Walnut Grove's Hmong Community

Named for the grove of Black Walnut trees near the original town site, the Southwest Minnesota town of Walnut Grove was famously home to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her book series, Little House on the Prairie, depicts her childhood and adolescence in the Midwest. Like many settlers, her family was drawn to the area's rich land and abundant game, so they settled a mile and a half north of Walnut Grove along the banks of Plum Creek in 1874. While the family did not stay in the area long, the dugout site where they had their family home is available for the public viewing and visitors can view the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum's collection in historic buildings such as the 1898 depot, a chapel, a covered wagon display, and the little red schoolhouse.  

One of the town's other landmarks is a little more recent. On the side of Bubai Foods, a grocery store owned by Harry and Terry Yang, a painted mural covers the wall. On it, Laura Ingalls Wilder stands alongside a Hmong woman who is dressed in traditional clothing. According to Terry Yang, it represents the similarities between Laos and Walnut Grove and brings together Minnesota's settler history and the more recent additions of Hmong culture. 

Today, Walnut Grove's cultural makeup is vastly different from its early settler days. An influx of Hmong Americas brought new life to the town when the population numbers and tax dollars were dwindling. In the 2000 Census, 1 of 600 Walnut Grove residents identified as Asian. By 2017, the Census estimated the number of people of Asian descent had skyrocketed to about 325, or roughly half of the current population. 

A 2004 article from MPR, points to the Little House on the Prairie television show as one of the reasons the town attracted some Hmong Americans. When Harry Yang wanted to leave St. Paul, he found that the housing prices in the suburbs were too high. It was his daughter, who suggested leaving the Twin Cities in favor of a small town she saw on television. After searching in neighboring towns of Tracy and Lamberton, Harry Yang found the best price in Walnut Grove and moved there with his family in 2001. 

The mural, and this part of the origin story of Hmong Americans in Walnut Grove, is where the relationship with Laura Ingalls Wilder seems to end. The annual pageant honoring her story occurs around the same time of year as St. Paul's annual Hmong International Freedom Festival, meaning very few local Hmong Americans participate in the pageant. Additionally, outside of the community, many have called into question the romanticized depiction of settler life in Wilder's books. It is argued that not only do they misrepresent the lives of native people in the 1800s, but they also do not accurately represent the lives of white settlers. Once heralded as "works of folk art that capture the attitudes of the time," the books are now scrutinized for their heavy use of racist and anti-Indigenous stereotypes. 

The mural's illustration of farming and open fields, however, do ring true to Walnut Grove's appeal. The available farmland and the agrarian lifestyle of the community was appealing to Hmong Americans because it felt adjacent to their lifestyle in Laos. In a video for Pioneer Public, Terry described Walnut Grove as a "good town for us, mostly farmland which is familiar to what we lived in Laos. It's a quiet place with good neighbors and good community." 

That community extends to leadership opportunities, too. For Blia Thae Moua, whose family was one of the first to move to Southwest Minnesota, "most important is that we collaborate with leaderships. Local leaders, state leaders, so that we can share each other's culture and our heritage" Expanding on this, Terry reiterates that leadership is very important in Hmong culture.

This cohesion, however, did not happen overnight. Sean Yang recounted how there was a period of adjustment, particularly during the first wave of migration, and in the early 2000s, Harry Yang experienced an anonymous letter suggesting the Hmong leave Walnut Grove.  

Like in the case of Wilder's books, it is important to recognize that perceptions of life in small towns are easily oversimplified. The realities of community migration cannot be summarized in a single story, nor are these communities monolithic in their makeup. 

It should be expected that these communities will continue to change as people come and go, like any city or town. In Walnut Grove, the influx of Hmong migration has all but stopped. The population numbers are once again declining as the children of the Hmong residents leave to start families and their lives as they move out of town to college and do not come back. As much as they like the peace of the small town, residents like Sheila Vang are worried that the small size will make it difficult to find a job after college. Terry was hoping to retire, but this is proving difficult because none of his children decided to stay in town. Still, some like Kou Thao, who serves on the city council of nearby Tracy, MN, says he feels like he "owes something to the town he grew up in – and to his parent's generation that brought him and other Hmong Americans to southern Minnesota" 

To learn more about Laura Ingalls Wilder's cultural legacy and complicated history, see American Master's New Documentary Premiering December 29 at 8 p.m. on PBS. The show will be streaming online at https://www.tpt.org/laura-ingalls-wilder/ until January 29.