Workbook
For Sri Lankan (American) Families
A Workbook on Diaspora, Civil War Memory, and the Identity Built on What Survived
Build from what survived.
Sri Lankan American families — Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher, or Muslim — navigating the space between a homeland shaped by civil war and a life built here. Families who carry the weight of ethnic tension, diaspora displacement, and the question of what to tell the next generation about where they came from.
The Name It First Experience
Your family carries Sri Lanka. Not just the food and the language and the festivals — the whole weight of it, including what was lost, what was divided, what was left behind. You may carry an ethnic identity that itself became a site of conflict. You may have come here as a refugee, an immigrant, or a professional — and the stories you tell your children about where you are from are incomplete in ways you have never quite named. This workbook does not ask your family to resolve Sri Lanka's history. It asks you to name — together and on paper — what your family is, what you carry on purpose, and what you are choosing to build from here. Grounded in Racial Identity Development theory (Cross, Helms), Acculturation Theory (Berry), Intersectionality (Crenshaw), diasporic identity scholarship (Brah, Hall), and research on Sri Lankan American diaspora identity, this workbook gives your family a structure for the conversation that has been waiting. The work is yours to do together. This is where you write it down. You leave with The Sri Lankan American Family Charter.
You can opt into 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-ins from your account. We recommend you do — the point is to see what changed.
Sample questions
- What is the part of Sri Lanka's history your family has carried across the ocean that you have never found the right words to explain to the next generation?
- How does your family's ethnic identity — Sinhalese, Tamil, Burgher, Muslim — shape the way you talk about where you are from? What goes unsaid?
- What would the Sri Lankan American Family Charter say about what your family is, what you carry on purpose, and what you are building from here?
Research basis
Cross (1971, 1991) Nigrescence Model adapted for South Asian American identity / Helms (1990) racial identity statuses / Berry (1997) acculturation strategies / Crenshaw (1989, 1991) intersectionality applied to ethnicity, religion, and gender / Brah (1996) Cartographies of Diaspora applied to Sri Lankan diaspora / Hall (1990) Cultural Identity and Diaspora / Fuglerud (1999) Life on the Outside: The Tamil Diaspora and Long Distance Nationalism / Daniel (1996) Charred Lullabies on Sri Lankan Tamil war experience / cultural frameworks of caste, Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, Tamil Hindu and Christian identity, and Burgher/Muslim minority identities in Sri Lankan diaspora / Wayland (2004) on Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora and long-distance nationalism / intergenerational trauma and civil war memory in diaspora families (Boss, 1999) / South Asian diaspora family identity (Maira, 2002).
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