In Moorhead, growing Kurdish population builds culture with the only class of its kind in Minnesota

MOORHEAD, MINN. – Two dozen national flags fly in Zak Amin's classroom. As an English Learner teacher at Moorhead High School, Amin wants his students to feel seen, so these flags reflect the homelands of students who've come to this western Minnesota border city from all over the world.

There's symbolism at play here, especially during such an uncertain time for immigrants in America. As they become increasingly Americanized, Amin wants students to feel welcome in his classroom and in this community, a swing county in the sea of red that is western Minnesota.

The biggest flag represents the United States. But the second-biggest flag doesn't represent a country at all. It's of Kurdistan, the mountainous region comprising parts of four countries that's home to the world's largest group of stateless people and, as it happens, the same ethnic group as Amin and the handful of students straggling into his class on a recent morning.

"We're going to talk about Kurdish dress!" Amin told his students, who were as excited as you'd expect teens to be when their teacher announces the topic du jour. "You know Newroz [this week's Persian New Year, celebrated on the first day of spring] is coming up. We need to be prepared! I've seen your pictures in Kurdish clothes. You look good!"

A few years ago, the Kurdish American Development Organization (KADO) started teaching Kurdish language classes at its office in Moorhead, home to the Upper Midwest's largest Kurdish population. An estimated 3,500 Kurds live in the Moorhead area, about 8% of the city's population. (The largest Kurdish population in the United States resides in Nashville, Tenn., with about 20,000 Kurds.) Fifty-three students signed up.

Amin got to work writing a curriculum and selling Moorhead schools on sponsoring the class.

The district, where Kurdish is the second most-spoken language after English, approved the curriculum. Last year Amin started teaching Kurdish language and heritage, the only class of its kind in Minnesota.

"One of the goals for the school is to preserve our identity, the language, the culture," Amin said. "I am a Kurd no matter what. I can stay a proud Kurd, but when it comes to being a citizen of this country, I am an American."

Age-old question

Some 30 million Kurds live in the region comprising parts of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Like Jews before the founding of Israel, they're an ethnic group always searching for a home. Their diffuse, worldwide diaspora means a constant challenge to keep their distinct culture alive.

With this class, Amin hopes these new immigrants continue to connect with tradition as they assimilate into America.

It's a modern version of the age-old American question: How much cultural heritage can you retain while fully becoming an American? It's why Duluth has a Nordic Center and Minneapolis a Ukrainian American Community Center, and why newer immigrants like Somalis and Kurds honor traditional culture as they embrace a new one.

"A stateless people assimilate a lot faster than people who have states, because we want to be a part of one, part of a state that embraces us, that doesn't make us feel like second-class citizens," said Kawar Farok, the executive director of KADO. "Our kids are becoming more and more Americanized, which isn't a bad thing. But it's important for them to know who they are in their mother tongue."

The Kurdish influence can fly under the radar even in Moorhead, but there are signs if you look hard enough: Kurdish flags in heavily Kurdish neighborhoods on the south part of town, the popular Newroz Kebab restaurant, Kurdish women walking through parks in spring gathering grape leaves for yaprakh, the Kurdish version of stuffed grape leaves.

"One thing we know from history is it snowballs," said Markus Krueger, programming director for the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. "The more Norwegians you get, the more Norwegians you get. The more Kurds you get, the more Kurds you get."

Amin clicked through a slideshow: a stone carving from 550 B.C. showing traditional Kurdish dress, a photo of the king of the short-lived Kingdom of Kurdistan from the 1920s wearing a shal shapik, the traditional male look with a collarless, embroidered jacket tucked into flared trousers. Amin played a video of a cobbler crafting traditional Kurdish shoes, called klash hawraman.

There was a Kurdish wedding in Moorhead that weekend, Amin reminded his students, and the school's international day coming up. Newroz, on March 20, was just around the corner. Amin encouraged them to wear traditional Kurdish clothes to all those events.

"If you don't wear it at all, we're going to lose it, we're going to lose our past," Amin said. "It's one of the indications that Kurdish people existed in the past, by seeing their clothes, how old the Kurdish people are."

These teens were in Heritage Kurdish II, an advanced class. One, who came to the U.S. at age 6, showed off his Duhok SC soccer jersey, a Kurdish team in the Iraq Stars League. Another, who came to the U.S. at 7 and now works 30 hours a week at a Walgreens, scrawled his name in Kurdish on the whiteboard; he couldn't write a single word in Kurdish when he started.

"My dad says this is who we are, this is how we do things back home, and he's so happy I'm learning this," said the student, Arinas Tamar.

Heritage as identity

The first Kurd to settle in Minnesota was Hameed Alemadi in 1976. His portrait hangs prominently in a Clay County Historical Society exhibit about Kurdish and Iraqi Minnesotans. Alemadi marked the first wave of Kurdish immigration in the state as peshmerga fighters were battling for independence from Iraq. Successive waves came in the 1990s after the first Gulf War and in the 2000s during the second Gulf War. Most Kurds in Moorhead are from Iraqi Kurdistan.

The current fraught moment for immigrants affects Kurds in a different way than, say, immigrants from Latin American countries, Farok said. Virtually all Kurds entered the U.S. legally, and most of Minnesota's Kurds are citizens, he said. Farok said while there is sympathy for unauthorized immigrants rounded up to be deported, Kurds are more concerned about things like the potential revocation of birthright citizenship.

Amin, 44, emigrated a decade ago from Erbil, the oldest continuously occupied town in the world, in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. He got a special immigrant visa after nearly a decade of working all around Iraq as a translator for the U.S. military, military contractors and the State Department, and he has since earned citizenship.

Amin sees Kurdish teens in Moorhead becoming increasingly Americanized, especially the second generation. In some families, kids speak English while parents speak Kurdish.

Indeed, he would like to expand his language and culture classes to them, but it's defined as a "heritage language" class, so only available to English Learner students, not the larger group of Kurdish students raised in America who speak English fluently.

"Because we've never been a country, because we've been divided into parts, we've been used to getting adapted to any situation we live in," Amin said. "Heritage is about more than just language. It's about identity. I want them to preserve their identity and culture and language, to stay who they are and be proud of their background."

Middle Eastern countries have long sought to eradicate the Kurds. Farok came to the United States at age 3; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces had killed his grandfather and two cousins, so his family fled.

In Amin's classroom, there are Kurdish books and magazines. He tells how he speaks Kurdish to his own children at home. Elders like Amin and Farok know their community's grip on the past is tenuous as the next generation embraces their Americanness.

"We haven't finished the complete mission," Farok said. "Until Kurdistan is a country, most Kurds feel like any branch of Kurdish identity that gets chopped off is a branch to the whole tree that gets chopped off. We don't have an identity that belongs to a nation, so it's deeper for us."