The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project honors 50 years of history through archival storytelling

The year 2025 marked a major milestone for Southeast Asian communities, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the end of the Secret War in Laos and the Khmer Rouge genocide. This moment also highlighted the importance of preserving storytelling to ensure these histories and lived experiences remain accessible for future generations.

The SEAD Project

The Southeast Asian Diaspora Project (The SEAD Project) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2011 by creative storytellers working to redefine community development and cultural representation for the Southeast Asian diaspora. The organization works to build spaces where lived experiences are central to community empowerment and collective identity. 

The SEAD Project envisions a growing Southeast Asian diaspora ecosystem that reimagines sustainable community development by uplifting leaders, women, and young people through storytelling, language, and the arts. Its mission is to serve as an accessible creative hub for Khmer, Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese communities, offering workshops and programs that foster connection, knowledge-sharing, and long-term empowerment across local and global diaspora networks.

They center the arts and storytelling into all aspects of their programs, which include heritage and language workshops, cultural organizing, youth leadership, and Planting SEADS, a storytelling initiative that seeks to honor and amplify the experiences of Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese community members.

“We help language learners of the diaspora reconnect with language so that they can communicate with our elders,” Co-Executive Director of Programs Juanita Vang says. “That connection to culture through the arts is what makes taking a class all worth it.”

Memories of Abundance

A new project led by The SEAD Project, in partnership with Palita Chunsaengchan, assistant professor in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and supported by the Liberal Arts Engagement Hub (The Hub) residency program, aims to preserve underdocumented histories, foster intergenerational dialogue, and create lasting educational resources for students, researchers, and community members through film and archival storytelling. 

The project, Memories of Abundance: The Diasporic Journey of Southeast Asians in Minnesota, highlights narratives from Khmer, Hmong, Lao, and Vietnamese communities, focuses on lived experiences of migration, adaptation, and renewal across Minnesota. It explores how these journeys have shaped community identities and contributed to the state’s cultural and historical landscape.

“Our communities were known as diaspora because of all the wars,” Co-Executive Director of Operations Kaysone Syonesa says. “We dispersed and went all over the world. Because of that we have made places around the world, we built lives, we built businesses, and made new families. These stories and these histories needed to be acknowledged and told.”

The project hosted storytelling sessions in partnership with Chunsaengchan, who will also coordinate community engagement through a feature film screening on May 2 and a roundtable with Southeast Asian filmmakers. Her expertise in film and media studies informed the work throughout the residency.

She describes film as a foundational language for understanding shifting perceptions and how stories evolve within changing social and technological contexts. The film she curated for the public screening aligns with The SEAD Project’s mission, which centers Southeast Asian diaspora communities and their journeys to the United States.

“This aspect about film is something that I think truly reflects one of the goals of this residency, which is to bring different stakeholders together and to work in and with communities,” Chunsaengchan says.

The storytelling sessions began with the creation of an “abundance altar,” developed in spring 2025 in collaboration with a local Southeast Asian artist and community advisors from each heritage. Designed as a mobile installation for communal reflection, remembrance, and grounding, the altar is rooted in cultural practices of honoring ancestors. The altar invited participants to bring objects, photographs, or personal belongings from their journeys as offerings and as a way to center their stories within the space and the community.

Participants were invited to write, share, or orally narrate their stories in ways that felt comfortable to them. For many, it was the first time speaking their experiences aloud.

A key component of these sessions was the use of a “memory map,” which featured historical timelines marking significant events affecting Southeast Asian communities, including major accomplishments of these communities beyond war. As participants engaged with the map, many contributed their own lived experiences, placing personal stories alongside broader historical moments, Syonesa says. 

“We are not alone in this fight to keep our identity, our culture, and our ancestral backgrounds intact,” Vang says. 

This story was written by Lulu Jaeckel, an undergraduate student in CLA.