Indigenous Oral History Research Articles

A History of the Fort at Long Akah: Contact, Collaboration and Power

This paper traces history through the fort at Long Akah during the various eras of the Brooke administration, the colonial government and the Sarawak State government. This study takes its cue from the notion of the fort as a vehicle for a distinctive history of an area and uses indigenous oral histories and recollections as “alternative history.” Forts were built during and after pacification and this process was dependent on the collaboration of local leaders whose influence was ritually prescribed by the adat. The forts functioned as a place where taxes were paid, where court cases were heard, and where trading took place. While the fort at Long Akah represented locally a locus of power for the Brooke administration, it will be seen that this power was located in a crucial local collaboration in governance, which depended on the role of local leaders.

Like Water, We Re-Member: A Conceptual Model of Identity (Re)formation through Cultural Reclamation for Indigenous Peoples of Mexico in the United States

Background: Diasporic Indigenous peoples of Mexico living in the United States continue to survive and reclaim their cultures despite multiple disruptions to identity formation resulting from systematic violence and cultural silencing enacted through white settler colonialism in the United States and Mexico. Honoring Indigenous survivance, the authors present a conceptual model of Indigenous identity healing and reformation that mirrors the dynamic qualities of water for Indigenous Mexican peoples living in the United States. Methods: The conceptual model arose from a ceremony-based, participatory, digital archiving project documenting Indigenous oral histories. The model is illustrated through case analysis of three Indigenous Mexican individuals living in the United States whose stories holistically represent the model’s components. Results: The case narratives illustrate how Indigenous Mexican identities are (re)formed by moving through the model components of Rift (disconnection from land, culture, and community), Longing (yearning to find what was lost), Reconnecting (reclaiming cultural practices), and Affirmation (strengthening of identity through community), via Reflection (memory work which propels movement through each stage). Conclusions: Findings suggest that identities can be (re)formed through reclaiming cultural practices and reconnecting with the community. This conceptual model may be useful for further understanding Indigenous Latinx identity development and healing.

Redressing Archival Harm: Ownership, Access, and Indigenous Knowledge

ABSTRACT Institutions that house Indigenous oral histories are often ignorant to the harm they perpetuate by treating these materials without rooting curatorial considerations in Indigenous approaches to knowledge. Issues of categorization, attribution, and access, among many others, often go unaddressed, causing serious harm to Indigenous peoples and their cultural resources. It is imperative that Western archives, libraries, and museums seek out alternatives to systems that perpetuate settler-colonialism, and work to place control of oral histories back in Indigenous hands. In this paper we present several considerations for working with Indigenous oral histories in Western archives, provide case studies that promote the ethical curation and sharing of Indigenous materials, and close with an overview of our current work to revitalize and redress a large collection of Native American oral histories presently housed at the University of Florida.

Gratitude as a systems-wide values-based approach to enhance sustainable consumption choices

What if the best approach to solve climate change were to emphasize an emotion felt by the majority of the population? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass presents gratitude as a powerful emotion. This article is a deep theoretical exploration of gratitude, largely informed by Indigenous oral histories as presented by Kimmerer. The analysis shows gratitude as having the potential to serve as an emotional (rather than logical) catalyst for change in human consumption behaviours. Also explored is how gratitude can form a cyclical system interwoven with care, gifts, and reciprocity. Environmental activists have been seeking to enact change, largely through a wide-range of education-scoped efforts. Yet change doesn’t happen. This article argues that Indigenous wisdom on the practice and experience of gratitude offers a profoundly more satisfying approach to human relationships; both with nature and other humans. Ultimately gratitude, when more deeply experienced, seems capable of inspiring new programs of actions, education, and efforts to affect highly meaningful and engaging societal transformation towards greater ecological responsibility.

Getting it Right: Safeguarding a Respected Space for Indigenous Oral Histories and Truth Telling

ABSTRACT Indigenous stories increasingly challenge the Australian understanding of the relationships between colonizers and Indigenous experiences and perceptions of the postcolonial past. Indigenous oral history is becoming an integral and powerful aspect of oral historiography that includes Indigenous oral histories and stories as important components of Australian history making. Given that Indigenous reclamation of history is essential to the process of decolonization, this paper poses the question of how we can safeguard a respected space for Indigenous oral histories so truth telling can take a rightful place in history making. The paper details examples of a non-Indigenous researcher working with and for Indigenous storytellers and in doing so, elaborates on an Indigenist approach to oral historiography. We provide examples from the Moola Bulla project, an Indigenist methodologically based study collaboratively designed by Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers around ethical research practices. The authors recommend that to ensure ethical practices and faithful re-storying, researchers engage in training with Indigenous people, thereby enabling the moral integrity and rigor of Indigenous history making in the field of oral history. This paper reiterates the fundamental prerogative for all those in the domain of history making in colonized contexts to work with Indigenous people in the rewriting of postcontact history informed by an understanding of Indigenist methodologies.

