Menu Sidebar
Menu

Tanya Finchum on Reflection and Reflexivity in Interviewing

In the latest installment of our recurring series focused on oral history and self care, Tanya Finchum, of Oklahoma State University’s Oklahoma Oral History Research Program, reflects on her experiences conducting oral histories when the stories hit close to home and how our emotions and individual pasts impact our work. See Tanya’s earlier post, exploring how she prepares for and processes her interview experiences.

By Tanya D. Finchum

In 1997 Valerie Yow penned “‘Do I Like Them too Much?’: Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-Versa,” which has become a classic when discussing the effects of the oral history interview on both the interviewer and the narrator. She noted the need for reflexivity, i.e. being aware of how our own experiences influence our approach to an interview as well as our reaction to the stories we hear… and don’t hear.

Today I’m going to share with you as I reflect on one of my own emotionally challenging interviews. By way of context, America’s Greatest Homecoming Celebration here at Oklahoma State University dates back 100 years, and part of that celebration is the Sea of Orange Homecoming Parade which draws large crowds of alumni and community members. In 2020 the traditional homecoming celebrations were canceled, yet another loss for our students that can be attributed to the pandemic.

In October of 2015, a woman deliberately drove her car into a crowd of parade spectators, killing four: a retired faculty member and his wife, a college student, and a two-year-old boy, while injuring around fifty more. There was: loss of life, loss of livelihood, and loss of the innocence of a hometown parade.

On that particular day, I was returning from my morning walk and kept noticing helicopter after helicopter flying toward town and then away from town. Not an everyday occurrence. I later learned 8 medical flights took place that day.

Let’s fast-forward to 2019. In the 4 years since the accident, there had been many articles about those injured and their road to recovery, but not much about those on the periphery. To fill that gap in the historical record, I embarked on a small oral history project. I interviewed 8 people who had various roles that day and the days that followed and included such people as the mayor, a photojournalist, and an architect who designed a memorial.

Today, I’ll focus on one particular narrator, the Director of Emergency Management. In preparing for this interview, I did a self-assessment of my positionality—what I was bringing to this interview, as we are trained to do. I had: a decade of social work experience, over a decade of OHA sessions (where presenters like Valerie Yow and Mary Marshall Clark spoke about the emotional impact at the intersection of narrator and interviewer), over a decade of conducting oral history interviews, and a decade of serving on the university’s Institutional Review Board (I was familiar with ‘do no harm,’ ‘respect for persons,’ and so on).

But…. all that experience and knowledge was complicated by the emotional associations I had, in my mind, with the topic at hand. I am an alum of OSU who enjoys Homecoming celebrations, a sister of two nurses (who would have jumped into action), a daughter whose father was life-flighted after suffering what would be a life-ending accident, a mother of a son whose high school sweetheart was killed in a horrific car accident at age 17, and a grandmother of a three-year-old boy (I can’t begin to imagine that loss). Further, there was the issue of anticipatory grief and knowing, and yet not knowing, that there is a fine line between empathy and over-associating.

But…. all that experience and knowledge was complicated by the emotional associations I had, in my mind, with the topic at hand…Further, there was the issue of anticipatory grief and knowing, and yet not knowing, that there is a fine line between empathy and over-associating.

The interview with the Director of Emergency Management took place in the late afternoon at his place of work. That was his choice. I used the life history approach, believing a person is more than just a singular event. As part of that, we talked about his career path and he eased into recounting the day of the Homecoming Parade incident. It soon became apparent he had integrated that day into his life story and spoke close to an hour before stopping. His opening line, “We learned a lot of hard lessons in 2015. We were unlucky, but we were very lucky at the same time.” (I recall making a mental note that if he didn’t cover both unlucky & lucky, I could refer to this statement in a follow-up question.) He goes on to explain what he means by lucky and unlucky. Unlucky in that they had not planned for a mass casualty event in Stillwater, because “nothing like this would happen here.” Lucky in that the accident occurred at the end of the parade. Traditionally the fire department, sheriff’s department, and first responders are at the end of the parade so if it was going to happen, happening when and where it did was fortunate. Help was on site immediately and medical professionals in the crowd jumped into action as well. The narrator proceeds to recount that day as if it was yesterday, and ends that part of his story with, “We did what we were supposed to do.”

A point of reflection for me: at least four times during the interview I was aware of my own struggle with what was going on internally and externally. Those points were when he described the helicopter scene, the clean-up (his words created imagery. That emotional memory stays with me to this day), the grandmother’s visit to his office looking for her grandson’s boots, his father’s remarks. In those moments, I said to myself, “This isn’t about you, Tanya. Don’t detach. Stay present.” Looking back, I wonder if by blocking my emotions, did I also block the emotions that I needed to actively listen? I hope not, but I’m not sure.

I followed his recounting of that day with questions about lessons learned and what he was doing currently, in part to bring him back to a good place. He spoke proudly about the command post he helped build with all its new bells and whistles and it seemed to be one of his happy places. I thought perhaps this was his way of turning his grief into purpose, with the goal of improving the department’s response to future emergencies. And I also asked about following in his father’s footsteps, which he had stated earlier he had done. He shared that his father came to his office a few days after the incident, closed the door, and said, “I’m not here as your peer or your cohort. I’m here as your father, and I just want to tell you that you did a very good job, son. I’m very proud of you.”

