Introduction:

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples offers students an opportunity to learn about research from, perhaps, what is a new and frank perspective. The author, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, writes that colonized readers and researchers are the target audience of Decolonizing Methodologies (xi). However, people of many different backgrounds can benefit from reading and sitting with the new methods and modes of ethics that Smith presents. As students use some of her ideas for research as a framework for understanding Kim Phúc, they help expand knowledge of the impact of the Vietnam War, especially on women and girls.

Goals: Students will aim to de-center the colonizer by focusing on the indigenous people and environment of the colonized place. Students will experiment with new research methods and take new points of view into account. Students will interpret a visual artifact while connecting across disciplines, such as history, literature, and science.

Focus/Purpose:

Living in Vietnam before 1972, the child Phan Thị Kim Phúc (or Kim Phúc) probably never expected a picture of herself -- let alone one of her most painful moments arguably -- to be shared around the world. The photo entitled “The Terror of War” showed her crying face and unclothed body after napalm covered her.1

Kim Phúc probably never expected to be discussed in an American history course either, but she has been. A spring 2023 lecture in American History from 1877 featured Nick Ut’s “The Terror of War” on a lecture slide, alongside other unforgettable images from the Vietnam War in the presentation.2 However, spending merely a moment on the well-known picture doesn’t do justice to the experience. How can one teach “The Terror of War” to one’s students? How will students analyze the photo in terms of U.S. history and politics? Why does this photo matter to U.S. history if the photographer and bombers with napalm were South Vietnamese and Kim Phúc now lives in Canada?3

Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith inspires some ideas to help answer these questions. Smith’s book analyzes the (Western) concept of research, its history, its coloniality, and its relationship to modernity. She explains how it has impacted colonized peoples, particularly Māori, and offers 25 ideas for how to research in an Indigenous fashion. Smith writes that her book is for Indigenous researchers; however, there’s much to be learned by the non-Indigenous scholar.4

For students to better understand Kim Phúc and “The Terror of War,” I have adapted four of Smith’s project ideas to enhance this topic in the classroom.

Pre-Requisite: Class reads and discusses Chapter 1-3 of Decolonizing Methodologies, 2nd ed., by Linda Tuhiwai Smith during an earlier class period.

· Ch.1: “Imperialism, History, Writing and Theory”

· Ch. 2: “Research through Imperial Eyes”

· Ch. 3: “Colonizing Knowledges”

Homework/Preparatory Work:

· All students should:

o 1) read Decolonizing Methodologies, Ch. 8 “Twenty-five Indigenous Projects”; o 2) read the New York Times article: “It’s Been 50 Years. I Am Not ‘Napalm Girl’ Anymore”; and o 3) acquaint themselves with “The Terror of War” (note: graphic image of war, nudity)

· Divide class into 3 groups. (Subdivide as needed depending on class size and typical length of readings.) Each group will focus on specific readings, and return to the classroom ready to present on those readings and guide discussion on the “project” on which they focused. Here are the students’ reading instructions.

Group 1: Embrace “Remembering”5 and then read and process Kim Phúc’s 2022 opinion essay in the New York Times. Kim Phúc conveys her voice and her experience without romanticization, and Smith defines this project as “the remembering of a painful past, re-membering in terms of connecting bodies with place and experience, and importantly people’s responses to that pain.”6 One can absorb the latter when Kim Phúc shares the bad (she writes: “the burns scarred a third of my body and caused intense, chronic pain” and “As I got older, I feared that no one would ever love me.”) and the good (for instance, her happy life before the photo).7 Kim Phúc here remembers, and we are here to listen. · Also, read “1968 – the year that haunts hundreds of women” and “Survivors recall US massacre in My Lai”

· Guiding Questions: Whose memories of the Vietnam War can we process from reading the testaments in these articles and viewing the accompanying videos? What voices might we be missing? Where might it be difficult for both the colonized and the colonizer to remember and recognize fully the “painful past”? How can Westerners listen effectively in support of the remembering project?

Group 2: “Gendering”8: Focus some time understanding the gendered aspects of the photo and its use. Students should be able to analyze the gendered dynamics that lie behind the major historical events and themes we cover.