Paleoecology provides context for conserving culturally and ecologically important pine forest and barrens communities.

In fire-prone ecosystems, knowledge of vegetation-fire-climate relationships and history of fire suppression and Indigenous cultural burning can inform discussions of how to use fire as a management tool, particularly as climate continues to change rapidly. On Wiisaakodewan-minis/Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore of Wisconsin, USA, structural changes in a pine-dominated natural area containing a globally rare barrens community occurred after cessation of cultural burning by Indigenous Ojibwe people and the imposition of fire-suppression policies, leading to questions about the historical role of fire in this culturally and ecologically important area. To help better understand the ecological context needed to steward these pine forest and barrens communities, we developed paleoecological records of vegetation, fire, and hydrological change using pollen, charcoal, and testate amoebae preserved in peat and sediment cores collected from bog and lagoon sediments within the pine-dominated landscape. Results indicated that fire has been an integral part of Stockton Island ecology for at least 6000 years. Logging in the early-1900s led to persistent changes in island vegetation, and post-logging fires of the 1920s and 1930s were anomalous in the context of the past millennium, likely reflecting more severe and/or extensive burning than in the past. Before that, the composition and structure of pine forest and barrens changed little, perhaps due to regular low-severity surface fires, which may have occurred with a frequency consistent with Indigenous oral histories (~4-8 years). Higher-severity fire episodes, indicated by large charcoal peaks above background levels in the records, occurred predominantly during droughts, suggesting that more frequent or more intense droughts in the future may increase fire frequency and severity. Persistence of pine forest and barrens vegetation through past periods of climatic change indicates considerable ecological resistance and resilience. Future persistence in the face of climate changes outside this historical range of variability may depend in part on returning fire to these systems. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Cultural-ecosystem resilience is vital yet under-considered in coastal restoration

As large areas of the Mississippi River Delta (MRD) of the USA disappear into the sea, present-day communities and cultural resources are lost. While the land loss may be readily quantified, describing the impact of cultural losses is less straightforward because cultural elements are frequently less tangible and difficult to map, identify, and categorize. The elision of cultural components of landscapes and ecosystems is evident in restoration practices and policies, although numerous scholars have identified the interlinked processes of culture and ecology as critical to rebuilding healthy and resilient environments. We define and measure cultural-ecosystem resilience (CER) in the Mississippi River Delta through analyses of Indigenous oral histories, mound-building practices and settlement patterns, and the persistence and reuse of archaeological sites. CER describes a system containing resilient properties embedded in human-natural settings including river deltas that may manifest in oral cultural traditions, architecture, and the selection of habitable environments. Our interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the role of human-modified landscapes in generating resilience for past and present coastal communities and highlights the importance of consulting records of historic and modern Indigenous traditions in shaping sustainable landscape-management strategies. Results show that archaeological earthen and shell mounds made by Native American Gulf Coast and MRD communities have been persistent features that endured for centuries and are sited in regions of high multicultural value within the dynamic delta. Yet, we document the rapid 20th-century loss of mounds due to coastal erosion, industry, and other human land-use practices. Present-day and future coastal land loss endangers what remains of these keystone features and thus lowers the resilience of modern Mississippi River Delta communities.

Kinship is not a metaphor

ABSTRACT Indigenous oral histories say that Treaty No. 6 (1876) was not only a legal transaction but rather a ceremony of adoption whereby incoming settler peoples became relatives. With Indigenous theories of relationality now informing many disciplines, how do white settler peoples take up the framework of kinship without using it only as a metaphor—and thereby as yet another tool of settler-colonial displacement? This essay examines this risk by considering the figurative use of kinship terms by Commissioner Alexander Morris at the negotiations for Treaty No. 6, in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada. Morris’s reliance on a borrowed vocabulary of kinship was, like his participation in the ceremony of the sacred pipestem, an invocation of relationality as a rhetorical device aimed at securing the ‘surrender’ of the lands. While metaphor is a figure that can mislead, coerce, or yoke, however, it can also make relationships, make things akin. In light of the continued relevance of the Indigenous legal framework known as treaty, this discussion takes up the possibility of kinship metaphors as not only figurative but also as literal, binding, and central to the possibility of good relations in the prairies today.

