Oral History Review

Author Interview: The Creators of the New Roots/Nuevas Raices Oral History Initiative

In their recent OHR article, “Migration and Inclusive Transnational Heritage: Digital Innovation and the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative,” Hannah Gill, Jaycie Vos, Laura Villa-Torres, Maria Silvia Ramirez demonstrate how the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative engages with and documents immigrant populations. Here Gill answers a few of our questions about the project.

Briefly tell our readers about the New Root/Nuevas Raíces Oral History Initiative and its goals.

The New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative is an ongoing research and archival initiative started in 2007 by the Latino Migration Project, a collaborative program of the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Center for Global Initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill. The oral histories are archived with the Southern Oral History Program’s collections in the University Libraries. New Roots documents the arrival of Latino communities in the U.S. South, one of the most significant demographic changes in the recent history of the nation. We recently created a digital information system and bilingual website to enhance global access to the oral histories of migrant newcomers.

How have the digital technologies the projects used facilitated the work of oral history?

Using the open-source software Omeka, we created a new website and tools to map migrant journeys, sync data from institutional archival systems, and facilitate the online presentation of content in two languages.

As the United States and other countries experience more demographic changes in the 21st century, how can the New Roots Latino Oral History Initiative adapt to, reflect, and address those changes?

There are many ethical and methodological challenges of engaging with internationally mobile populations and in new destination regions where migrants face linguistic, socioeconomic, and legal challenges that hinder access to the resources of educational and governmental institutions. Our work is committed to engaging with migrant communities to address these challenges and open access to resources. For example, the New Roots website was designed collaboratively with migrants, Latin American scholars, and K-12 teachers, and most of our interviewers have recent Latin American ancestry.

What is the relationship of the project to current legal and policy battles over immigration?

Oral histories in New Roots reflect critically upon the current immigration policy landscape, describing life during a time of unprecedented deportations, border enforcement, and local immigration policy and programs. Oral histories describe efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform and access to higher education on federal, state and local levels.

Describe the targeted and potential audiences for the project.

New Roots responds to a growing demand for oral history resources from constituencies that include North Carolinians with Latin American heritage, K-12 teachers in Mexico and Latin America, museums and heritage centers in the U.S. and Latin America, civil rights and youth mentoring organizations, and scholars and journalists throughout the Americas.

Please explain the significance of the project’s bilingual aspects.

New Roots uses a bilingual system of description and arrangement, and outreach to make the New Roots materials more accessible to regional, national, and global public constituencies both north and south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Many of the New Roots oral history interviews are conducted by bilingual graduate and undergraduate students as part of an annual interdisciplinary course that combines ethnographic and oral history methods, migration theory, and service-learning to understand Latin American migrant perspectives. Students’ long-term service experiences, academic training, and bilingual skills enable them to build relationships that facilitate oral history collection in migrant communities, and many continue this engagement after the course.

How can the project assist those who may not have access to high-speed internet?

New Roots materials can be downloaded as mp4s and pdfs, so they can be exchanged on usb drives when streaming is not available. We do storytelling workshops with K-12 schools that do not involve the internet.

What are your hopes for the future of this project?

We hope to reach more global audiences with these resources and partner with community organizations to offer content.

Date October 25, 2019
Author Oral History
Comments 1 Comment

Documenting Tears

Oral historians have begun drawing on the history of emotions, analyzing nonverbal communication and sentiment, rather than only the words narrators speak. Here Dalrún Eygerðardóttir, a PhD student at the University of Iceland, shares her interpretation of expressions of sorrow communicated by Icelandic housekeepers in oral history interviews.

By Dalrún J. Eygerðardóttir

“I can´t explain the tears.”

(Interview with a former housekeeper)

Sorrow expression is a language known to all human beings. Each person has the ability to express sorrow, but not all can analyze the materialization of sorrow within all contexts, such as differing cultures and genders. During recent decades, scholars have explored the root causes of human sorrow and its embodiment, for example in trauma studies. Among researchers who have contributed greatly to our understanding of the communication of sorrow are oral history researchers, including Svetlana Alexievitsj. Through interview analysis, oral historians have been able to analyze the presence of sorrow by studying how narrators represent their sadness at the time of the interview, both verbally and non-verbally. But in order for an oral historians to analyze sorrow in an interview, they must first see, listen, and feel its existence.

As a feminist historian I am continually searching for data about women’s lives in written sources from past ages. In my search I have observed that women in Iceland continuously suppressed their sorrow emotions and frequently displayed their feelings with silence, which contrasts with the popular idea that women have expressed their feelings more freely than men throughout history. In fact, some sources reveal that men had much more space to express their emotions, particularly emotions related to anger. Men have also had a greater advantages to express emotions in the public realm, for they were allowed to articulate their thoughts through politics, scholarly writings, fiction and poetry writings, as I have written about elsewhere. However, since the late 19th century women in Iceland have created for themselves a greater space for expression. But despite women’s increased freedom of expression, I suggest that Icelandic women still today express their sorrow largely through silence. This finding comes from my ongoing doctoral research on the history of live-in housekeepers: A hidden history of housekeepers in the second half of 20th century rural Iceland.

Housekeeping has a long history in Iceland, yet it has to this date hardly been explored. Considering that sources are very limited it was necessary for me to interview women who served as housekeepers in the second half of the 20th century, most of whom are at an old age today. I rely heavily on the methods and theories of oral history in my study. So far I have interviewed well over forty women who used to work as housekeepers, recording with video in order to capture both the audible and visual aspects of the women’s narratives. As I began collecting the these narratives, I soon observed repeated form of communication: silence as a system of communication when sorrow was expressed. It seemed as if the women were carrying out the deep-rooted female tradition in Iceland of how to communicate sorrow, which dates back centuries. Women´s silence as an expression in written history has been studied by scholars such as the historian Erla Hulda Halldorsdottir in “The Narrative of Silence” and by the literary scholar Helga Kress in her research on women’s way of communicating in the early Icelandic literature. I, on the other hand, set out to analyze how the women interviewees communicated sorrow through living narratives, so I would be able to grasp the full depth of their stories. For that purpose, I developed a method to capture and analyze silence as an expression of sorrow in oral history interviews. I began looking at silence as a glasslike sculpture, studying its texture, instead of looking through it.

