The Politics of Power in Indigenous Oral History

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Oral history has often been politically styled a “democratic tool” apt in amplifying the voices of the previously silenced. This chapter unpacks these underlying political approaches and definitions in oral history and tradition, and compares and contrasts these with an indigenous perspective on the politics at work within oral history as a field. The chapter explores how the politics of indigenous oral history are always concerned with an assertion of self-determination that is intimately connected to expressions of tribal identity. Examples, such as a tribal indigenous political reading of gender, are used to demonstrate the wider impact of the “Politics of Power” and the ways indigenous oral histories are driven and emboldened by the need to survive, resist, and decolonize our past and present.