Super Boat People
Recipient of the 2025 Grassroots Public History Award
We are thrilled to announce that the Super Boat People Collective, spearheaded by Remy Chhem, Marie-Ève Samson, and Eva-Loan Ponton-Pham, has been awarded the 2025 Grassroots Public History Award. This award of distinction by the National Council on Public History recognizes outstanding public history projects undertaken by community members in their own communities.
The Super Boat People Collective is a community-based public history project composed of younger second generation Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in Quebec who are reclaiming their stories, reconnecting with their culture and history, and advocating for a more accurate representation of their lived realities. Several of the key people of the group, formed four years ago, were introduced to oral and public history during the Montreal Life Stories project between 2006-12, which recorded life stories with the older generation of Cambodian genocide survivors.
Over the past two years, they have undertaken a series of participatory workshops with people to explore their own family stories pairing them with artists from the community, asking: How do families with refugee backgrounds share their histories? What makes doing so difficult? What specific cultural and historical contexts play into this transmission? In the absence of transmission, how do participants receive this silence? And how do creative practices help work through these stories and silences?
This work has culminated in a series of popular exhibitions, including “Plus que des bons réfugiés! 50 ans de présence cambodgienne, laotienne et vietnamienne à Montréal,” currently on view at the Centre des Mémoires Montréalaises (April 4 to June 15, 2025). We are just delighted to see the work of our long-standing community affiliates and COHDS collaborators celebrated and recognized. Congratulations, Eva-Loan, Marie-Ève, and Remy!