I connected with that emotion both as a parent and as a daughter. The threads throughout this interview reminded me of my own losses and just how fragile life can be. The interview was emotional for me. It was 6:30 p.m. when we finished. There was no one at the office with whom I could debrief. As we transition from an interview to home, where do the stories go? That day I got to my car, I turned on the radio and hoped to hear an uplifting song. That day I got lucky; Kenny Chesney’s “Everything is Gonna Be Alright” was playing. I listened and tried to get lost in the melody and chorus before heading home.

The next day I had a debriefing opportunity with a colleague, but was aware of the potential for secondary trauma: I was aware that verbally describing a traumatic experience through vivid word imagery might be difficult for a listener. I was also aware of the four steps of low-impact disclosure (LID), from the Compassion Fatigue Workbook: self-awareness, fair warning (give listener fair warning that a story may be difficult), consent (meaning let them say if and how much they are okay hearing), and low-impact debriefing (watch for signs the person is checking out of listening). I tried not to share the specific details that were lingering with me and watched body language for signs of discomfort.

Reflecting on the interview, I also wonder if I unknowingly silenced the narrator in some way. I identify a similarity between our roles. He had put his emotions aside to do his work that day in order to manage the recovery process as best he could. Likewise, I had tried to keep my internal and external emotions in check so as not to impact the interview process.

By definition, grief is mental suffering often endured alone and in silence… and in oral history work we try to engage with the silences, whatever they might be. And that includes our own silences. I’ll close with lyrics borrowed from Miranda Lambert’s “Bluebird” song:

And if the whole wide world stops singing and all the stars go dark, I’ll keep a light on in my soul and keep a bluebird in my heart.

Dr. Tanya Finchum is a Professor with the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program and has been a member of the Edmon Low Library faculty since 1999. She has conducted over 450 oral history interviews, beginning in 2006, and has been the leader on projects featuring various narrators such as women legislators, cooperative extension educators, and Oklahomans working to sustain the Monarch butterfly population and other conservation efforts, just to name a few. She also contributes to the production workflow and discoverability efforts. Finchum is a 2017 Columbia Center for Oral History Summer Institute Fellow. She holds a doctorate in Family Relations and Child Development with an emphasis in gerontology from Oklahoma State University, an M.S. in Library Science from The University of Tennessee, an M.A. in Rehabilitation Counseling from the University of Cincinnati, and a Bachelor of Social Work from East Tennessee State University.

Featured image courtesy of the author.

OHR Ethics Webinar, November 16

Mark your calendars! We will host a webinar in partnership with the Oral History Association and the Organization of American Historians on November 16, 1pm ET, titled “Sharing Authority: The Oral History Review Special Issue on Ethics.” 

From the editors

During this webinar, the OHR editorial team will join authors of articles in its recent Special Issue on Ethics to discuss sensitive issues involved in interviewing living, named subjects. Drawn from their own experiences working with oral history, the authors and editors will engage in a roundtable conversation about navigating the relationships forged with their narrators, funders, archives, and publishers.

Registration is free for Oral History Association members, so it’s a good time to re-up if your membership is not up to date. OAH members may also register for free!

The Andean Oral History Workshop: Reweaving Narratives of Indigenous Resistance in Bolivia, Part 2

This week, Benjamin Dangl finalizes his two-part post about the Taller de Historia Oral Andina and how a small group of Indigenous Bolivian activists have been using oral history to decolonize their collective past since 1983.

In case you missed it, find his first post on the Andean Oral History Workshop here.

By Benjamin Dangl

The Andean Oral History Workshop’s (THOA) methodology was bound up in the organization’s political and intellectual commitments, which aimed to decolonize research and historical production. The THOA members’ closeness to the communities and cultures they were researching helped their work immensely. Their horizontal research methods aided the recovery of communal memory and knowledge. The THOA’s efforts to piece fragments of memory and historical traces together into a whole helped fill in silences and reweave the narrative fabric of Indigenous resistance.

In their research, the THOA deployed various techniques to help elders recall the past with precision and fill in incomplete historical accounts. In some cases, they visited places related to their past in order to help them recall significant events with more detail. The THOA also sought out extended interviews with people who were not necessarily tied to historical events important to the community, but were superb narrators or had a deep knowledge of local history and culture. Through repeated interviews, these individuals provided a wider view of history. These life histories, former THOA member Carlos Mamani explains, helped “enrich our vision of what the common cultural rules are and the individual variants are in a society like ours.”

THOA members were not strangers visiting Indigenous communities from afar; they were considered part of the same community, albeit part of the wider Aymara diaspora triggered by migration to cities. When THOA members conducted their interviews, they approached their work from a space of intimate understanding. They spoke the same language and many had lived in rural communities when they were younger. “The fact of being Indigenous, Indigenous researchers, made us part of the same community,” Felipe Santos Quispe explained in an interview. For many THOA researchers, the experience of gathering testimonies was like an extended family reunion. The THOA’s work was a process of mutual reflection and collective remembering; the line between the researchers and the researched was blurred. Members were investigating themselves, their own identities, and their pasts. “It was a kind of self-reflection, and we shared this self-reflection with the communities,” Santos explains. There was no lack of trust: “We woke up together in the communities conversing, debating.” The activist-researchers and community members were getting to know their ancestral history, culture, and worldview, but also getting to know themselves.

