Jane Hamilton-Merritt

Jane Hamilton-Merritt (Born, Mary Jane LaRowe, 1937), in Noble County, Indiana, is a retired college professor, photojournalist, former correspondent, author, and human rights advocate who reportedly previously covered the Vietnam War.

She was twice been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work on behalf of the Hmong people of Laos. However, she was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, by the Norwegian Norwegian Nobel Committee despite the nomination efforts.

Hamilton-Merritt is a current resident of Connecticut. In 1999 she was inducted into the Connecticut Women's Hall of Fame and the Explorer's Club.^[1]

Education, background and teaching

Jane Hamilton-Merritt was born, Mary Jane LaRowe, in 1937 in Nobel County, Indiana, not far from Fort Wayne, where she grew up on a farm. He father, a farmer, was, the late Claude LaRowe, according to Noble County records.^[2]

She attended Ball State University in Muncie, where she received both a B.A. and an M.A. degree. She reportedly went on to get a Ph.D. in Southeast Asia Studies at Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio.^[3]

Hamilton-Merritt was a part-time, tenured professor at Southern Connecticut State University, where she taught journalism for nearly two decades (1979–97) on a part-time basis. In 1991–92 she was a visiting faculty fellow at Yale University.^[3]

In 1997, Hamilton-Merritt resigned from teaching in order to work full-time for the resettlement of 20,000 Hmong living near Bangkok, Thailand.^[3]

Photojournalism and advocacy

Hamilton-Merritt claims to have gone to Vietnam as a free-lance correspondent, reportedly spending some six years covering and writing about various aspects of the Vietnam War. Her reporting and writings from this period, however, cannot be found and references do not exist, are obscured, or are currently unknown.

She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for her series on young soldiers. She won the Inland Daily Press Association’s Grand Prize Trophy for her frontline war coverage.^[3] Over the course of her career, Hamilton-Merritt's opinion-editorial writings have been published in such newspapers as the Washington Post and San Francisco Chronicle, among others.^[1]

Hamilton-Merritt has worked to write about, and advocate, on behalf of the Laotian and Hmong people, who were U.S. allies in the Vietnam War before being largely forgotten in the aftermath. In 1980, she broke the story of chemical and biological warfare in Laos in Reader’s Digest.^[3] She has testified before Congress about chemical and biological warfare, genocide, refugee issues, and the plight of the Hmong people.^[1] She has also worked as an adviser to American school systems with large numbers of Hmong children.^[3] Beginning in the early 1990s, she worked to stop forced repatriation of Hmong political refugees from camps in Thailand back to communist Laos, on the grounds that this puts them at great risk of execution or slavery.^[3]

In 1993, in cooperation with Indiana University, she published a book on the Hmong people, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret War for Laos, 1942-1992 (Indiana University Press, 1993).^[3]

For her work to help bring awareness about the Hmong people's situation and their recent history, Hamilton-Merritt was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (1998 and 2000), but did not receive the award, for a variety of reasons.

Burke Marshall of Yale Law School reportedly wrote in support of her nomination:

“They (the Hmong) are a people who have been deeply damaged and wronged by history and by the actions of great nations...and for whom there is no compensation, no recourse except for the inexplicable intervention of the exceptional, virtually unique, voice and body of Dr. Jane Hamilton-Merritt.”^[3]

Hamilton-Merritt was the editor of Indiana University's Vietnam War Era Classics Series.

Controversy and criticism

Hamilton-Merritt has been criticized by Professor Alfred W. McCoy. Likewise, she, along with other scholars, are also harshly critical of McCoy's highly disputed research and controversial writings on the Hmong people, General Vang Pao, Laos, and Southeast Asia, during the period of North Vietnamese invasion of Laos.^[4]

Selected publications

Books

• A Meditator's Diary: A Western Woman's Unique Experiences in Thailand's Monasteries (2001)
• Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret War for Laos, 1942-1992 (1993)

Articles

• "Gas Warfare in Laos: Communism's Drive to Annihilate a People" (1980)

References