“I can´t explain the tears,” she said as she dried her lined face, ever so quickly. The tears appeared as she was telling me a very controlled narrative of how her young son died decades ago. She chose the words carefully, as if every word was a stepping stone towards the end of the story. However, she was met with an unexpected obstacle; she didn’t foresee her tears.

My objective here is not to explain the source of the tears of the women I interviewed, but rather to express how sorrow often broke silently to the surface in the interviews when the women recalled either violence they had experienced from their employer when working as a housekeeper, or other sadness they experienced in their lives. With the objective of analyzing expressions of sorrow, I created a checklist for identifying how the women articulated their sorrow and demonstrated sorrow with their bodies.

My main findings were threefold. First, the women occupied the role of the storyteller in the interviews, which often gave them an opportunity to distance themselves from the events of the story. Even so, memories of upsetting events from the past threatened the women´s roles as storytellers. In these incidences it was as if the main character in their narratives, “themselves in the past“, emerged uninvited from the storyline to the present time in the form of sorrow expressions. As a consequence, the storyteller had to give way to the story being told, walking out of the room to hide their emotions; freezing up; or crying while trying to hold back tears.

Secondly, some of the women expressed their sorrow through a very specific eye contact with me, especially when communicating a very deep-seated anguish and despair, such as their experience of sexual violence. The eye contact was in all cases very intense and without any verbal communication. I can only describe this particular transformation of feeling, this gaze, as a visual shout (ice. ásýnd öskurs); a silent shout from within.

Thirdly, I learned that in order to document an expression of silence both on sound and film, it was important not to distort the expression of the interviewee with any vocal gestures on my behalf or with the movement of the camera, for then the silence, the women´s expressions of sorrow, would be breeched.

stream; sorrow; sound; silence : þagnargrátur from Dalrún J. Eygerðardóttir on Vimeo.

After having interviewed former housekeepers about their lived experiences, including their sufferings, my experience was that the women´s sorrow emotions had the same features as water. Thus I could easily see why hurt is generally associated with tears. Just like water, whether it is still or running, the women´s sorrow had the ability to reach you. And like water, sorrow can flow silently, both below and above the surface.

Dalrún J. Eygerðardóttir is a PhD student in History in the University of Iceland and a film scholar. Dalrun´s specialization is women´s history and oral history. She plans to turn her thesis project, “A hidden history of housekeepers in the second half of 20th century rural Iceland” into a book, along with a documentary drawing from around 45 interviews with housekeepers.

Video: Dalrún J. Eygerðardóttir

Underwater camera recording: Johannes Sturlaugsson

Photographs: Raindrops on the water surface, taken from down below. Johannes Sturlaugsson

Community Centered Storytelling: The Relationship Between Oral Histories and Social Cohesion

Oral history has deep roots in activism, with practitioners focused on how the method can build community and lead to social change. Next week’s Oral History Association’s annual meeting centers on the theme of “Pathways in the Field: Considerations for those Working In, On, and Around Oral History,” exploring various modes of working in oral history. Here, staff at the Muslim American Leadership Alliance demonstrate how the Muslim American Journeys project contributes to grassroots community building.

By Ahmed Flex Omar, Deputy Director and Andrew McDonald, Operations Manager

The collection, preservation, and sharing of oral histories is often regarded as an academic pursuit. But it is also a powerful tool for grassroots community building. By orienting oral history collection and curation to serve communities, our groundbreaking project provides our constituencies with the agency to write and share their own histories, informed by a constellation of unique individual narratives.

Since 2015, the Muslim American Leadership Alliance (MALA) has existed as platform for Muslim Americans to share their stories in their own life experiences and journeys. These stories comprise the Muslim American Journeys project: an oral history collection featuring over 500 narratives from individuals representing a wide range of nationalities, ethnicities, and fluid identities. Through a community partnership with StoryCorps, we archive the oral histories at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

MALA’s approach to storytelling and oral history collection focuses on how stories can be a resource for the communities who contribute to the project. Whereas, many oral history initiatives pursue stories for their significance as tools for academic research, the Muslim American Journeys project views stories as unique cultural artifacts that emphasize community cohesion. Oral history is a powerful tool because it allows us both a macro and micro view into a diverse, vibrant community. Stories offer insight into common experiences, struggles, and triumphs, while preserving the individuality of each perspective. This is an asset that is useful to a range of fields, and it exists as an accessible resource for the communities who participate.

Holistically, MALA provides members of our community with a platform to speak for themselves and numerous opportunities to represent themselves and the issues that are relevant to them. Through our oral histories and community programs, our objective is to sustain a healthy, pragmatic and empowering Muslim American organization.

MALA’s methodology does not prompt interviewees to focus on particular events, people, or experiences. Thus, MALA’s approach to interviewing and oral history collection focuses on autonomy of the storyteller. Rather, our interviews take a conversational form and follow the direction set by the interviewee. Prompt questions focus on the interviewee’s perspective on identity, community, family, and other themes that connect our human experiences. By placing the interviewee in the driver’s seat, MALA encourages Muslim community members to collectively paint their own history, and share their own stories.