“When we speak in Aymara, when we acullicamos, when we talk in the evenings, a deep history arises, and it is a deep history that comes from long ago.” — Marcelo Fernández

Speaking an Indigenous language was a requirement for early THOA members; the shared knowledge of Aymara strengthened relationships with the communities. In an interview, THOA member Marcelo Fernández reflected on language’s essential role in their early work: “When we speak in Aymara, when we acullicamos [chew coca], when we talk in the evenings, a deep history arises, and it is a deep history that comes from long ago.” Researchers without a common understanding of this language would not have been able to access the same stories or the same meaning and sentiment within them.

Just as the language provided an inroad, sharing coca—a leaf used widely throughout the Andes for medicinal and spiritual purposes—during conversations helped ground the discussions in the rituals and the cultural foundations of the community. “Coca is an element in making a dialogue,” THOA member Filomena Nina explained in an interview. “It is a way of saying, ‘Let’s chat.’ It’s not necessarily saying, but rather showing, and giving coca, so that already has another significance, which is to say, we already know the symbolic language of the communities.” When THOA members conducted their research, they typically brought coca with them for just this purpose.

The cover of the 1984 THOA booklet on earlier twentieth-century Indigenous leader Santos Marka T’ula. Courtesy of the Andean Oral History Workshop.

Early 1980s THOA audio files (located at the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore in La Paz) bring the organization’s methodologies in the communities to life. In various recordings, where Aymara is predominantly spoken, one can hear the rustle of participants grabbing at piles of coca leaves and chewing the leaf during the interviews. In other THOA recordings, snippets of rural daily life are present in the sound of chickens clucking, birds singing, or the wind whipping over the microphone during outdoor conversations. Hours and hours of such recorded interviews and conversations in rural communities formed the core of the THOA’s historical productions.

The researchers and those who provided testimonies shared much of the same culture and lived experience, identified with each other, and spoke the same language, providing the foundation for a participatory and horizontal production of history. This process decentered the typical power of the researcher and focused on a genuine collaboration that THOA members say decolonized their methodology. This style of research was evident in the ways the interviews were organized. In THOA co-founder Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections on the THOA’s early work, she describes how the interviewees themselves decided on the research approach and topics, how the interviews would be formatted and conducted, how the transcriptions would be returned, evaluated, and discussed by the community, and how the final product would be used.

The THOA’s approach, Rivera writes, was “a collective exercise of disalienation, as much for the researcher as for the interlocutor.” This active and collaborative participation on the part of “investigated communities and movements [aimed] toward the disalienation and decolonization of history.” In such a process, the interviewee is not considered an “object of study,” but rather a participant in a collective reflection. Through such collaborations in interviews and discussion, Rivera explains, “one will discover the complexity and richness of the ways of thinking and visions of history that the actors themselves generate in their lived experience.”

The THOA’s interviews were not solely about collecting facts but were often investigations into the past’s role in the transformation of society. Such an approach enabled rich discussions, for example, about the persistence of colonialism in contemporary times. “This allows us to reflect on the present in light of the past: to ask ourselves, for example, if we are living the same reality, or if some change has been produced,” Mamani writes. “In this way, in some communities, collectively or individually, we have generated a reflection about the permanence of the colonial situation as a system of domination of our peoples, and this reflection has enriched the consciousness-raising of the syndical, communal, and other organizations.”

The ideal of such research methods guided the THOA’s work at each stage of the organization’s historical production. From the collection of testimonies to the shaping of the narrative and the piecing together of fragmented histories, this nonhierarchical relationship was an essential part of the THOA’s work to rebuild an Indigenous people’s history of Bolivia.

While Indigenous movements were struggling in the streets, in between barricades, for political power and rights, the THOA was fighting intellectual battles to put Indigenous people on the historical map of the country. THOA members used oral history techniques to recover the silenced and fragmented past of Indigenous people, and produced histories for political action in an era of Indigenous resurgence.

Dr. Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication at the University of Vermont. He is a longtime journalist in Latin America and the author of three books on Bolivia, most recently The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, which focuses largely on the work, methods, and impact of The Andean Oral History Workshop.

Featured image depicts Andrés Jach’aqullu (standing) speaking with the THOA in La Paz, Bolivia in 1990.

5 Questions AboutHouston’s Underbelly

We ask authors of projects reviewed in Oral History Review to answer 5 questions about why we should read their projects. In our latest installment of the series, Amy C. Evans discusses her project Houston’s Underbelly.

Lauren Jacobsen-Bridges’ review of Houston’s Underbelly is available online and in OHR issue 48.2.

What’s it about and why does it matter?

The Houston’s Underbelly oral history project—fieldwork I conducted for the Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) in 2014—highlights Asian businesses whose specific culinary traditions and expertise not only influence contemporary Texas foodways, but offer inspiration in their adopted city of Houston, as well. Each location is connected to the story of local chef and restaurateur Chris Shepherd’s first restaurant, Underbelly (2012-2018). As part of the restaurant’s original mission, Shepherd looked to each of these cooks and restaurateurs as a culinary resource and not only celebrated their ingredients and expertise in his kitchen, but highlighted their businesses by encouraging his guests to patronize their establishments, as well. But Houston’s Underbelly is not an investigation or critique of Shepherd’s inspiration or appropriation. Rather, it is an effort to amplify marginalized voices, while also offering insight into the immigrant experience, the path to entrepreneurship, and the distinct yet varied food culture each narrator represents. (For more on the relationship between Chris Shepherd and two of the narrators, read the piece I wrote for The Local Palate in 2015, “The Interpreter and the Source.”)

