Post #96216 by Kono on Sun, Jun 13, 2004 7:00 PM

The link's no good anymore. I would've like to have read that piece.

I have an interest in military history (probably alone in that among TC members) and if you read history of the Vietnam war you will eventually come across the term Montagnard. Montagnard was a name, coined by the colonial French, meaning "mountain people" that was applied to various tribes that lived in the central highlands of Vietnam and were ethnically distinct from the Vietnamese who originally migrated from China.

Most any book that talked at length about the Montagnards would describe them as "Polynesian" or "like Polynesian" or of "Polynesian stock."

I did a lazy google and found a couple of sites:

http://www.culturalorientation.net/montagnards/vpeop.html

Apparently there's a linguistic connection between some of the tribal groups and the Malayo-Polynesian language group.

It would be interesting to see if there's any info on the religous beliefs of some of these tribes such as the Rhade and Mnong and if those beliefs have any parallel in Polynesian religions. I really don't remember any mention of even animist beliefs, much less an organized mythology. I've never read of any sort of carved wooden effigies, but you never know.

[ Edited by: Kono on 2004-06-13 19:18 ]