[LINK] "Steppe Children"

[rfmcdonald]

Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer's recent article in Foreign Policy, "Steppe Children", examining the issues facing people of mixed Tibetan and non-Tibetan ancestry in the diaspora is thoughtful. It's a matter of relevance to Toronto, actually, since Tibetan-Canadians are one of the largest diaspora communities and they're concentrated in the Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale.

Mixed-race Tibetans coming of age in the West like Dondup and his brother are grappling with issues that an increasingly dispersed community will face more of in the future: how they fit into the Tibetan cause, how to preserve a sense of connection to a far-flung homeland now several generations removed, and how to handle the perception that they are contributing to the dissolution of a community that still feels like it must fight to preserve itself.

It's been more than 50 years since the first wave of Tibetans fled the plateau for Dharamsala, following a failed uprising against Chinese Communist Party rule and the subsequent brutal military crackdown, in which the Chinese government executed or imprisoned tens of thousands suspected of supporting a Dalai Lama-led government. As exiles, this first wave expected to return home quickly once Tibet gained its independence, said Emily Yeh, who researches Tibet at the University of Colorado, Boulder. So instead of dispersing like other diaspora communities, the roughly 85,000 people who first fled Tibet mainly clustered around a central core, built around Dharamsala and the Dalai Lama, in the mountains of India, Nepal, and Bhutan, next to their homeland.

But the past three decades have seen the start of a new chapter for Tibetans living outside of the plateau, a vast landmass of about 965,000 square miles in southwest China. As the decades in exile wear on, and the prospects of returning to the plateau have dimmed, more Tibetans are exchanging refugee life in South Asia for the West. Western countries, won over by the lobbying efforts of the Tibetan government, have arranged for large-scale resettlement programs that bring in hundreds of immigrants. Like Dondup's father, some of them -- there are no good estimates on the number -- have married Westerners and raised families with half-Tibetan children.

They're leaving at a time when a community that's always fretted about cultural preservation -- about how to maintain a strong sense of itself even though Beijing has destroyed many of the hallmarks of its culture -- faces increasing questions about what, exactly, constitutes "authentic" Tibetan-ness today.

Parents in Dharamsala worry that their Hindi-speaking children are too Indian, while new arrivals from Tibet to Dharamsala struggle to fit in, considered by their first-wave counterparts too Sinicized to be truly Tibetan. Meanwhile, Han Chinese settlers continue to flow onto the plateau, in what the Dalai Lama has called an ongoing "cultural genocide."

Amid all this, some mixed-race Tibetans have struggled to find their footing. There are enough of them asking the same questions about their collective identity that a group of about two dozen organized a conference in June in London, where they received messages from Tibetan Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay, Tibet's representative to Northern Europe, Thubten Samdup, and even the Dalai Lama himself. Intermarriage for Tibetans was "inevitable," the Dalai Lama wrote. What was important, he said, was "the preservation of the Tibetan language and culture."