How does oral history contribute to your project?

Oral history does not simply contribute to Houston’s Underbelly, it is the entire focus of the project. Conversations with seven Asian entrepreneurs are featured online and include full transcripts, short biographical sketches, and audio slideshows, which offer a view into the physical space connected to each narrator, as well as the narrator’s voice. Since its inception, the SFA’s documentary program has upheld a commitment to sharing its oral history archive with a popular audience, hence the multimedia packages featured on the SFA website. Complete audio files, as well as other ancillary materials, are accessible through the Department of Archives & Special Collections at the University of Mississippi, where the SFA is based.

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

Oral history is the most direct way for people to share their stories and experiences in their own words, thereby contributing to the historical record. Oral history offers the opportunity for human connection and collaboration, bringing people together through the simple act of conversation and allowing for a deeper understanding of what connects us all.

“Oral history offers the opportunity for human connection and collaboration, bringing people together through the simple act of conversation and allowing for a deeper understanding of what connects us all.”

Why will fellow oral historians be interested in your project? 

Fellow oral historians will be interested in Houston’s Underbelly because it amplifies immigrant voices, offers insight into a diverse culinary culture, and explores history through the lens of food, which, at the most basic level, connects us all. The project is also a wonderful portrait of Houston’s culinary scene, where South Asian ex-pats from London can open an Indian restaurant, featuring family recipes that are prepared by a Guatemalan chef.

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

I hope the audience sees the diversity of Houston, generally, and its Asian communities, specifically, in these interviews, as well as the unique relevance of foodways as an entry point to exploring countless other subjects. What’s more, oral history is not just about documenting the past; it can be an important tool to document current events and explore specific themes in real-time.

Amy C. Evans built the documentary program at the Southern Foodways Alliance and served as their lead historian for twelve years. Her latest independent, multimedia documentary project is Houston in 2020: Self-Employed Black Artists. 

The Andean Oral History Workshop: Decolonizing Historical Research Methods in Bolivia, Part 1

In the first of two installments, Benjamin Dangl writes about the Taller de Historia Oral Andina and how a small group of Indigenous Bolivian activists have been using oral history to decolonize their collective past since 1983.

By Benjamin Dangl

At the top of a winding street in La Paz, Bolivia, heading up from the city’s downtown toward El Alto, lies an inconspicuous brick building that looks exactly like the others in this working-class neighborhood. A small metal sign reads: Taller de Historia Oral Andina (Andean Oral History Workshop, THOA). Behind the doors of the building are the organization’s offices, libraries, archives, and meeting rooms. A vast mural depicting the altiplano covers one wall, and bags of coca sit on the long table where THOA members hold meetings. This is the headquarters of a grassroots research group that sought to create an alternative to the standard Bolivian historiography by tapping into the wellspring of oral history in Indigenous communities. 

Founded in 1983, the THOA was formed by nearly a dozen Indigenous activist-scholars and still operates to this day. The founders and early members were professors and students at the public Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz, one of the nation’s most important public universities. Most of the early members were Indigenous people who had recently migrated from the rural highlands to La Paz for studies; they discovered a void when it came to Indigenous Bolivian people’s history and sought to correct this by saving the stories of Indigenous resistance, using oral history as their primary methodology. 

Alongside the resurgent Indigenous movements of the period, the THOA challenged prevailing historical understandings at the university and embraced oral history as a tool for the reconstruction of silenced and fragmented Indigenous histories. In both its theory and methodology, the THOA broke new ground in historical research in Bolivia. Their commitment to recovering and promoting Indigenous culture and history was reflected in the organization’s research, production, and distribution. Not only did its work throughout the 1980s and beyond make use of new techniques and strategies for gathering oral history, but it also created a historical record of the majority of the country’s people that was previously absent, contributing to the transformation of historical consciousness in Bolivia. 

“The central objective of the institution framed itself in the accompaniment and empowerment of the Indigenous communities…. The THOA generated a space of reflection on and analysis of hot-button issues about national needs and the Indigenous communities.“

In “Una mirada autocrítica a la historia del THOA,” THOA member Felipe Santos Quispe outlines the organization’s accomplishments: “The central objective of the institution framed itself in the accompaniment and empowerment of the Indigenous communities, based on the strengthening of Indigenous identity through the investigation, dissemination [of the histories], formation [of researchers], and education [based on the histories produced]. The THOA generated a space of reflection on and analysis of hot-button issues about national needs and the Indigenous communities. Lastly, the community recuperated the organic model of reciprocity in relation to the communities. This made it easier to implement the oral history method in interactive investigations.” 

The THOA collected oral histories primarily in the rural Aymara communities where many members originated. Researchers worked alongside the communities and developed a process in which the interviewees set up the parameters of the interview, the research, and the historical production; they complemented oral history material with archival research to produce booklets and radio programs. With this work, they filled in the public silences surrounding Indigenous pasts, rebels, and uprisings, and in doing so, they strengthened historical self-awareness among Indigenous Bolivians.  

