Abstract
Abstract Chapter 1 examines a collection of Indian and Pioneer oral histories in the state of Oklahoma, formerly Indian Territory, which is also a lens for exploring Southwest borderlands history. This collection was connected to the US Works Progress Administration, a key site for reconfiguring discourses of national and regional heritage in the 1930s. The chapter analyzes the representation of music, language, and dance in this oral history collection, as well as the differential functions of orality and aurality. The chapter argues that the constructedness of oral histories, their production through historical and cultural processes, should not invalidate them as sources. Rather, like all historical sources, oral histories are the product of multiple voices and political forces, some visible and audible, and others obscured in the archive. We need to listen and read beyond the referential function of this genre to place it in its own social-historical context and consider what it may reveal.
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