hmong music. When I heard that album there were songs on there that I really did like, and of course I didn't know how to pronounce the words, so I just mimicked what I heard, and then when I went back to school I let my friend know, "Hey, I really loved the CD and the song," and she sings beautifully too. So she would start singing and I would try to join in with her, and then she'd laugh and be like, "Yo, yo, you said this wrong." And then she would correct me, and that actually would help me out.

Andrea Swensson: So when she knew she was on her way to Texas for college, she went for it.

Jasmine Tierra: I know every year there's a huge Hmong New Year held in Minnesota. So I thought, "How 'bout I perform for that? Let me look at the contest rules and make sure it's open to anybody," and it was. So I went in and performed for it, and it turned out really well. That's when I realized it was something that I want to seek further, because it was such an amazing feeling.

Andrea Swensson: That first performance in Hmong at the New Year celebration went over so well that it led Jasmine to pursue a Hmong music career. After a break for school—she lives in Austin, Texas, now—she's rolling out her album Efflorescence and getting back on the live circuit.

Jasmine Tierra: The largest crowd I performed for was about over 10,000 people at the Minnesota Hmong New Year. Now, the events that I do are anywhere between about 100 up to about 5,000-ish, depending on the event. So most of the events I perform for are pretty popular Hmong events.

Andrea Swensson: At a Hmong New Year, there might be ten to fifteen acts on the big stage, doing short sets; Jasmine typically performs six songs in a half-hour.

Jasmine Tierra: There's actually a lot going on. There's dancing. That's very popular. You'll see a lot of Hmong dancing, Thai dances. I have seen break-dancers at the events. That's pretty popular too.

There are a lot of different booths with different cuisines. There's rappers. There's different artists. So I fit into of course the entertainment sector of that, and I'm normally there to sing of course. There's a lot going on, like any other festival. It's just mostly Hmong related.

Andrea Swensson: As many Hmong folks continue to celebrate their history and observe their traditions, Tou SaiK has become curious about how his culture overlaps with others'.

Tou SaiK Lee: I also realized that Hmong people are considered indigenous people in other parts of the world, and so a lot of the movement and creativity that's coming out of Native communities here in the United States are an inspiration to me.

Andrea Swensson: Tou and our producer Cecilia decided to ask Ernest and Missy Whiteman, a father/daughter pair of artists from the Arapaho, or Hinono'ei, nation, about intergenerational relationships in their community. The Current hired Tou to host this conversation.

Ernest Whiteman: My name is Ernie Whiteman. That's my English name, but I was given a name when I was very young by my people. My name was given to me by my great-grandfather, Charlie Whiteman, who gave me the name of Tei'eihi Beh'eih, which means "strong old man" because when I was very young they didn't expect me to live to be a year old. So that's who I am.

And I'm Hinono'ei, which is what my people call themselves. It means "the people," merely "the people." We were given the name by the European colonizers—Arapaho, Northern Arapaho, but we refer to ourselves as Hinono'ei simply.

Missy Whiteman: Tous. My name is Missy Whiteman and I also belong to the Northern Arapaho/Hinono'ei and Kickapoo people.

Andrea Swensson: To close this episode, we wanted to share what Ernest told Tou about his perspective on respecting and consulting elders. As Tou expands his work, the parallels between his journey to connect with his culture and the work that Native communities are doing have only become more clear.

Ernest Whiteman: The elder in many cultures is the person that we all seek for information, for advice, for spiritual things. We, I think today, have drifted away from that, the way our cultures were meant to be. And so I desperately am trying to make that connection again with the young people.

We, as older people, become invisible to the younger generation. I once said to an elderly lady, "It's good to see you." And she said, "It's good to be seen." And what she meant was that I no longer have my role because of today's contemporary society. People don't have time to communicate with their elders, and to me that's an important part of any culture, is your elders. They are the backbone of your people. They have the information. And so if I'm not fulfilling my role as an elder; I'm not doing what I'm supposed to do.

Probably with your culture and your grandmother, collaborating with your grandmother, that was one way that you were able to bring that connection together with your grandma and what you do. I think that's probably something that we need to be thinking about. I know in my culture, it's how do we utilize our elders more? How do you collaborate with our elders?

We don't just go and ask them for information, but there's other ways that we can incorporate the elders into whatever we do in our daily lives, and not to neglect them. I kind of sound like I'm feeling sorry for an elder, like it's "be nice to your elder week" or something like that.

Tou SaiK Lee: It should be every day, right?

Ernest Whiteman: Yeah.

Andrea Swensson: The whole conversation between Missy, Ernest, and Tou was fascinating. To hear more of their insights and stories, find their full conversation at TheCurrent.org/rewind.

["Winging It" by Lazerbeak]

Andrea Swensson: The Current Rewind is produced by Cecilia Johnson. Michaelangelo Matos is our writer, Marisa Gonzalez Morseth is our research assistant, and Brett Baldwin is our managing producer. Our theme music is "Winging It" by Lazerbeak from the album Luther. Michael DeMark mastered this episode, and Veronica Rodriguez recorded audio of our Hmong Cultural Center tour.

Thanks to our guests: artists Tou SaiK Lee, Shawn Mouacheupao, Jasmine Tierra, and the legendary Lis Pos; Txongpao Lee of the Hmong Cultural Center; Fres Thao, Koobmeej Lee and Mai Vang of the Hmong Museum; father/daughter artists Ernest and Missy Whiteman, and filmmaker Justin Schell. You can see Justin's documentary, "We Rock Long Distance," on Vimeo. Thank you to Hmoob Lis Channel on YouTube for letting us use their recording of the qeej.

If you're interested, keep an eye out for some exciting projects from Tou SaiK Lee—he is writing a memoir to honor his grandma's legacy, called "My Grandma Can Freestyle." Plus, he's releasing his first Hmong language hip-hop album in 2019.

This is our second-to-last episode of the first season of The Current Rewind. If you've been digging these episodes, we would love it if you would go rate and review this series.

Go to TheCurrent.org/rewind to find transcripts and bonus materials.

The Current Rewind is made possible in part by the Minnesota Legacy Amendment's Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. It is a production of Minnesota Public Radio's The Current.