The THOA’s emergence onto the sociopolitical scene in the early 1980s was part of a national shift toward Indigenous organizing and politics. While activists fought in the streets to change the course of history, the THOA produced Indigenous histories and transformed the way the country’s Indigenous majority saw themselves, their past, and their future in the nation they wanted to rebuild. 

Recovering Histories of Indigenous Resistance 

Through the collection of oral histories, the THOA sought to recover the silenced Indigenous past of the Andes. Members saw the Spanish conquest and colonialism of the Americas as forces that destroyed and fragmented Indigenous history. For THOA member Carlos Mamani, the long duration of colonialism inflicted a political, economic, and social trauma on Indigenous Bolivians, a trauma that fractured people’s historical memory and consciousness, relegating Aymara history to the underground. “From this moment [of conquest],” Mamani writes in a booklet on the methods the THOA used in its research, “our historical memory was destined to survive clandestinely and to manifest itself in myths and oral traditions.” Oral history provided a way to weave together the Indigenous histories fractured by colonialism and neocolonialism, and to rescue Indigenous history, and therefore identity, from imminent disappearance. “If we do not care to know our own history and to recuperate our own historical destiny, very soon the aymaras, quichwas, urus, guaranís will be converted into museum artifacts,” Mamani writes.

The cover of the 1986 THOA publication Mujer y resistencia comunaria: Historia y memoria.

The cover of the 1986 THOA publication Mujer y resistencia comunaria: Historia y memoria. This work includes testimonies from Quechua and Aymara women on their participation in indigenous uprisings. Courtesy of the Andean Oral History Workshop.

The THOA’s publications were widely distributed to rural areas and had a direct political and social impact. In the early years, member-investigators used their research to create short and inexpensively produced works for distribution in rural communities. Themes included histories of Indigenous rebels of the early twentieth century, women’s avenues of resistance in Indigenous movements, the history of the ayllu, a collection of important dates in Bolivian history on resistance and oppression, popular Indigenous traditions, and children’s stories set in rural Aymara communities. 

The THOA also organized radio programs and public discussions that brought debates on Indigenous culture and politics out of the university and into the wider public, in La Paz and rural highland communities. In addition, the THOA organized groundbreaking cultural events in university spaces where, for the first time, academic debaters spoke publicly and intentionally in Aymara and, instead of wine, shared coca leaves in the communal act of acullicu, the ritual “chewing” of coca. THOA publications were available in Spanish but, most notably, were also published in Aymara and Quechua, a move that was rare in the 1980s for history publications. 

The THOA was a generational expression of the influx of Indigenous students from rural parts of the country into the university system. These heirs of the educational reforms of the 1952 National Revolution found allies among Indigenous university professors, most notably THOA co-founder Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The seeds of the THOA were planted in the classrooms where Indigenous issues were newly included in the curricula and openly discussed. Indigenous professors and students addressed what they saw as the ongoing colonization of Bolivia and found Indigenous histories that existed on the margins of society, in the oral testimonies and archival fragments of this past that remained. Their views were oriented by roots in rural Bolivia and the memory of their communities and ancestors. Such Indigenous histories and shared experiences converged in UMSA classrooms, leading to the creation of the THOA. 

Reflecting on the work of the THOA, Silvia Rivera explains in “El potencial epistemológico y teórico de la historia oral” that as Indigenous movements worked for self-determination and rights, they also reclaimed their “right to generate their own ideological and political systematizations, displacing the role of intermediaries assumed by the intellectuals […].” Such political mobilizations at the time demanded a rethinking of anthropological methods and research approaches practiced by academics regarding Indigenous people and culture. This shift, Rivera writes, came “thanks to the fact that Indian mobilizations and organizations assumed a growing and critical control in the face of the researchers’ and leftist politicians’ attempts at instrumentalization [of their movements].” 

The THOA fused the demands, ideologies, and organizational strategies of the new Indigenous movements with a historical research approach that placed the power of investigation into the hands of the Indigenous subjects themselves. Rivera explains, “Obviously, the emphasis on history is central to all these movements. The past acquires new life in being the central foundation of cultural and political Indian identity, and a source of radical criticism to the successive forms of oppression that q’ara [Western] society exercises on the Indian. It is in this context that the oral history projects of the THOA emerge, as an attempt to put the Indian movements’ demands for historic recuperation into practice.” The THOA’s work contributed to the shifts in historical consciousness, both within and outside of the academy, which were taking place thanks to a new generation of Indigenous leaders. 

You can find the second half of this post here

Dr. Benjamin Dangl is a Lecturer of Public Communication at the University of Vermont. He is a longtime journalist in Latin America and the author of three books on Bolivia, most recently The Five Hundred Year Rebellion: Indigenous Movements and the Decolonization of History in Bolivia, which focuses largely on the work, methods, and impact of The Andean Oral History Workshop.

Featured image depicts Don Lúcas Miranda, son of the cacique Toribio Miranda, conducting an Andean ceremony during a gathering of indigenous elders in 1990. The meeting was organized by the Andean Oral History Workshop to collect oral histories on the struggle of the caciques apoderados Indigenous movement in the early twentieth century. Courtesy of the Andean Oral History Workshop.