In order to build and curate oral histories that represent communities with honesty, candor, and vibrancy, it is crucial that historians and institutions take an active role in their communities. As such, MALA maintains a strong commitment to partnership building and engagement. We do this by hosting regular programming in Washington DC, Chicago, and New York that brings people together to learn, share, and celebrate. The organization’s central theme lies in its bedrock to build, grow, and strengthen our rich, diverse communities. MALA has created and sponsored Community Builders Councils, made up of influential and diverse community leaders, mentors, artists, philanthropists, and organizers. The Community Builders Councils convene monthly and advise MALA leadership on new developments, key issues, and unique projects in their communities. Through the construction of the Community Builders Councils, and a commitment to accessible and engaging programming, MALA has worked hard to play an active role in the communities that our oral history project serves. This is an important step to building trust, and ensures that MALA is part of a continuing dialogue with the communities represented by the Muslim American Journeys project.

Watch an excerpt from Ahmed “Flex” Ohmar’s oral history.

MALA also seeks to expand our community engagement by sharing our platform with new demographics and communities. The most effective way to build a detailed image of Muslim lives, stories, and identities in America is to include as many perspectives as possible. In accordance with this, MALA invites practicing Muslims, as well as cultural Muslims and folks who identify with Muslim heritage, ranging from orthodox Muslims, to atheists, to converts, and beyond to contribute to the project. By creating a platform that is broad, accepting, and safe, MALA seeks to bring together a rich and diverse amalgamation of voices.

Our hope is to continue our community mobilization events and oral history programs in order to support storytelling, heritage, and fostering pride in identity among the Muslim American community. These narratives, which will now be preserved for generations to come, offer insight into the multifaceted and dynamic layers of Muslim American experiences. They also open the door to cultivate new leadership within our community.

Ahmed Flex Omar in the Deputy Director of the Muslim American Leadership Alliance. He coordinates MALA’s Muslim American Journey’s oral history project, in partnership with StoryCorps. A native of Somaliland before growing up in United Arab Emirates, before immigrating to Chicago, he’s currently an active member of the Chicago Leadership Alliance. He is the recipient of the Presidential Service Award, bestowed by President Barack Obama in November 2016. Listen to his StoryCorps narrative.

Andrew McDonald is the organization’s Operations Manager. Originally from the New Hampshire Seacoast, Andrew began working with MALA as an intern in Spring 2017. He joined the team in September 2018 as a Program Associate. Andrew recently finished his B.A. at Hampshire College, where he designed his course of study in Political Islam and Geopolitical identity in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Andrew is passionate about the transformative art of storytelling, and the importance of community dialogue. He works remotely to coordinate MALA’s Muslim American Journeys project, and provide support for other national MALA programming.

Follow MALA: Twitter: @MALAnational, Facebook: MALAnational, Instagram: @MALAnational

Featured image courtesy of MALA.

Author interview: Lindsay French on Oral History as a Complicated Form of Social Engagement

In her recent OHR article, “Refugee Narratives; Oral History and Ethnography; Stories and Silence,” Lindsay French describes the nature of her interviews with Cambodian refugees in Thailand after the demise of the Khmer Rouge. Here she answers some of our questions about the challenges she encountered conducting ethnographic interviews in this context.

Please describe the ethnographic fieldwork with Cambodians that you drew on for your article.

I began working with resettled Cambodian refugees in Boston in 1985, as a volunteer language tutor. It was this experience that led me to grad studies in anthropology, when I worked with Cambodians who had been living in camps on the Thai border for the 10 years since the Khmer Rouge was overthrown in 1979. I spent 20 of the next 24 months in Site II, a camp of approximately 185,000 people, working for an American non-governmental organization collecting peoples’ stories about their lives on the border. This was the basis of my doctoral dissertation in Social Anthropology, called “Enduring Holocaust, Surviving History: Displaced Cambodians on the Thai Cambodian Border 1989-91.” It was also when I started working with the main protagonist in my article, Bunthoeun, a resettled Cambodian refugee who worked as a psychiatric social worker; I had bi-weekly language lessons with her to keep my Khmer language skills active. In 1991 I visited Cambodia for the first time; since then I have made 10 additional trips to work in the field. I have focused mostly on the area around Battambang in northwest Cambodia, because many of the people I worked with in Site II were originally from this province, and all the border Khmer were repatriated from Thailand in 2002. But I worked with people from this area who had chosen NOT to go to the border camps after 1979 as well, looking especially at families that had been divided by both the Khmer Rouge revolution, the civil war that followed, and resettlement to a third country. Throughout this time, I stayed in touch with my Khmer teacher in Boston. She became more of a friend and collaborator than a teacher over time.

In the article you recount how in your fieldwork in camps with displaced Cambodians, you did not conduct many substantive oral histories, and consider some of the most insightful interviews as “failed.” Describe what you mean by failed interviews and what you learned from them.

I did conduct a few extended life history interviews in Site II but very few. Although I spent many months in the camp, as an international NGO staff member I was only allowed in the camp between 9:30 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. This wasn’t conducive to getting to know people well and building rapport and trust. And the camp residents were wary: they had seen many international workers come and go in the previous 10 years, and many were not interested in getting to know another person well, only to see them leave the camp for good after a year or two. People were self-protective, and wisely so. But more importantly, as a westerner, and part of the small army of international staff who were there in some capacity to provide “relief” (other programs in my NGO provided medical and educational services) my interests were somewhat different from theirs, and especially from their leaders, who were the civilian branch of a resistance army, fighting WITH the Khmer Rouge to take control of Cambodia back from the Vietnamese army that had liberated the country from the Khmer Rouge control 10 years earlier. The politics of this low-intensity civil war were complicated, and much was kept out of sight of the international staff. The food, medical, and educational assistance that the camp residents received depended in part on keeping their political and military agenda somewhat invisible. As a result, there was a lot that people couldn’t or shouldn’t talk with me about. It was only from the people I got to know very well — mostly my research assistants — that a got detailed life stories.

Describe how stories recounted in oral history interviews are a “complicated form of social engagement.”