No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous

As a scholar who frequently relies on a microhistorical and biographical approach to Indigenous history, I often marvel at the ability of other historians to synthesize and build on previous scholarship to develop broad narratives that span political, cultural, and temporal borders. One of the perils of such an approach is that a cohesive argument can often become lost as data and sources multiply and become unmanageable. Despite these challenges, in No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous historian Sheldon Krasowski has succeeded in producing an innovative and cohesive account of the first seven numbered treaties negotiated between the Canadian government and western First Nations between 1871 and 1877.Drawing from his work with Indigenous elders and academics in the province of Saskatchewan, Krasowski implements an Indigenous “Treaty Bundle” approach. By recognizing treaties as sacred undertakings enacted through ceremony, this approach draws on Indigenous oral histories that understood the treaties to be a cumulative, interrelated whole rather than isolated instances of policy negotiation. Through this approach, No Surrender builds on previous scholarship that focused on individual treaties to step back and identify the larger patterns that ran throughout the negotiations of the first seven numbered treaties.By writing largely in response to what he terms the “misunderstanding thesis,” Krasowski has made use of previously overlooked eyewitness accounts and Indigenous oral histories to reexamine the veracity of the published records of government operatives. Beginning in 1936, historian George F. G. Stanley promoted the interpretation that the ill effects of the numbered treaties were largely the result of misunderstandings arising from the interaction of two deeply different cultures and that the government negotiators, though confused and misguided, acted honorably and in good faith. This “misunderstanding thesis” has had a pervasive influence on twentieth-century Canadian treaty scholarship. While acknowledging the complex cultural interactions that pervaded treaty negotiations, Krasowski argues that negotiators on both sides understood each other to a much greater extent than was previously thought. In light of this, No Surrender concludes that the representatives of the Canadian government acted duplicitously by downplaying the significance and meaning of the “surrender clause,” which was intended to forfeit Indigenous lands to the Canadian government. Krasowski points out that in four of the seven sets of treaty negotiations, despite the centrality of land surrender to the Canadian government’s goals, the surrender clause never appeared in recorded translations or proceedings. The swiftness and opacity of the government’s negotiations were sometimes so apparent that they were critiqued by missionaries and traders whom the government relied on as witnesses, translators, and Indigenous liaisons. This theme connects all seven of the treaties studied in No Surrender and is supported by Euro-Canadian eyewitness testimonies and Indigenous oral histories alike.No Surrender will be an invaluable text for undergraduate students of Canadian and Indigenous history because of both its comprehensive analysis of the first seven numbered treaties and its modeling of fundamental historical methods. By carefully walking the reader through the construction of his argument, Krasowski provides a clear discussion of the different kinds of sources used by historians and their associated challenges. In addition, the historiographical passages are straightforward models of how aspiring historians should grapple with previous scholarship. Additionally, future scholars of Indigenous peoples’ dealings with the Canadian government, Canadian settler colonial policy, and the history of western Canada will need to engage with No Surrender. New research on treaties in particular will benefit from Krasowski’s synthesis and reinterpretation of previous scholarship through the lens of Indigenous oral histories and the Treaty Bundle framework.

Indigenous Oral History Reader

The oral history of Indigenous people in Canada has been recognized by mainstream legal systems in Canada over the past few decades as being of fundamental importance in court cases and negotiations with Indigenous peoples. As Indigenous peoples further exercise their right to self-government, they will continue drawing their oral traditions to define and develop their autonomous legal system. This anthology attempts to collect a wide variety of materials that embody many perspectives. It attempts to place those materials within a conceptual framework that might be helpful in looking at Indigenous oral history, and indeed oral history generally. That framework includes viewing oral history in three dimensions of time - testimony about recent events, oral histories that encompass an individual's lifetime, and oral traditions that are passed down from generation to generation. The framework includes looking at oral history in the context of how many cultures and traditions incorporate oral history in their legal systems and cultures. It asks both how values and methods differ among communities and how they reflect widespread or virtually universal tendencies. The framework also invites the reader to consider the different ways in which oral evidence can or should be reinforced or qualified by references to other sources of information, such as other oral evidence, documentary testimony and physical evidence of various kinds. It is hoped that this collection will be of assistance to others in studying or developing their own teaching materials in this dynamic area.