2021 Virtual Issue: Ethics

The Oral History Review editorial team is delighted our special issue on ethics has launched online and arrived in your mailboxes. To accompany this issue, our spring 2021 intern Mark Vallaro and assistant editor Nicole Strunk have produced our annual virtual issue drawing from the OHR archive of articles. This year, the virtual issue explores the broad theme of Ethics.

From the editors

Our Special Issue on Ethics has already reached many readers, along with recent blog posts published here by some of the authors who contributed articles to the issue. We are exceptionally proud of these pieces, who crafted compelling essays drawn from their personal experiences as oral historians working in our sensitive field involving living, named subjects. We hope the articles will launch continuing conversations about how to responsibly navigate the relationships with our narrators, funders, archives, and publishers.

As part of this continuing conversation, our 2021 virtual issue, featuring articles freed from their paywall, looks back at how practitioners have considered ethics in diverse and expansive ways. Read the editors’ intro, view the table of contents, and link to the articles here. 

Oral History Association Annual Meeting Preview

From the editors

It’s not too late to register for the Oral History Association’s annual meeting, October 9-14, and the good thing is, you don’t even need to book a flight. Although we dearly miss seeing our friends and colleagues in person, and the opportunity to make new friends in the elevator, hotel bar, or coffee hour, we are glad to have the chance to network remotely from afar. Check out the preliminary program. This year’s theme is Moving Stories.

Your editorial team (Abby, Dave, Janneken, and assistant editor Nicole) will be floating about the Zoomisphere attending panels and papers. Say hi when you see us, and let us know on Twitter if you want us to attend your session, especially if you’d like to develop your topic into an OHR article or guest blog post.

We also have a booth in the exhibit hall, which will be accessed through PheedLoop (link and details forthcoming), where you will be able to find us and video chat, peruse our list of books available for review, pitch us your article ideas, and learn more about our forthcoming call for papers on “Disrupting Oral History Best Practices.” And yes, there will be prizes! 

Residential Security Map of Baltimore, 1937

Is Sharing Authority a Cop Out?

OHR‘s Special Issue on Ethics is finally here. We will hear from several of our contributing authors over the next months, as they reflect on aspects of their oral history practice as it relate to ethics. This week, Mary Rizzo, author of “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater,” discusses how shared authority, a vital practice to oral historians, has the potential to be harmful to progressive, social history without additional expertise and critical thinking.

By Mary Rizzo

Listen to the members of marginalized communities when they talk about their lived experiences. For oral historians, this has been a tenet of the field since the new social history of the 1960s, if not before. It’s become a common idea in progressive public history circles as well. Rather than assuming that knowledge comes only from archives, official records, or outside observation, collaborating with community members recognizes that their lived experience is knowledge and has value. Both oral history and folklore have prioritized the transmission of knowledge from community member to community member. In practice, it’s often referred to as sharing authority, which has become central to oral and public history practices, as textbooks and introductions to public history reflect.

Sounds good, right? In many ways, yes. But I’m concerned that in practice, sharing authority can mean that scholars cede their authority to historically contextualize lived experience. Sharing authority is a two-way street that sees the necessity of both community and scholarly perspectives. By downplaying our expertise, we are abdicating our duty to provide perspective and challenge communities whose worldviews are based on incomplete understandings of the past.

As I demonstrate in my article, “Who Speaks for Baltimore: The Invisibility of Whiteness and the Ethics of Oral History Theater,” in Oral History Review’s Special Issue on Ethics, foregrounding sharing authority without a thorough understanding of how power operates in the community can backfire if our goal is progressive public history.

The article is a case study of Baltimore Voices, a documentary theater play performed in 1980-1981. Written only with words from the more than two hundred interviews collected by the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project in the late 1970s, Voices won substantial national and local funding and was seen by more than 10,000 people in Baltimore and at national events like the Organization of American Historians conference. A filmed version aired on regional PBS affiliates in 1981, adding perhaps several thousand more viewers. For the young oral historians, established social historians, and theater professionals who worked on it, this project was ripe with left-leaning political possibility. Turning thousands of pages of oral histories into a traveling play meant that people across Baltimore and the nation could hear the words of elderly working-class people, people who had been exploited as workers in factories, and then seen those jobs disappear due to deindustrialization.

While class identity disempowered the narrators as a group, race gave white narrators, who were a majority of the interviewees, privilege that was invisible to them. Some white narrators expressed virulently racist beliefs in the interviews. Less explicit but equally insidious, other narrators ignored how their whiteness gave them access to material advantages, like better housing, than Black people. Instead, they remembered how their families and communities simply worked hard to achieve the American dream. Whiteness, as scholars from David Roediger to Peggy McIntosh have shown, works through invisibility. Most white people are unaware that they have a racial identity that privileges them. But today, in a moment when oral and public historians are trying to show the danger of white supremacist ideas and reveal how white privilege works, this case study from five decades ago shows us how smart, liberal people with good intentions made choices that ultimately centered white perspectives.

In the article, I outline several decisions made by the creators. Here, I’ll focus on the one I think is most important and which ties back to the issue of shared authority: the decision to only use the words of the narrators in writing the play.

