HMoob Eldership as Pedagogy: Reclaiming HMoob Knowledge as HMoob Education

For centuries non-HMoob people and scholars have sought to label and define who HMoob people are, but this paper reclaims and repositions HMoob people as agentic and reinforces our people’s power to define themselves as we have for centuries. This paper also addresses problematic discourse about HMoob people and HMoob education, such as “peb HMoob tsis muaj kev kawm”1 or “peb tsis muaj kev txawj hab kev ntse le lwm paab lwm pawg.”2 Departing from such deficit discourse, this paper explores HMoob eldership as pedagogy as one way that HMoob people have valid knowledge systems. HMoob eldership as pedagogy examines who is considered an educator and how education is implemented within our community. I propose HMoob eldership as pedagogy as a form of knowledge from our community’s multiple pedagogies and education methodologies, one that roots HMoob epistemologies in eldership. Eldership, in this sense, traces the ways HMoob knowledge is passed down from the older generations to the younger generations through everyday teaching and learning. Ultimately, this work aims to nuance HMoob people’s understanding of HMoob epistemologies and cosmologies.