Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2025: Folk/Lore
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Each May, the Office of Pluralism and Leadership (OPAL) works with a student planning committee to host Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (AAPIHM), a series of events focusing on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) history, culture, and experiences. We aim to highlight stories from AAPI members who are less represented within the community, explore how one defines their own identities, and celebrate the unique beauty that comes from our holistic experiences. This year, the AAPIHM student planning committee is hosting a variety of programs focusing on the theme of Folk/Lore.
Folk/Lore signifies our focus on the AAPI community at Dartmouth as a strong, expansive, and proud community on campus (Folk), while maintaining an emphasis on the stories, experiences, celebrations, and histories of the AAPI diaspora (Lore). We pay homage to the traditions, stories, and people who came before us, while also seeking to fervently push forward as a community. Folk/Lore seeks to recognize the expansiveness of the AAPI community - from transnational experience, traditional stories and mythology, to the ever-evolving Asian American culture and identities – and to the folklore that continues to develop each day. We emphasize that to be Asian and Asian American is, as Sojin Kim (2014) explains, a "disparate mash-up of behaviors and forms": A combination of cultural experiences, stories, histories, and interests that create the composite AAPI identity; an identity transcending borders. During AAPIHM, we urge the Dartmouth community to lean into this disparate, fluid nature, and expand our understandings of what it means to be AAPI, notably by hearing and emphasizing the stories of those on the margins within our community. We aspire for Folk/Lore to become another moment in our collective AAPI story.