Smith writes: “Gendering indigenous debates…is concerned with issues arising from the relations between indigenous men and women that have come about through colonialism.”9 Kim Phúc refers to her own questions about why she alone wore no clothes in the photo.10 (Did she not deserve dignity?) Interpret the gendered dynamic and its possible origins through an excerpt from Wendy N. Duong’s 2001 law journal article (pp. 253-261).

· In addition to reading Kim Phúc’s writing on her experience, students should read about the lives of other Vietnamese women and girls in the era (for instance, Le Ly Hayslip’s writing about village life in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places and Aimee Phan’s We Should Never Meet: Stories on Operation Babylift).11

· Guiding Questions: What information do we need to better understand the gendered dynamics and whether/how these readings fit within Smith’s “debates”? How do these interdisciplinary sources help us understand “The Terror of War”? What responsibility (if any) do Western scholars have in helping tease out the “debates…between indigenous men and women”?12

Group 3: Students should aim to understand the photo through the projects of “[r]estoring”13: and “[p]rotecting.” 14 For Smith, restoring takes on the social and health issues that result from colonization and “[r]estoring well-being – spiritually, emotionally, physically and materially –” seems to be one form of justice.15 So, treating and alleviating Kim Phúc’s physical pain and mental health issues that have weighed on her 50 years after the napalm attack could be part of this.16 Students should take the time to learn about the physical and mental effects of napalm on humans by reading this article by Guldner and Knight featured by the National Library of Medicine).

· Students should also read about the restoration needed to the land because of the chemical’s impact on its use. Smith argues that the landscape and environment can be protected and that “alliances with non-indigenous organizations have been beneficial in terms of rallying international support.”17 Read Tess Eyrich’s article and view the video about historian David Biggs’ work on the environmental costs of war. How can we protect the people’s villages, communities, and cultures against future damage? How could those who rained down napalm have thought about how to avoid such long-term damage in the first place? What international organizations or agreements could help avoid, mitigate, or prevent this harm? (What might be the problems of relying on these international organizations or agreements?) Students must learn to ask and ponder such

questions and understand the inherent value of people and the landscape.

· Guiding Questions: What damage was done beyond what we can see in “The Terror of War”? How do we interpret what the image represents in terms of time and space? What place, if any, does Western medicine and science have in terms of repairing the damage done in war on the people of and lands of the (officially or unofficially) colonized? How could U.S.-focused historians write a medical or environmental history that would work towards restoration and protection?

1 Kim Phuc Phan Thi, “It’s Been 50 Years. I Am Not ‘Napalm Girl’ Anymore,” New York Times, June 6, 2022, accessed November 12, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/06/opinion/kim-phuc-vietnam-napalm-girl-photograph.html. 2 Stephen Warren, “From the Bay of Pigs to the Fall of Saigon: The Cold War and the Collapse of Containment” (lecture, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, April 19, 2023). 3 Jane Recker, “Fifty Years Later, Kim Phuc Phan Thi Is More Than ‘Napalm Girl,’” Smithsonian Magazine, June 10, 2022, accessed January 1, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/Kim-Phuc-Phan-Thi-Napalm-Girl-180980227/; Kim Phuc, “It’s Been 50 Years.” 4 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), Ch. 1-3, Ch. 8, p. 18. 5 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 147. 6 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 147. 7 Kim Phuc, “It’s Been 50 Years.” 8 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 152-153. 9 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 152. 10 Kim Phuc, “It’s Been 50 Years.” 11 I want to acknowledge the following texts that introduced me to Phan and Hayslip: Jacquelynn Kleist Griffiths, “Persuasion and Resistance: How Migrant Women Use Life Writing,” PhD diss., (University of Iowa, 2019), accessed December 30, 2023, https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.o9kpn2o8; Bethany Sharpe, “War Babies,” in Childhood Traumas: Narratives and Representations, edited by Kamayani Kumar and Angelie Multani, 37-49 (London: Routledge India, 2019), accessed December 31, 2023, https://books.google.com/books?id=SdeuDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. . 12 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 152. 13 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 155-156. 14 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 159. 15 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 155-156. 16 Kim Phuc, “It’s Been 50 Years.” 17 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 159.