In a recorded meeting from 1979, project personnel debated how to deal with racism in Baltimore and the interviews. They were ultimately swayed by the suggestion of one person who said (link to full audio):

People tell the truth as they know it. There’s all kinds of truth to be told in this piece . . . The words speak for themselves. That person from Hampden [a white working-class neighborhood known for anti-Black racism] can hear his words and think, gosh those are my words and that’s how I feel and, at the same time, they can see from other parts of the city the results of all different kinds of prejudices coming down. I don’t think we need to make a big thing out of socioeconomic examination of racism. . . . This is personal history and what makes that interesting is putting that in light of truth in other parts of the city and you start to see some very different trends.

On one hand, only using the words of the narrators seems like a radical act of sharing authority. The creators put the lived experiences of working-class people on stage in their own words. However, I argue that this decision ignored how white privilege shaped the narrators’ recollections and hid the fact that the creators edited and curated the interviews to create the show. By refusing to contextualize the narrators’ words, they lost an opportunity to interject material that could illuminate the workings of white privilege.

Other models existed. For example, in Martin Duberman’s In White America, the first play produced by the Free Southern Theater in 1963, actors read texts of speeches and documents to show how American history had been shaped by anti-Black racism. Voices’ creators could have had an actor read the text of a 1911 law defining where Black people could live in Baltimore (the first of its kind in the country) or even included a discussion of blockbusting, which tore the city apart in the 1950s. They did nothing like this. Rather than share authority, they ceded it. They made white privilege the invisible theme through the production.

I see this case study as a warning to those of us who work in oral and public history as an extension of our progressive political values. At the same time, I struggled while writing this article, not wanting to critique people for not talking about whiteness before whiteness studies as a field existed. The creators of Voices thought and cared deeply about their project. Several of them also spoke to me, which I am grateful for. My goal is not to point fingers at the past, but to use this case study to help those of us today who care about our oral and public history work making a political difference to think through the complexities of sharing authority and community collaboration. To combat white privilege and white supremacy, we must shine a light on the everyday practices of whiteness which requires that we bring our scholarly expertise.

Featured image: Baltimore Housing Security Map of 1937 showing redlining practices. Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries. 

Mary Rizzo is associate professor of history at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press, 2015). She is an advisor for the Queer Newark Oral History Project and founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project. 

Using Oral History to Preserve Space for Individual Traumas within the Collective Tragedy of September 11th

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Rebecca Brenner Graham reminds us how oral history can validate and preserve individual traumas from such a harrowing time.

By Rebecca Brenner Graham

The September 11, 2001 attacks occurred twenty years ago. Five years ago, I conducted a series of oral history interviews with survivors of trauma related to September 11th. For these narrators, their experiences on that day—all that was lost— will remain integral to their life stories. Jay was a Rhode Island-based attorney whose little sister was working as a flight attendant. Annie was a civilian employee who felt safe and worked longer than most in the transient workspace of the Pentagon. Steve worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, located at 1 World Trade Center, from 2000 through 2002.

While September 11th unfolded for each narrator differently—Jay lost a loved one, Annie sat in the Pentagon when hijackers crashed into it, and Steve stood in the North Tower’s lobby as its elevators stopped working—their experiences and traumas collectively taught me three important lessons. First, personal loss—of a beloved sister, a sense of safety at work, or an entire office—isolates one’s individual experience and memory from a collective or nation’s experience of a major event. Second, the collective nation’s ability to memorialize the event and mourn what was lost in collective memory on a national stage is limited. And third, Jay, Annie, and Steve taught me that ineffable, intangible feeling of connection and empathy that I cannot translate into words but that I will never forget.

Jay watched United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower from his law office’s television in Rhode Island. Since his sister Amy was flying neither to nor from New York, he did not realize that she could be on the plane. Yet, a few hours later, when his boss knocked and gently told him “I’m going to bring you home,” Jay intuitively knew. The horror that he watched on television held gutting personal implications: Amy was gone. Jay described Amy as the last person who you’d ever think could get caught up in this. Amy was characteristically easy-going, free-spirited, and good-humored. Amy began her career as a flight attendant after graduating from Villanova University. She had planned to marry her college boyfriend Kyle. Amy was a talented flight attendant and a “perfect aunt.” Jay’s daughter Ally reminds him of his sister. She is named for her and simply has a way about her that reminds the family of Amy. 

Amy’s Mount Saint Charles Academy high school classmate Chris Ross composed and recorded a song for Amy, entitled “Brave.”

Annie Bratcher, fall 2016

Two hundred and thirty miles south, Annie was a longtime civilian employee at the Pentagon. She enjoyed and took pride in her work and still does. Throughout her career, Annie has woken up before 5 am to listen to gospels to fuel her day spiritually. When Flight 77 hit the Pentagon at 9:37 am, Annie was several hours into her day. Before September 11th, Annie’s routine was comforting, predictable, and sacred. Trauma is the opposite. As days turned to weeks, Annie remained paralyzed on her couch. When she returned to work, the colonels helped her around the building. A fellow commuter with whom Annie frequently chatted—without asking her name—never returned.

