Tibetan American

Encyclopedia : T : TI : TIB : Tibetan American

The history of Tibetans in the United States is a comparatively short one, as the remote kingdom for centuries had little relations with outside countries. Even neighbors had relatively little substantial interaction, and Western countries far less yet. The United States had limited contact or involvement with Tibet before World War II expanded to the Pacific.

Tibetans began to immigrate to the United States beginning in the 1950s. There are now more than 5,000 Tibetans living in the United States and Canada. The migration of these Tibetans to the United States took on the pattern of 22 "cluster groups", located primarily in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the Intermountain West. Other communities include Austin, Texas and Charlottesville, Virginia.

Contents

1 Tibetan Americans in the Northeast
2 Tibetan Americans in the Great Lakes region
3 Tibetan Americans in the Intermountain West
4 Notable Tibetan Americans
5 See also
6 External links and references

Tibetan Americans in the Northeast

Communities of Tibetan Americans in the Northeast exist in Boston and Amherst, Massachusetts, Ithaca, New York and Washington, D.C., and in the states of Connecticut, Vermont and New Jersey.

The [Tibetan Museum Society] of Alexandria, Virginia, a non-profit association, is a recently formed, civic league of concerned international citizens who wish to advocate museum exhibition of Asian art from ancient Mongolia and the Greater Himalayan Region. Through a broad range of programs and projects, the Society's two primary focuses are to provide financial support to selected museums that enrich the arts with display of historically significant representations of Buddhist culture, and to protect sacred, religious shrines, from which Buddhist art is gathered for public sale or display against removal without consent, artifacts of any kind. Though not allied with any political group or religious sect, the Tibetan Museum Society supports the fundamental humanitarian right to freedom of religious expression.

Tibetan Americans in the Great Lakes region

Communities of Tibetan Americans in the Great Lakes region exist in Chicago and in the states of Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. There is a Tibetan Cultural Center in Bloomington, Indiana near the campus of Indiana University. The brother of the Dalai Lama is a professor at the university.

Tibetan Americans in the Intermountain West

Communities of Tibetan Americans in the Intermountain West exist in Portland, Oregon, Berkeley, California and several locations in Southern California, and in the states of Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Washington and Utah.

Although quite small in number overall, Colorado has one of the highest concentrations of Tibetans in North America, focused on Boulder, Colorado Springs, Douglas County and Crestone. The state sports a Buddhist university, the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist commune west of Castle Rock, and several cities have Tibetan outreach organizations. Colorado Springs alone has three Tibetan stores and a restaurant. Much of the reason behind this rather peculiar demographic is that Tibetan guerillas were secretly trained by the CIA at Camp Hale outside of Leadville. Camp Hale was used as a training camp for expatriate Tibetans to be inserted to foment uprising in the mountain kingdom after its invasion by the Chinese People's Liberation Army, between 1959 and 1965. The site was chosen because of the similarities of the Rocky Mountains in the area with the Himalayan Plateau. This was a contemporary plan of the CIA to the one that trained dissident Cubans in what later became the Bay of Pigs incident. After that failed foray, the Tibetan plan in Colorado's mountains was abandoned, but the Tibetans, having no free homeland to return to, opted to stay in the friendly environment and homelike terrain.

Notable Tibetan Americans

See List of Tibetan Americans

External links and references

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[Training of Tibetans at Camp Hale]
[Asian Genes] This website discusses the genetic distance of different Asian groups.