My fieldwork raised many questions: Who was I? Where did I come from? What did I want from the people I approached for an interview? What were they obliged to tell me? What were they obliged NOT to tell me? Ethnographers and oral historians aren’t just generic outsiders, we stand in a particular relationship to the people we interview, and people really wanted to know who I was.

How did the power dynamics of the displaced persons camps, including your own position as a western outsider, affect your ability to conduct interviews?

I discovered that initially many people thought I was a spy. Initially I felt sad that people were so suspicious of me, but gradually I came to realize that there were many people asking questions in the camp, not just me. And many of them were spies, in one sense or another. There were people from western embassies interested in knowing about conditions inside Cambodia, there were Cambodians from different political factions trying to learn about their faction, there were Thai soldiers interested in working out trade routes into Cambodia.

People really wondered why an obviously privileged and educated western woman had come halfway around the world to talk with them, mostly poor rice farmers, without a lot of education. I had to really think about how to answer that question. In the end I usually said that I was there to learn about life in the camp so that I could write a dissertation and get a degree that would allow me to teach in a university. This answer seemed to make sense to most people. I said a little more about why I was interested in their lives to people who could imagine a more nuanced motive. But it told me something about being a refugee that the most instrumental version of my motives was what made sense to most people.

How has your methodology of conducting oral history changed from your experiences with post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia?

I think I am more circumspect about what I learn, and give more thought to what I don’t learn. There is never one story, and the story is never complete.

Lindsay French is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of History, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences at the Rhode Island School of Design. She teaches courses on mainland Southeast Asia, Buddhism, refugees and labor migration, oral history, and the ethics of community engagement. She has worked with Cambodians since 1984, in the US, in Thailand, and in Cambodia.

Featured image: United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) used with a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Connecting the Virtual and the Actual: Making a Digital Oral History Project

New York University graduate student Yu-Shih Huang discusses her oral history StoryMap project which maps the life of one of Taiwan’s Lo-Sheng Sanatorium patients, Báu Bān-Ki.

By Yu-Shih Huang

According to an estimated statistic of International Telecommunication Union, “at the end of 2018, 51.2 per cent of the global population, or 3.9 billion people, was using the Internet.” In other words, nearly half of the world’s population is not online. What might happen once this significant amount of people eventually have access to the Internet? Although, as a history student, I cannot predict the future, I can still provide some observations from my digital oral history project in collaboration with an eighty-year-old former patient with leprosy.

An overview of this project must start with an understanding of leprosy. Since some symptoms of leprosy—deformed faces or shortened finders—are visible, patients have been stigmatized throughout human history. Japanese colonial authorities instituted a compulsory segregation policy in Taiwan creating the first official leprosy sanatorium on the island in 1930, Lo-Sheng Sanatorium, designed to separate patients from society for the duration of their life-times.

Huang’s StoryMap project

The suffering of these people didn’t end with that segregation regulation in 1962 or fade through time. In 1994, the land of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium was sold to Taipei Metro to build a new depot. Some former patients with leprosy decided to fight against the eviction with students and activists joining them. These young supporters founded the Lo-Sheng Youth League in 2004, and the senior residents united as the Lo-Sheng Preservation Self-Help Group during the next year.

During the fall semester in 2016, I joined the Lo-Sheng Youth League to advocate for the rights of former patients and preserve this historical sanatorium. The team has also been interviewing former patients with leprosy for years to create a narrative distinct from the official discourse. In the summer of 2017, when the activists and I were discussing the interviews we had conducted, Mr. Báu, a former patient with leprosy, rushed into the room, announcing that he was going to make a great timeline about his life story. However, Báu could hardly complete that mission on his own because he is illiterate. Therefore, I started an oral history project with him.

Through a series of interviews, I learned that Báu’s life can be divided into before and after he lived at the Lo-Sheng Sanatorium. Báu Bān-Ki (茆萬枝) was born in 1935 to a farm family in Suann-Siōng (山上) in the countryside in Southern Taiwan. Báu farmed, peddled foods in the market, and worked in the factories. However, with more symptoms of leprosy appearing, Báu was hospitalized in Lo-Sheng Sanatorium in 1973. In 2003, his life once again took another direction, as the sanatorium’s demolition initiated his political participation. He followed the Lo-Sheng Preservation Self-Help Group to protest on the street, sing in fundraising events, and support public programs to recruit supporters. Báu also tried to recreate the sanatorium by drawing the demolished buildings and making models of destroyed building out of the wreckage of the sanatorium. These artifacts were then displayed in his small museum in Lo-Sheng Sanatorium.

With an abundance of content gleaned from the interviews, I believed that we could do more than just the timeline Báu initially imagined. I decided to use the online tool, StoryMapJS, to tell a story that conveyed both change over time and geographical movement. I selected several important moments in Báu’s life and pinned the clips of the transcriptions onto the map. To verify the locations, during Tomb-Sweeping Day in 2018, a group of activists and I traveled with Báu to his hometown to visit his home, farm, and the factory where he had worked.

A slide of Huang’s StoryMap project mapping Báu’s life in 1945

During the summer in 2018, fellow activists and I curated a temporary exhibit about the residents of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium. The exhibit, Walking with Sickness: Stories, Items, and Documents of Lo-Sheng Sanatorium, also featured Báu’s story map. Since the exhibition was held in an abandoned dormitory, there was no electricity, so a QR code took visitors to the map through a digital device.

I also designed a set of postcards to sell as a way to promote the project and fundraise for the organization. On one postcard, I drew Báu drawing the dormitories and shared the QR code. By selling the postcard, the project became tangible and actual, rather than only virtual. Some supporters also mentioned that they would give the postcards as a gift to their friends, by which the digital oral history project was spread via an actual connection—a real life social network—between individuals.

