Preliminary Programme

After collecting life stories and oral histories, the process of taking the raw interviews and creating personal narratives that are readable, entertaining, empathic, steeped with cultural and historical context, is a challenging and at times, daunting task; but in the end, immensely rewarding.

Following the signing of the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement in 1992, the Gwich’in Tribal Council (GTC) established several organizations to deal with the responsibilities created under the new Agreement. The Gwich’in Social and Cultural Institute (GSCI) was founded as the cultural and heritage arm of GTC in response to concerns about the decline of Gwich’in culture and language. With a mandate to ‘document, preserve and promote Gwich’in culture, language, traditional knowledge and values’ Gwich’in Elders wanted their stories to be recorded so future generations would understand their history and learn, from the Elders, their heritage and culture.
For over 20 years I have worked on taking oral history interviews with 23 Gwich’in Elders in the Northwest Territories in Canada and putting them into personal narratives that reflect the voice and personality of each Elder. The challenges faced and overcome to do this will be detailed in my presentation which will discuss:
• Being a non-Indigenous person recording and writing Indigenous Elder stories in way that does not repeat the long history of ‘Indian Biography,’ a genre steeped in a colonialist world view of non-Indigenous people writing life stories/biographies of Indigenous peoples
• Working with GTC to find a compromise on how the ‘voice’ of the Elder was to be represented in writing. English was a second language of the Elders how to put ‘Village English’ on the page in a respectful way
• Insuring that the historical context of many of the narratives are included so that the reader understands the meaning and importance of the story being told
• Insuring that the kinship relations that are assumed the reader/listener will know are incorporated into the story for the reader who is unfamiliar with them
• Incorporating traditional knowledge and place names into the stories to give the reader a Gwich’in view of the relationship of the Gwich’in to the landscape
• Ensuring that the personal narratives illustrate the Gwich’in values of honour, love, kindness, dance/song, laughter, humour, teaching of stories, spirituality honest/fairness, sharing and caring

The challenges were overcome and in the spring of 2020, the University of Alberta Press will be publishing the over 800 page, ‘Our Whole Gwich’in Way of Life Has Changed. Gwich’in K’yuu Gwiidanda?i’ Tthak Ejuk Go?onlih. Stories from the People of the Land’ by Leslie McCartney and Gwich’in Tribal Council.
Deputy Grand Chief of GTC, Jordan Peterson, the great-grandson of one of the Elders featured in the book penned the forward in the book. “I am one of those future generations that had the opportunity to learn from some of the Elders that are in this book, but also one of those future generations that will learn about my identity through these stories.” His comment has made all the challenges of this project worthwhile. (Show less)

In 2009 a nationwide Oral History project named MenschenLeben (Human Life) was launched in Austria dedicated to collect life story interviews with “ordinary” Austrians, ranging from mountain farmers and school teachers, to metalworkers and migrants, to puppet artists, working mums and pensioners. The overall aim of the project is to portray the development of and the changes within non-elitist Austrian society, its historical background as well as the personal and general living conditions from around the 1930ies to the present. In over ten years more than 1600 interviews were recorded, archived and made accessible in Austria’s leading audiovisual archive called Österreichische Mediathek. The proposed paper will give insight into the theoretical and methodological approach of MenschenLeben, its inherent chances and possibilities as well as its structural limitations.
Two of the main challenges in the daily work of MenschenLeben will be discussed in detail. At first there are ethical aspects which have to be thought of in the course of archiving oral history interviews. The interviewees’ rights are protected through legal release forms. But how can oral historians or archives protect interviewees from harming themselves by telling illegal events in their own or somebody else’s lives? What is to be done in case of intentional or unintentional defamation of family members, colleagues or neighbours during a life story narration? How should we deal with the sensitive topic of presenting personal life story narrations in full length on the internet? And how can we (at the same time) fulfil the project’s main aim, which is to grant public access to as many interviews as possible?
The second challenge to be discussed in the proposed paper is the preparation of the interviews for future secondary analysis and use. Keywords or subject heading topics as well as partial transcription with timecodes will help researchers, teachers or journalists to find the interviews they need and will give them an instrument to navigate within the audio files. Thoughts about the breadth and depth of indexing and transcription will be presented as this is crucial for the future use of this thematically very heterogeneous oral history collection. (Show less)

