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Abstract. This article provides an overview of the recent interactions between the highlanders of northern Vietnam and the successive powers that controlled the state between 1802 and 1975: Imperial Vietnam until 1883, the French colonial state until 1954, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam after that date. Ignored for a long time, courted during wartime, subject to strong acculturation policy since the independence of the North, these highland societies are facing a constant challenge to their cultural survival.
The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a land of human diversity. Today ethnic Kinh, the lowland Vietnamese majority, account for approximately 85 percent of the national population. The remaining 15 percent belong to one or another of the remaining forty-eight ethnic denominations registered in the country in the 1989 census.1 These are grouped under the appellation of National Minorities. Of these National Minorities twenty-four different groups are found in northern Vietnam, amounting to 62 percent of the National Minority population and 8 percent of the national population (Table 1). Their habitat is part of the northern reaches of the Annam Cordillera and includes a large portion of the southern part of the mainland Southeast Asian Massif (Figure 1).
This article provides an overview of the recent interactions between the montagnards of northern Vietnam and the successive lowland powers that controlled the state between 1802 and 1975.2 The written documentation used in this article comes from secondary sources, either in French or English, or is translated into one of these languages from, chiefly, Vietnamese and Chinese. This documentation is in the form of archives, public reports, monographs, and various studies, including a number of rarely cited documents published in French during the colonial era.
Many montagnards in the North do not have a written language; if they do, most have kept no written records. As a result, researching and writing the history of interactions between these societies and the outside world held little appeal for modern historians, who have often left aside this remote region and its inhabitants. For this reason but also, more recently, in connection with political secrecy that forbids most "first world" observers and researchers from conducting fieldwork in Vietnam, very little has been said about the montagnards in northern Vietnam by Western scholars....