The story map has also been disseminated through Báu’s network. At first, because he had no experience using online tools, Báu could not interact with or share the map himself, which depressed him. Eventually, I stuck the QR code of the story map on the wall of his museum displaying his sketches and miniature buildings. Recently, one of the activists notified me that Báu constantly said, “Use Line (a communication app)!” to encourage his visitors to pull out smart phones and scan the code to read his story. Even though he does not fully understand how apps function, Báu accepted that that the story map was an efficient means to introduce himself.

Although the project was promoted through this online tool, it was supported through an actual social network. Even though Báu seemed not to completely understand how the cyber world functions, he could still sense the power of digital display. While the project depends on in-person interactions, its digital format still creates a chance for broader audiences to discover Báu’s story. This is what those who are offline can never achieve, and here is also where the boundary of the Internet stands. If we really appreciate the Internet for breaking through the hierarchy, we should bridge the gap and really democratize the Internet. Once people worldwide can get online, they won’t abandon their actual real-life social networks, but open new doors to connect with the world.

Yu-Shih Huang is a current graduate student in the Archives and Public History Program at NYU and received her BA degree in history from National Taiwan University. With a strong interest in community history, she and her classmates have created a demo role-playing video game and a website about the lives of patients with leprosy at Taiwan Lo-Sheng Sanatorium in 1962.

The first draft of this article was presented in Systems: NYU Gallatin MA Student Conference in 2019. Thanks to the comments and feedback from the conference attendees.

Featured image depicts Mr. Báu in front of his home, courtesy of the author.

From Gaman to the Spoken Word: The World War II Department of Justice Camps

Recent California State University, Fullerton, public history graduate, Helen Yoshida reflects on the origins of her oral history project about Department of Justice camps during World War II, and what she learned about shared experiences of incarceration during the war period.

By Helen Yoshida

It was a humid summer day in Washington D.C. when I stepped into the Renwick Gallery to see the 2010 exhibition The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps, 1942-1946 curated by Delphine Hirasuna, and the accompanying film Snow Falling on Cedars. An English major at the University of California, Irvine, I was in D.C. to conduct research for my Humanities Honors creative writing thesis, a collection of historical fiction short stories set at the Heart Mountain incarceration camp in Wyoming during World War II. Heart Mountain was where my paternal grandparents were imprisoned during the war. At that time, I wanted to learn about the camps to better convey what Japanese Americans and their families experienced behind barbed wire. The Art of Gaman and Snow Falling on Cedars was the beginning of that journey.

Gaman means to endure something that seems unbearable with dignity and patience. The objects exhibited at the Renwick were physical representations of that word. Japanese American incarcerees from ten War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps crafted small painted pins in the shapes of birds and flowers. They made their own tools, furniture, dishware, Buddhist shrines, toys, games, and musical instruments. They portrayed their physical surroundings and their own feelings about camp through their artwork. As I walked through the exhibition, I thought about how I could incorporate some of those objects into my work. But when the film started and I saw the FBI arrest a Japanese farmer and whisk him off screen to a camp in Montana, I thought, “Did this actually happen?” An online search led me to the National Archives’ webpage on the Enemy Alien Control Program and the Department of Justice (DOJ) camps that incarcerated 31,000 Japanese, Italians, Germans, and Latin Americans during World War II.

A Texas Historical Commission plaque describing the Crystal City DOJ camp at the camp’s original site in Crystal City, Texas.

What were these DOJ camps like? Who experienced these camps? What did they remember? How did they feel about their experiences now? Those questions sprang into my mind as I watched the film. They inspired me to complete a historical fiction manuscript. Most recently, they drove me to complete my oral history project with Crystal City, Fort Missoula, and Santa Fe DOJ camp incarcerees and their children for my Masters of Arts in History from California State University, Fullerton.

I traveled to San Tan Valley, Arizona; Monterey, Oakland, and Richmond in California; Missoula, Montana; Seattle, Washington; and Washington D.C. to interview five incarcerees and three descendants. I listened to stories from Rosemary Andersen, Satsuki Ina, Blanca Katsura, Larry Oda, Ursula Potter, Eletra Vandeberg, Trudy Werner, and Libby Yamamoto. Through that process, I learned how public history and literature factored into their knowledge about their family history. Trudy Werner was a girl when her family was incarcerated in the Crystal City DOJ camp. One of the incarcerees gave two small, painted wooden bird pins to Trudy’s mother as a gift. She was living in Washington D.C. when she saw The Art of Gaman reviewed in the Washington Post.

“Well, I read that article on a Sunday and I appeared at the museum on Monday. I couldn’t wait to go. Of course the exhibit wasn’t opening until Friday but that hadn’t registered with me. But she [Delphine Hirasuna] was in there giving a press tour and so I was on the other side of the rope and I was wearing a jacket and I had one of my pins on the lapel and I pointed to the pin when she turned around. And she said, ‘Oh! Where did you get that?’ and I told her and then she told (laughs) the assembled press corps. (both laugh) She really did a super job putting that show together,” said Werner.

“Oh! Where did you get that?” and I told her and then she told (laughs) the assembled press corps. (both laugh) She really did a super job putting that show together,” said Werner.

Listen to Trudy Warner recall visiting The Art of the Gaman exhibition.

Eletra Vandeberg is the daughter of Alfredo Cipolato. He was incarcerated at Fort Missoula as a young man. Reading Snow Falling on Cedars was her introduction to effects of incarceration. “Well the first [time] I really realized how devastating it all was, and how insidious it all was, was—I think I—I think the book was Snow Falling on Cedars. And I read that and I thought, This cannot be. And, I mean, of course it was.”

“Well the first [time] I really realized how devastating it all was, and how insidious it all was, was—I think I—I think the book was Snow Falling on Cedars. And I read that and I thought, This cannot be. And, I mean, of course it was.”

Listen to Eletra Vandeberg reflect on the impact of the novel The Snow Falling on Cedars on her understanding of her father’s experiences.

