From “Best” to Situated and Relational: Notes Toward a Decolonizing Praxis

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses the continuing impact of settler proprietorship, or the state of owning and the right to own in a settler colonial context, in US professionalized oral history. Specifically, it focuses on three dimensions that demonstrate the linkages between settler proprietorship and established guidelines recognized as “best practices” in oral history: the multiscalar meaning of ownership; the oral history as an “open” and “discoverable” product; and the archive as repository. Centering the multifaceted work of Indigenous, women of color, and feminist oral historians and scholars, and drawing on my teaching and research as a guide, this article also considers how practitioners have long enacted plural forms of oral history that are in tension with, or depart from, these existing guidelines. Thus, I consider what is possible when we shift our focus from reproducing a singular standard of principles to acknowledging the multiple ways of practicing that already ground the labor of oral historians committed to decolonizing forms of (un)learning.