Shannon Ward

As members of a diasporic nation whose roots are shifting from India to North America, Tibetan-Canadian children are at the forefront of cultural change. Despite the central role of children in cultural reproduction and transformation, the study of transnational Tibet has often focused onBuddhist institutions or the narratives of elders who first entered into political exile. While mostTibetan exiles still live in South Asia, since the early 1970s, the Tibetan population in Canada has been growing, facilitated partly through federal resettlement programs. Inspired by postcolonial critiques of how constructions of childhood exclude children from public life and politics (Viruru 2005), I use photographs of everyday life in the Tibetan-Canadian community inVancouver, British Columbia to demonstrate children’s roles as active producers of the Tibetan nation in exile. Through these images, I trace how the temporalities of a diasporic nation are situating children as active agents of cultural and political survival.The Tibetan diaspora is made up of an estimated 150,000 individuals, living in more than forty countries. This transnational community traces its roots to a first exodus in 1959, when political violence in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital city, caused the Tibetan people’s spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, to flee to India. This mass migration marked a pivotal moment in Tibet’s cultural and political history, which is known as “the change of time in Tibet” (Wylie Tibetan:bod du dus ‘gyur) or “the collapse of time in Tibet” (Wylie Tibetan: bod du dus log pa) (Desal 2020, 8). Amid these senses of temporal disorder and historical disjuncture, Tibetans rebuilt their society in India with an exile government, monasteries, and secular schools that mirrored the institutions of independent Tibet. In forming an exiled nation, the new Tibetan government, centered in Dharamsala, India, looked to schools as vehicles of political unification.

Shortly after entering India in 1959, the DalaiLama and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru agreed to establish Tibetan schools in line with legislated rights for minoritized communities (Maslak 2008, 85). The Tibetan exile government established 82 schools across India, which have adapted traditional learning methods to a secular curriculum of Tibetan language and Buddhist culture (Thubten 2009, 63). As the Tibetan exile government’s Education Code of 2005 asserted, “it was of paramount importancethat we maintain our national identity [emphasis added] and at the same time prepare ourselves to take on the new challenges posed by new ideas” (as cited in Maslak 2008, 87). Tibetan schools thus located Tibetan national identity in the past, while noting the need to adapt to shared futures. Despite the vibrancy of Tibetan institutions in South Asia, over the past two decades, the number of Tibetans living in India has drastically decreased, expanding the geographic reach of theTibetan diaspora. Tibetans are moving to seek citizenship and opportunities for socio-economic mobility, especially in Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. In Canada, many Tibetan immigrants work in essential services like care work which, although not highly paid,provide financial stability not often found in Tibetan settlements in India.These new migration patterns have altered the roles of schools and families in the intergenerational transmission of language and culture. Given the remote nature of many Tibetans ettlements in India, children left their families as young as three years old to study Tibetan language, history, and culture in the exile government’s schools. Today, the Tibetan exile government’s schools remain in India, but their teachers and students are moving. With new waves of migration out of India, responsibility for children’s education has shifted from boarding schools to private, community-based initiatives like weekend heritage language schools. TheTibetan Cultural Society of British Columbia, for example, operates a heritage language school primarily through a group of parents, with the support of a local monastery. It offers weekly classes in Tibetan language, music, and dance, some of which are taught by former teachers from the Tibetan exile government’s schools in India.In Vancouver, this Tibetan weekend school mirrors nation-building activities from Tibetan schools in India. An assembly marks the start of each school day, where children sing theTibetan and Canadian national anthems. Children stand in lines from tallest to shortest, manifesting an image of growth. With their hands held in prayer, children show reverence for thetwo nations in a uniquely Tibetan gesture of respect. During classes, students learn from worksheets and videos created by the Tibetan exile government’s Department of Education.These materials feature elements of cultural heritage, such as dress and Buddhist practices, while expressing an underlying nationalist sentiment by referencing the lack of religious and political freedom in Tibet and suggesting a future of repatriation. For example, one song ends with the didactic message: “By studying well, go to the Tibetan homeland!” (Wylie Tibetan: slob sbyongyagpo sbyang nas phayul bod la ‘gro).