Although I knew that the DOJ camps operated at the same time as the WRA camps, I did not know the extent that they worked together. As my narrators shared their stories with me, I learned less about how the DOJ camps operated and more about the generational impact and perverse effects of unjust wartime incarceration. Similar to the oral histories on Densho, the organization that documents the experiences of incarcerated Japanese Americans, my narrators discussed how incarceration disrupted their families’ lives and the pressure from their parents to assimilate into American society after the war. However, my narrators expand the Japanese American incarceration story to include stories from German Americans, Italian Americans, and Japanese Latin Americans, who were also imprisoned. Their interviews detail their experiences in camp and individual paths of awareness about the DOJ camps. Viewed together, this collection highlights similar experiences. Across ethnicities and ages, my narrators reflected on the absence of fathers due to incarceration, parents’ silence about the topic of the DOJ camps, and the confusion of piecing their families’ histories together into adulthood.

Helen Yoshida earned her M.A. in History from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF) with a focus in Oral and Public History. After graduating from the University of California Irvine with a B.A. in English, she worked for the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Education Association, Education Week, Washington Life and the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation (HMWF) in Washington D.C. The majority of her work was with the HMWF, which preserves the original site of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, one of 10 DOJ camps that incarcerated Japanese Americans and their families during World War II. HMWF shares the stories of Heart Mountain incarcerees through their Interpretive Center, educational programming, and local and national outreach. Helen’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, UCI School of Humanities, Kokoro Kara, NEA Today, Washington Life, Education Week and Voices, the Journal of Cultural Studies at CSUF.

Images courtesy of Helen Yoshida. Featured image caption: An original barrack that held incarcerees at the Fort Missoula DOJ camp during World War II.

5 Questions About: Amplified Oklahoma

We’ve asked creators of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our next installment of this series, Patrick Daglaris discusses the Amplified Oklahoma podcast, produced by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University.

Read Hope Shannon’s review of the Amplified Oklahoma podcast, from the Summer/Fall 2019 issue of OHR, available online.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The Amplified Oklahoma podcast is about using oral history to explore Oklahoma’s diverse history and culture. The goal is to package our oral history interviews in ways that are more easily consumable for a general audience, reducing 1-2 hour long interviews into roughly 20 minute episodes. It is a public engagement tool that allows us to publicize a variety of our projects and collections for public or scholarly use. By utilizing the power of narrators speaking for themselves, we strive to engage, contextualize, and complicate the popular history of our state. Primarily a student production, Amplified Oklahoma also provides opportunities for undergraduate students to gain experience in oral history methodology, audio production, and storytelling.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

We created this podcast with the primary intention of featuring our oral history collections. Each episode is built around a theme or collection, and the narrative is completely dependent on the content of our oral history materials. This makes it a great storytelling process and helps us identify blind spots or absences in our collections (i.e. we can’t tell a story if we don’t have a narrator who tells it first).

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Oral history is an incredible exercise in listening and shared human experience. I value the opportunity to engage with diverse communities, share their stories, and adequately preserve them. I am often humbled and awed by this responsibility.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

I think oral historians are always interested in finding new ways for larger audiences to engage with their materials. While Amplified Oklahoma may not be the first or largest oral history podcast, I hope we can serve as another example of how to condense and contextualize oral history materials for public consumption as well as how to incorporate undergraduates into the oral history and storytelling process. Also, as one of the only oral history podcasts focused on Oklahoma, I hope we can meaningfully contribute to the oral and public history fields nationwide.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

I want them to remember that while this may be an Oklahoma-specific podcast, the stories and themes often relate to broader human experiences and events. Oral history is great at bringing larger movements and events to very individualized, personal experiences, and I would encourage the audience to seek these stories out regardless of their geographic or personal connection to them.

5 Questions About: We Are The Roots

We’ve asked creators of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our latest installment of this series, Jenna Bailey discusses the We Are The Roots documentary, winner of the 2018 OHA Non-Print Format Award.

Read Anna Kaplan’s review of We Are The Roots, published in the Fall 2019 issue of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The Shiloh Centre for Multicultural Roots (SCMR) Oral History Project is a research and community engagement project designed to document the historical and contemporary experiences of Alberta and Saskatchewan’s Black settlers who moved to the Canadian Prairies between 1905 and 1912 to escape racism and intense persecution in the United States.

By conducting oral histories with nineteen descendants of the original settlers, our project documented this migration and settlement history with the main focus being to record individuals’ experiences with discrimination and marginalization in Canada. Alongside capturing an important and neglected part of Canadian history, the project created an awareness and understanding of the current systemic discrimination and marginalization against Black people living in Western Canada.

Ultimately, the project matters because it has increased awareness about the significant contributions Alberta’s and Saskatchewan’s Black settlers and their descendants have made to the development of Western Canada and helped to start a dialogue as a catalyst for change in removing barriers and discriminatory practices.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

“We Are The Roots” was produced by Bailey and Soda Films

Oral history was the key component of our project. We wanted this settlement and migration history, as well as the stories of decades of discrimination, to be recorded and told by the individuals who lived these experiences. The oral histories that were collected were then used to create the documentary film, We are the Roots: Black Settlers and their Experiences of Discrimination on the Canadian Prairies. We felt that an oral history based documentary would be the most appropriate vehicle to share this research as we could convey both the historical background and contemporary stories of discrimination in a format that was accessible, engaging, and easily shared online. Most importantly, using oral history interviews in this way allowed the experiences of this community to be shared by the interviewees themselves—both heard and seen by the audience.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

As someone who has worked in the field of oral history for over fifteen years, I am continually surprised when researchers decide not to use oral history as a methodology. Combined with rigorous background research, oral history interviews seem to me to provide the best window into the past, and an opportunity not to be missed when there are living narrators. I am constantly invigorated by hearing individuals recall stories about their lives and honored when they are willing to share their personal thoughts and feelings with me and the wider public. For me, this is the absolute best method a historian can use to learn about people’s lives and important events in the recent past.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