The Reintroduction of the Horse to the Northern Great Plains and its Influence on Indigenous Lifeways

The presence of horses in archaeological sites across North America is often noted in research as an indicator of European contact. Fewer studies, however, have considered how Indigenous peoples incorporated horses as an intrinsic aspect of their lives. Research that considers Indigenous peoples’ relationships with horses typically focuses on Southern Plains groups and does not feature Northern Plains communities as a central aspect. Looking specifically at one Northern Great Plains Indigenous people, this paper analyzes how Blackfoot lifeways were altered as a result of the protohistoric (seventeenth to eighteenth century) reintroduction of the horse. Blackfoot lives were transformed as their relationship with the land evolved, economic systems reformed, and trade, religion, and war became centered around the horse. Almost all Blackfoot people would have felt the effects of the horse’s introduction, however not necessarily equally as these changes caused a shift in hierarchy. These impacts and changes on lifeways are evidenced by European historical accounts, Indigenous oral histories, and the archaeological record. Examining the relationship that the Blackfoot formed with horses demonstrates the significant influence that animals can have over people’s lives. Horses’ introduction to Blackfoot peoples proved to cause significant changes in the ways many conducted their lives, such as through the establishment of nomadic pastoralism and trade routes centered around the horse. This paper additionally calls for further research into the continued relationship between the Blackfoot peoples and the horse.

The Winter Heat Budget of Sea Ice in Kotzebue Sound: Residual Ocean Heat and the Seasonal Roles of River Outflow

AbstractThe winters of 2017/18 and 2018/19 saw unprecedented sea ice minima in the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Kotzebue Sound, located in the southeastern corner of the Chukchi Sea, remained largely ice‐free throughout the winter in a stark departure from both recorded history and Indigenous oral history. The only sea ice that persisted throughout the winter was landfast ice and most of this occupied a small corner of the Sound near the outflow of the Noatak and Kobuk Rivers. We present oceanographic and atmospheric time series from a heavily instrumented “ice‐tethered observatory” located on this landfast ice above the river outflow channel. This observing station was deployed as part of the Ikaaġvik Sikukun (Iñupiaq for “Ice Bridges”) project, in which hypotheses and subsequent observational programs were co‐produced in partnership with an Indigenous Elder Advisory Council in Kotzebue. The measurements allow us to quantify the heat budget of the ice above the outflow channel, and identify the ocean as the primary source of heat contributing to thinning of the ice, which began in early February and accelerated rapidly before the recovery of the station in April of 2019. In concert with the ice‐tethered observations, we use 2 years of oceanographic measurements from the mouth of Kotzebue Sound to characterize the influence of river outflow on the heat budget of the landfast ice, revealing a seasonal pattern in which the rivers promote ice formation and growth in the fall/winter, but help to drive melting of the ice in spring and early summer.

Raven Evades the Anthropocene: Whiteness, Indigeneity, and Environmental Disaster

Abstract: Despite its desire for a planetary scale, the framework of the Anthropocene fails to account for non-Western epistemologies, including those of Indigenous peoples. Whiteness is thus a pervasive framework in discussions of the Anthropocene. While Indigenous knowledge is sometimes extracted to benefit White futures, these futures have no place for actual Indigenous peoples. Similarly, the Anthropocene insists on a human-centered approach that leaves no room for other-than-human beings and relationality with them. Despite its desire to implicate and represent all of humanity, the Anthropocene perpetuates these problematic approaches and ultimately takes Whiteness as its representation of universal humanity. Many Western conceptions of apocalypse, like the Anthropocene, stem from Christianity. Such beliefs also shape cultural responses to disasters as portrayed in more recent popular literature and media. Indigenous oral history begets entirely different responses to catastrophe. This article specifically explores Lingít (Tlingit) Raven stories and their ability to undermine Anthropocene logics. These stories are not a response to such thinking, but they do illustrate long-standing Lingít means of dealing with catastrophe that are still valuable today. As such, the article argues that Indigenous stories exceed Anthropocene thinking and represent an entirely different, and ultimately more generative, framework for considering climate change.

Counteracting Settler Legal Systems

The 1997 Supreme Court case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia was groundbreaking in its recognition of oral histories as evidence of Aboriginal title. Brought forth by the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan nations, the trial would decide the title to territory in northern British Columbia, a jurisdiction which notably had never signed any treaties with the Canadian government. The Supreme Court overturned an earlier judgement from lower B.C. courts that had claimed Aboriginal title did not exist in law, allowing an appeal and leading to a retrial. The Supreme Court’s ruling not only defined the scope of Aborginal title, but ensured it was a constitutionally protected right that cannot be extinguished by the provinces, although it could be “infringed upon.” Additionally, it set the precedent for all future cases that Indigenous oral history must be given the same weight as written colonial history.