Oral History is considered as a complex social and political historical approach. In the 1970s, the method inspired especially social historians by their potential to illuminate hidden narratives behind the main topics. Since the first eyewitness projects, the amount of recorded oral history documents has increased: in Germany the large audio-visual archive “Deutsches Gedächtnis” of the University Hagendo important work. There as well as in other archive stocks for oral history documents, numerous biographical interviews with eyewitnesses from East and West Germany are archived - in the form of audio and video material as well as transcripts. For many of these sources there exists a transfer of rights. These were formulated beyond the background of the respective legal situation and technical possibilities. The advance of digitization has meant a quantum leap in oral history: Sound and image recordings can be created and disseminated much more extensively, data can be processed much more effectively, historians can devote themselves to extended research subjects, eye witness documents are in a new relationship to public space and can be analysed in other question contexts. But which not only methodical but also ethical questions arise from this for analysis and archiving?
Eyewitness researchers have developed guidelines that promote the dignity of interviewees and protect them from potential damage that the research process might cause. With the technical changes and new possibilities, there is the need to re-agree ethical standards for each oral history-based research project and to discuss individual principles against the background of new technologies (internet, storage media) and for future action. The ethical guidelines used by eyewitness researchers have evolved over time based on experience in the field. Similarly, there is room for ethical standards to grow and change.
In German-speaking literature, there are relatively few answers to these questions or texts that reflect these ethical dilemmas (von Unger 2014: 21). The proposed contribution addresses ethical issues arising from the secondary analysis of eyewitness documents. To this end, the author outlines international standards; individual questions are discussed based on own project experiences. The technical framework results from the current research practice and publication projects of the author. Finally, some suggestions are formulated on how to address research ethical issues in the reuse of time-witness documents. (Show less)

MigTALKS - oral history as digital heritage Malin Thor Tureby & Jesper Johansson
In the research consortium DigiCONFLICT we explore the impact of digital heritage on contemporary engagements with the past in specific national frameworks in Poland, Sweden and Israel. Focusing on oral history, photography and multimedia museums as some of the most common media used to digitalize cultural heritage, the transnational project investigates the widespread claims about the universality and democratizing abilities of digital heritage.
The Swedish research team, within DigiCONFLICT, is focusing on oral history as digital heritage in the age of migration and investigates if and how digital collecting and archiving methods transform who creates, contests and engages with a narrative cultural heritage. We are exploring the following questions:
-in what ways and under what conditions has a narrative digital heritage about and with persons categorized as migrants been initiated, created and curated?
-how do memory institutions collaboration with the public, political and media institutions as well as the ‘migrants’ influence definitions of cultural heritage and how it is being negotiated and reformulated in a digital context?
In this presentation we will discuss the case study MigTALKS as one empirical example to address these questions. MigTALKS was initially a so-called communication project instigated by the Migration Board in Sweden. With the purpose to put a face on the “immigrants” in Sweden and to counteract a discourse about migrants as “poor refugees”. The project conducted interviews and collected 100 life stories from people who had immigrated to Sweden (refugees, labor migrants, students etc.) between 2010-2015. All the materials were published at www.migtalks.com. After the communication project was finished, the Migration Board decided to donate all the materials (digital and non-digital) to the archive of the Nordic Museum. In our study we interview initiators at the Swedish Migration Board, staff at the Nordic Museum as well as the migrants who contributed with their life stories in order to investigate how a narrative digital heritage reflects and frames given societies and their complex historical, social and cultural power structures. (Show less)