The Dega People

Dega people entering a village in Darlac. Source:eindochine.free.fr/images/tribus/817DarlacElephant.jpg

We call ourselves Dega. The French call us Montagnards (mountain people). The Americans we fought alongside during the Vietnam War call us Yards (an abbreviation for Montagnard). The Vietnamese government calls us "Người dân tộc thiu so" (minority people). We do not accept the term "minority people". We are the autochthonous (original) people of Dega Country located in the Central Highlands of present-day Vietnam. 

   
autochthonous (adjective) =
(of an inhabitant of a place) indigenous rather than descended from migrants or colonists.

The Dega people share Indonesian-Malay-Polynesian ancestry. Our people are classified according to their language stock: 1)Malay-Polynesian-speaking Dega tribes and 2)Mon-Khmer-speaking Dega tribes. Mon-Khmer-speaking tribes are Dega tribes who came under heavy Khmer (Cambodian) language influence but kept our ancestral customs. We have over 30 tribes and over 40 dialects. 

Dega people are ethnically and nationally different from Vietnamese people. We have different political organization, ancestral origins, language patterns,  and cultures. We also physically look different from Vietnamese people. We do not share a common identity with Vietnamese people. 

Before foreign occupation of our territory, the Dega people lived as separate, independent tribal nations across central and south Vietnam. Forced to flee from coastal invasions, our ancestors successfully re-built our nations in the uninhabited Central Highlands in the 1400s. In 1950 South Vietnam illegally annexed our country, violating Dega territorial integrity. The united Socialist Republic of Vietnam later renamed Dega territory the "Western Highlands of Vietnam".

Since Vietnam's illegal annexation of Dega Country, the Dega people have faced genocide, persecution, forced sterilization, forced displacement, and other vile human rights abuses by Vietnamese governments.