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| The annual deer hunting season in Minnesota and Wisconsin begins in several weeks. Some are concerned about heightened tensions in the woods between white and Hmong hunters, in the wake of Chai Vang's conviction last week of killing six hunters during last year's season. (Photo courtesy of Wisconsin DNR) |
St. Paul, Minn. — The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources says there are about 10,000 hunters of Southeast Asian descent in the state. That's roughly 7 percent of Minnesota's Southeast Asian population.
Some Hmong immigrants-- from Laos-- aren't used to hunting with limits or regulations; that wasn't an issue in their homeland. So both Minnesota and Wisconsin have trained a few conservation officers to instruct immigrant hunters about private property and trespassing.
Those were clearly issues in Chai Vang's case. His conflict with a hunting party began because he was using a deer stand on private land.
The executive director of the Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans, Ilean Her, says Vang's case has likely sensitized other Hmong community members to hunting issues, including trespassing.
"I think the community is going to be more aware and more attuned to their own safety, to what is private property, to what is not private property, and to anger, and how to resolve problems," Her says.
But in some people's minds, the onus is falling too much on the immigrant community to learn lessons from the Vang case. The director of the center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul, Lee Pao Xiong, says Vang's actions were egregious. But he says racial tensions are indeed a problem out in the woods. And he says other hunters could also learn a thing or two about hunting etiquette.
"There was a lot of rush to make judgment about the fact that Hmong people don't understand the law, and that we ought to have more training sessions for Hmong people," Xiong says. "And we're thinking, 'You know, they should do that for everybody.' It's not just Hmong people. I think you should do it for everybody."
"There are a lot of conflicts every year during deer season. People fight over who's going to tag a deer," says Jerry Sondreal, editor of the the Amery Free Press in northern Wisconsin, and media coordinator for the Vang trial.
Sondreal says confrontations between hunters in general seem to be increasingly vitriolic. He says race certainly isn't the only issue feeding the flames.
"It's hard to overstate the issue of trespass -- by anybody, in anybody else's deer territory," Sondreal says. "It's a very big issue here, and it's become larger. Because more and more land has been gobbled up by development, we have less hunting land."
But tensions sometimes arise even on public land. And some hunters have their own ways of defusing prickly situations.
In the parking lot of a St. Paul sporting goods store, Tavixai Lee explains that he used to teach hunting safety classes to fellow Hmong immigrants in Wisconsin for many years. As a result, he says he's formulated a simple strategy for hunting diplomacy.
"You see some people, you have to be smiling, say hi to them, for example, and make sure they {do} not look at you as a strange person," he says.
Lee says he's never experienced problems with racial tensions while hunting, though he says he can imagine it happening to others. In any case, he says concerns about those tensions would never prevent him from going hunting.
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