When Annie awoke on September 11th, a Cantor Fitzgerald employee in New York might only have been asleep for a few hours. Working late into the night, Steve signed emails, “from the top of the World Trade Center.” One of these nights was September 10, 2001, and as a result, Steve ran late the following morning. His estimated time of arrival at work grew later after running into a cousin while commuting. They caught up on the details of Steve’s recent honeymoon. By the time Steve arrived in the lobby, the North Tower had been hit. When the South Tower was struck, Steve watched from underneath it. He will never forget the sight of the plane’s nose protruding the opposite side or the sound of people who, in their last moments, chose to jump rather than suffocate to death. Steve lost almost all the colleagues who had shaped him and his early career. He will especially never forget his mentor Dennis.

One of the ways that Jay remembers Amy is by noting ways that Ally emulates the aunt that she never met. One of Annie’s coping mechanisms is her involvement at church. She has even spoken publicly about what she experienced on September 11th. Steve honors Dennis’s memory when he mentors others. Another Cantor Fitzgerald colleague who died on September 11th had advised Steve to watch his guests watch the slideshow at his wedding. I reflected on the loss of Steve’s colleague by following the same advice at my own wedding.   

Survivors of trauma relating to September 11th offer memories and perspectives that might differ from traditional or even patriotic narratives. The relationship among individual, collective, and official memory is complex. Individual people contain multitudes—ideas, meaning, memories—September 11th transformed the lives of every person in the wrong place at the wrong time and their loved ones.

These oral history narrators generously, graciously shared pieces of themselves—who and what they lost—with me. I will always remember them, and not only on September 11th.

Rebecca Brenner Graham is a newly-minted Ph.D. historian, a full-time history teacher at an all-girls boarding school, a compulsive reader, and an aspiring author.

Featured image courtesy of Wikimedia user Saifunny, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. 

Author Interview: Liz Strong on Protecting Interviewers

Our new issue 48.2 focused on ethics in oral history features Liz Strong’s article, “Shifting Focus: Interviewers Share Advice on Protecting Themselves from Harm,” about distinct challenges faced by oral historians in their work. She outlines key structures of support to address such challenges, concluding with ways to apply those structures during project design, while a project is ongoing, and in the event of a crisis. We interviewed Strong about her article and the difficulties oral historians face in confronting trauma and toxicity.

What is it about our field that may cause oral historians to put themselves last when it comes to their work and careers?

Oral history is a relatively young field, and we are also very informed by the social movements around us. It may be a sign of the times, and of where we are in our own growth as a field, that we are ready to shift our focus to the rights and well being of interviewers as well as narrators. It may also be that the interviewers who were publishing, presenting, teaching, and gaining recognition in the 1980s through 2010s, imagined that all interviewers would be privileged, powerful, and protected because many of them were those things. But that was a skewed perspective that we’re compensating for now.

How do you go about preparing for a potentially traumatic interview? How do you decompress afterwards? Where would you suggest that someone new to an active self-care approach to oral history begin?

I think I’ve learned that I can’t prepare just as me, individually. From talking to folks, the common pattern seems to be that painful interviews cut deepest when interviews occur in unsupportive or toxic work environments. So the answer to how I prepare is honestly to just think carefully about who I work for, and to stay present for my colleagues, and to write this article. That’s really the best preparation I can do to ensure that if something happens in an interview that really tests me, my employer and my community will be tested right along with me, and all of us will rise to the occasion together.

Why do you think that there are so few publications on this aspect of oral history work?

Well, I think there are going to be more and more public and published conversations about what oral history interviewers face. To say why there haven’t been very many yet, would be total speculation. But I do recognize how hard it is, in general, to openly discuss personal experiences of failure or exploitation. I think many oral historians would be understandably concerned about their careers if they spoke critically about employers, clients, or principal investigators who contributed to painful experiences. My article provides a chance for us to speak collectively. Some of us remain anonymous; some of us put ourselves out there as case studies; and I’ve attempted to focus on the broader trends that affect us.

In what ways has the pandemic impacted the already-limited access that oral historians have to outside support systems?

It’s hard to get to AA meetings and to church and to school. We connect to each other through screens, which are the same portals broadcasting images of state violence and hardship. We’re steeped in stress, instability, and loss. In the midst of all this, the methods of our oral history practice had to adapt quickly to a remote world, which both created and closed opportunities for us. For example, I can end an oral history interview and be immediately in my own home, or step outside into my garden rather than stepping on to the subway. That can be really beautiful, and helpful. It can give me a lot of control over my space and the kind of care and recovery that I need before and after interviews. Other interviewers may be besieged in their closet while they record, with the pressures of family who need them just outside. They may be physically scrunched up or stifled in those spaces. They may yearn for the quiet drive between interviews and home life. The pandemic certainly increased our distance from one another, but whether it increased or decreased our agency over our circumstances is the most important shift. And that’s very different for all of us.

Liz Strong is the project manager for the Obama Presidency Oral History Project at Columbia University. Previously, she served as the project coordinator for Muslims in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Historical Society, and as the oral history program manager for the New York Preservation Archive Project. She received her MA in oral history from Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 2015, and her BA in narrative arts from Oberlin College in 2009.

Featured image from Flickr user Andréanne Germain used with CC BY 2.0 license.

Newer Posts
Older Posts

Oral History Review

© 2025 Oral History Review | The blog of the journal of record for the theory and practice of oral history and related fields.