Carole McGranahan's Tibetan Research and Camp Hale Event in A&S Magazine
Professor Carole McGranahan who has long studied the Tibetan perspective of China’s invasion and occupation of Tibet, joins the Tibetan community to commemorate the location on June 9 at Camp Hale, Colorado.
For decades, theto fight Chinese invaders was a state secret, but even after the U.S. government formally acknowledged the CIA-Tibet effort, the exact location of the Tibetan camp remained a mystery.
With the dogged research of anthropologistCarole McGranahan, the precise location is now known. McGranahan, a «Ƶanthropologyprofessor who’s been studying the Tibetan perspective on the resistance to China for more than three decades, will soon join Tibetans from Colorado and beyond to commemorate the camp, six decades after it was closed.
The memorial gathering, which is titled “Dumra/The Secret Garden–Commemorating the CIA-Tibet Program at Camp Hale,” will take place at noon on June 9 at.
Members of the Tibetan community from around the world and several members of parliament of the Dalai Lama’s exile government in India are scheduled to attend, as is one of his cabinet ministers.
McGranahan said finding the training camp’s actual location now is meaningful for two reasons. “One is that most of the veterans and retired (CIA) agents have passed,” and the other is that the history of the operation had been suppressed and concealed for decades—a condition McGranahan calls “arrested history.”
Tibetans, for instance, have been unable to “celebrate and honor these soldiers in a way that they deserved,” she said. “This service, not just to Tibet but to the Dalai Lama, was the defining moment of their lives.”
For the Tibetan community to know the actual location, she added, “is meaningful in a way that even as a scholar I hadn’t fully appreciated.”