The Taking Root Archive is a digital community archive, connected to VietLead’s award-winning Taking Root documentary series, that will steward the stories of Southeast Asian refugee communities across the United States to celebrate how our communities “took root” in the country after surviving the devastation of war.
The Taking Root Archive is excited to put out our first call for submissions! We are currently looking for members of the Southeast Asian refugee community across the country to share and contribute family photos to the Taking Root Archive.
As the world continues to shake with instability and injustice, our family stories become seeds of hope. They are important lessons that remind us of our resilience that can guide us towards a more just future. Our stories are dangerous to the people who continue to harm us. They can’t take away what we already know, but they will try to make us forget.
To protect and steward our stories, we need to tend to them. We need them to take root, to grow, and to flourish as evidence of our resistance and our resilience. And that’s where the Taking Root Archive comes in. Join us in rooting our community stories for generations to come.
A photo of a holiday gathering, a first home, a day at work—these are the everyday stories we’re collecting:
Uploading a photo requires signing in to Google, which works best in the full form. Open the submission form in a new tab →
We know our refugee communities have a history of our stories and artifacts being stolen from us, so we are committed to ensuring that your participation in this project, your privacy, and your ownership of your family photos are at the center of our process in making our community stories more available to our broader community. Submitting to the Taking Root Archive means that you are loaning your family photos to us to share on the archive, our social media, promotional materials, and with partners. You may ask us to remove your loaned photos from our website and materials at any time. This also means that we cannot guarantee that we will be able to store your photo long-term. We recommend that you keep several copies of your photo if you are interested in its long-term storage. If you have questions about submitting to the archive, please email takingrootarchive@vietlead.org.
Want to receive email updates about the archive? Sign up here!
If you have questions about the archive, please email takingrootarchive@vietlead.org.
You can also message us on Instagram @takingrootarchive.