I think this project will be of interest to oral historians because of the way it evolved from a traditional oral history project to the production of an award-winning documentary. We began with the intention to video record nineteen oral history interviews, transcribe them, and donate them to an archive. As a part of the grant funding we had also agreed to do an “edited video” but this was an unspecific deliverable that we had not thought too much about. It was only once we had conducted the interviews and realized that they were beautifully filmed and full of important stories of historical and contemporary discrimination that we knew we needed to share them in the format of an oral history documentary. As a team we had almost no experience with documentary filmmaking but learned enough about this medium to produce a film that has become an incredible vehicle for sharing our work and we have been able to reach a much wider audience as a result. This project showcases a way to share oral histories, via a documentary style film, that allows the narrators to speak for themselves and to have their stories shared widely by hosting the film online for free.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

The one thing our project team would like the audience to remember about this project is that, despite the fact that Black people have been living in the Canadian Prairies for over one hundred years, they continue to face prejudice, discrimination and marginalization on a daily basis and this needs to be acknowledged and stopped.

5 Questions About: the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project

We’ve asked authors of non-print and media projects reviewed in the pages of Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should explore them. In our next installment of this series, Myrl Beam discusses the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project

Read Liam Oliver Lair’s review of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project which is currently available online.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The Tretter Transgender Oral History Project (TTOHP) is committed to collecting, preserving, and making available oral histories of gender transgression, broadly understood through a trans framework.

The first phase of the TTOHP (2015-2018) was led by Andrea Jenkins—who went on to become the first Black transgender woman serving in elected office in the U.S.,—and focused on documenting the life stories and experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people, with a focus on the upper Midwest as well as those who are often excluded from the historical record, specifically trans people of color, undocumented trans people, trans elders, as well as others.

The second phase of the TTOHP (2019-2021) focuses on trans politics, activist movements, and strategy debates. Trans movements for justice demand a fundamental transformation of our society, which compels adherence to racialized gender norms and punishes those who transgress those norms. Trans movements have challenged those norms and the institutions that uphold and enforce them. In addition, trans movements have offered us new language and frameworks for thinking about gender, justice, embodiment, public space, policing, healthcare, solidarity, and queerness. Documenting the debates, organizations, and organizers that constitute this important and transformative force for social change is the goal of the second phase of the TTOHP.

A note about language: The term transgender is bounded in both space and time. It didn’t come into popular usage until the 1990s, and it is culturally specific. So, taking a cue from the Digital Transgender Archive, we approach transgender as a practice of gender transgression, rather than solely as an identity category. We also prioritize documenting gender transgression as it intersects with race, age, sexuality, citizenship, class, and ability.

How does oral history contribute to your project?

Oral history is a critical component of documenting gender transgression, as the written record is dominated by powerful institutions and their efforts to produce gender norms and police those who transgress those norms. All too often gender non-conformity is pathologized or criminalized, and so the archive of transgender history is dominated by gender non-conforming people’s interactions with those powerful institutions: the records of clinics, medical providers, psychiatric institutions, courts, prisons, police, and others. These records don’t begin to capture the complexity of trans lives or histories. The TTOHP believes that trans and gender non-conforming people, communities, and organizations are the best narrators of their own experience and histories, and that oral histories offer a critical resource for communities, students, and researchers attempting to understand gender regulation, policing, transformation, and struggle. Trans stories offer an important window onto the punishing norms that regulate gender possibility as well as the resilience, vision, power, and work of those who transgress those norms.

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

Because the written archive of transgender history is so dominated by the interconnected systems of pathologization and criminalization, the dominant trans narrative tends to be one of having been “trapped in the wrong body.” In this way, much of the written archive polices gender non-normativity and flattens gender expansiveness. Oral history, though, offers diverse and varied narratives of gender transgression, many of which, in fact, shed light on the pressure to conform to that dominant narrative. Oral histories also reflect aspects of trans life that are elided by written archives and helps us think differently about gender, as well as the systems and institutions that produce, police, and use gender in order to consolidate their power.

Oral history, at its best, is a window onto complexity, ambivalence, conflict, sadness, connection, joy, resilience, and work, each of which the written record often either bypasses completely or glosses over. This complexity is the value of trans oral history as well: it renders full, complex, and richly layered lives in an archive that is otherwise flat, rigid, and oftentimes dehumanizing.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in the project?

The TTOHP offers a treasure trove of primary source material that reflects the enormous diversity of trans experience. Videos recorded during the project’s first phase offer life stories of hundreds of trans and gender non-conforming people, and are richly varied in terms of age, class, sexuality, race, and gender identity. The interviews immediately dispel the notion of one unified trans narrative or experience, or even such a thing as a monolithic “trans community.” Narrators speak to the differing impacts of policing, gentrification, and employment discrimination on trans and gender non-conforming people across race, age, and class, and reflects the incredibly varied relationships trans and gender non-conforming people have with gender-affirming medical care. The project’s second phase will offer a “state of the movement” of trans struggles for justice, self-determination, and social change in a moment when trans people are under renewed attack.

Alongside the oral histories themselves, the TTOHP is also deeply invested in conversations about the complex ethical questions inherent in a project like this. What is “trans” about trans oral history? How can oral history practice be generative rather than extractive? In other words, how can oral history be used to build up community power and resilience rather than extract expertise and life history? We look to the many strategies developed by other engaged practitioners to navigate these questions as we work to build a resource that is meaningful for multiple constituencies. We envision the future of the project as creating space for conversation, cross pollination, and community engagement, and we would be eager to connect with other folks navigating similar questions.

What is the one thing that you most want the audience to remember about the project?

We find ourselves at an odd moment in transgender history: simultaneously experiencing unprecedented mainstream recognition—the “trans tipping point,” as Time magazine recently proclaimed—while also struggling with new kinds of legal peril and ongoing violence. This moment reveals to us that mainstream recognition can and does co-exist with backlash and violence, and that the safety of that recognition is often only available to transgender people with the most resources and privilege: white people, people with wealth, people who “pass” as gender normative, trans masculine people, and US citizens. These oral histories illustrate how trans people have long navigated this peril, have built strong and resilient communities, and fight to make safety and self-determination available to everyone.

5 Questions About: The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010

We ask authors of books reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their books. In our latest installment of the series, Luis Van Isschot discusses The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010

Wesley Hogan’s review of The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010 is currently available online and in issue 46.1 of OHR.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

My book is about why, how, and with what impact people living in a conflict area organize collectively for human rights. It tells the 100-year history of the oil refining center of Barrancabermeja, home to the oldest and most vibrant popular movements in Colombia, where the struggle for social justice has withstood long periods of state repression, from the rapid development of the city by Standard Oil in the 1920s to the present. In the 1920s and 1930s socialists were jailed by the police for leading strikes. In the 1940s a popular uprising called the Barrancabermeja Commune was put down by the military. In the 1950s workers’ organizations were declared illegal by the national government. ln the 1960s and 1970s, the military subjected striking trade unionists to court-martial. In the 1980s and 1990s, military and paramilitary death squads murdered community leaders. In the main period covered by the oral histories I recorded, the 1980s and 1990s, the city of Barrancabermeja and surrounding area known as the Middle Magdalena were ground zero in a national struggle against rightist paramilitary violence. Through it all, the popular movement based in this extraordinary place had to reinvent and reassert itself, shaping Colombian national history in the process.

How does oral history contribute to your book?

I conducted two dozen interviews with activists in Colombia who created a frontline human rights movement amidst terrible violence; I weave these oral histories into most chapters. I began recording interviews in 2005 at a time when residents of Barrancabermeja were reeling from the impact of a recent siege of the city conducted by military and paramilitary forces that claimed thousands of lives. The interviewees were eager to talk about what amounted to a catastrophic change in their lives. In this respect, I think this book is a reflection on the moment in time when it was written. It struck me that the people working for social justice in Colombia spend so much time responding to crises that it is a rare privilege to sit down and reflect on the past. In my previous career I had lived and worked in this war-torn region as a human rights observer, and wanted to have the chance to reflect on these experiences myself. If you are interested in the relationship between activism and memory in my work, see the chapter I contributed to Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki’s excellent edited volume Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan 2013).

What do you like about using oral history as a methodology?

The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010. Luis Van Isschot. University of Wisconsin Press. June 2015. PP. 328.

For anyone studying armed conflict and political violence, oral history is an indispensable tool. The keeping of written records in times of war and repression is often very dangerous. In this case, I worked with the archives of a human rights organization that kept reports on the fate of the detained, the disappeared, and the dead, under the very worst of circumstances. But in our conversations, some activists lamented not ever having enough time to catch their breath, and reflect on the work they were doing, let alone record their own stories. All of that is starting to change in Colombia, as official and unofficial memory projects have flourished with the signing of Peace Accords between the leftist FARC guerrillas and the government in 2016. The work of a truth commission also began in 2018. But all of this memory work has been undertaken in a context of Colombians’ deep uncertainty about the future. When the guerrillas demobilized, many of their former strongholds were occupied by illegal armed groups with links to the paramilitaries that caused so much suffering in the recent past. There have been, on average, two murders of community leaders every week over the past few years. The number of people working for peace and justice in Colombia is also growing, and these efforts are linked to longer histories of organizing.

My book will appear in 2019 in Spanish, revised, including additional excerpts from the oral histories I recorded. This is an extremely exciting prospect for me personally, both so that I can participate more fully in national conversations, and also as a heritage speaker of Spanish. It is worth mentioning that I had very little oral history training prior to undertaking the research for this book. My main preparation as an oral historian would come only during the last few years that I spent writing, after I had already completed the interviews. Much of this took place during my year-long stint as Coordinator for the Montreal Life Stories Project: Histoires de Vie Montréal, based out of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University. Colleagues there challenged me to think about my own role critically, to reflect on the ethics of doing oral history in a conflict area, the pressures that interviewees are subject to, and the interplay between current politics and the stories we tell.

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your book?

I think that anyone interested in what oral history can contribute to studies of political violence and human rights would be interested in my book. Oral history is fundamental to human rights work, in terms of collecting testimonies. Narrating these events is inevitable and important work. But we also need to come to terms with the ways that human rights reporting, especially by international organizations, tends to flatten the contentious politics that give rise to human rights movements in the first place. I set out to try and counter this tendency, to ask people why they took up the cause of human rights, what was at stake in their community. It is a desire on my part to examine how the human rights movements that emerged in Latin America during the period we think of as the Cold War relate to longer trajectories of popular protest. I hope that my research helps point to all of the work that could still be done. Hopefully it can be something to build on.

What is the one thing that you most want readers to remember about the book?

Human rights movements emerged in Latin America at a time of remarkable popular movement vibrancy. People in Barrancabermeja took up the cause of human rights as a way of defending the achievements of broader movements for social justice. One of the interviewees, a life-long activist named Francisco Campo, told me that he “learned to love life” during the first mass protests against violence that were organized in Barrancabermeja during the 1980s. This kind of statement opens us up to the emotional world of social movements. It is really an honor to join wider conversations about political violence in Latin America. For some scholars, the advent of human rights activism in the last frame of the twentieth century is a historical rupture. In this view, rights were taken up as a defensive strategy on the part of much-beleaguered leftist movements. Based on my interviews with leaders from the 1970s and 1980s, I argue that human rights movements draw upon decades-long traditions of organizing, and were also expressions of solidarity. I think that I began to understand how local activists appropriated human rights discourses and practices, incorporated them into their work, and carried on.

Date August 2, 2019
Author Oral History
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