Domestication in Motion: Macrofossils of Pre-Colonial Brazilian Nuts, Palms and Other Amazonian Planted Tree Species Found in the Upper Purus

ABSTRACT Evidence from several earthwork-building societies has recently been discovered in Amazonia that challenges existing theories about precolonial, human-environment interactions. Combining data obtained by plant macrofossil analyses, archaeological excavations, historical sources, and indigenous oral histories, we focus on the pre-colonial sources of subsistence and domestication processes of some tree species. Our study shows that the societies that built geoglyph-type earthworks in southwestern Amazonia harvested and consumed both wild and domesticated palm fruits, Brazil nuts and other identified species in the first millennium of the Common Era. Drawing on theories of human ecology, we argue that in the pre-colonial Amazonian context, plant domestication occurred as complex and nonlinear activities of protecting, supporting, and cultivating. This multifaceted indigenous cultural phenomenon of domestication had an important long lasting impact on Amazonian forest composition, and it is obvious that human and botanical interaction has also led to clear and observable differences in Brazil nuts and some palm fruits compared to their ancestors.

Did I Break It? Recording Indigenous (Customary) Law

In this paper, I explore several issues emerging in the discourse about the recording of indigenous law by drawing on several examples of my research and work with indigenous law in Canada. This is an important inquiry because there are limiting and disturbing fundamentalist premises underlying the debate regarding the recording of indigenous law. To take up these issues, I analyse and articulate the law and legal processes from two indigenous oral histories. The question under consideration is whether by this recording and analysis, I have somehow damaged Gitxsan law. In other words, did I break it?

Yarning about Sport: Indigenous Research Methodologies and Transformative Historical Narratives

Indigenous research methodologies prioritize community voices, perspectives, and stories. In Australia, yarning has emerged as a promising Indigenous oral history research methodology. Taking many forms for different purposes, common features of yarning include un-structured or semi-structured research interviews and discussion, flexible time schedules and Indigenous facilitation. Yarning is valued as a culturally appropriate and safe research conversational methodology that has the potential to yield findings and conclusions that are not always possible via traditional archive-based research. In this paper, we introduce a case study of yarning used specifically in a sport history research project in Australia. The focus is on a group of teenage girls from the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement in Queensland who competed in marching in the 1950s and 1960s and offer a rare example of female Indigenous participation in organized sport during the oppressive ‘protection era’. Urged to ‘tell our story’ by surviving marchers, who are now community elders, we approached this research methodologically in two ways: archival-based research and yarning. The results from these two approaches were vastly different, and highlight the value of this oral history methodology in producing rich insight and counter-narratives to those available from traditional empirical sources.

Indigenous Oral History Tradition in Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalayas

Indigenous Oral History Tradition in Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalayas

Delgamuukw v. British Columbia: When Aboriginal Voices of Law Were Finally Heard

This essay analyzes the enduring impact of the case Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), in which the Supreme Court of Canada overturned the original ruling by the Supreme Court of British Columbia in 1997 upon appeal by members of the Gitskan and Wet’suwet’en peoples representing the Delgamuukw side. The case set strengthened precedent in Canada’s legal system for the use of indigenous oral history as acceptable evidence in identifying first nations land claims based on their ancestral accounts. As has been shown in more recent indigenous land claims cases such as Tsilhqot’in v. British Columbia (2014), this precedent is finally allowing some first nations communities a legal tool recognized strongly enough within Canadian legal systems, historically entrenched in European common and civil law approaches of justifying evidence, to gain more just land claims settlements. While actions by some levels of Canadian government, such as the British Columbian Liberal government’s 2001 popular referendum on the merits of indigenous land claims, have shown bad faith for the prospects of nation to nation land claim settlement negotiation, the pressure exerted on all levels of Canadian government by decisions such as Delgamuukw and Tsilhqot’in show promise in forcing a shift to more just land claim settlements in future disputes.

Highland Tales in the Heart of Borneo: Postcolonial Capitalism, Multiculturalism, and Survivance

Highland Tales in the Heart of Borneo (2015) documents Indigenous oral histories and mythologies which span half a dozen Orang Asal communities across East Malaysia and Indonesia. In this article, Sheela Jane Menon proposes two interconnected readings of Highland Tales, demonstrating how the text is entwined with postcolonial capitalism and Malaysian multiculturalism. First, Menon argues that Highland Tales is a form of capitalist survivance that employs the very systems which exploit Indigenous peoples in order to celebrate Indigenous culture. Analyzing the form, production, and circulation of the text, Menon demonstrates how Highland Tales serves as a unique example of what Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor terms “survivance” – Indigenous “stories that mediate and undermine the literature of dominance” (Manifest Manners, 12). In Highland Tales, capitalist survivance is both transindigenous and transnational, employing a strategic partnership with state ecotourism. Second, Menon suggests that Highland Tales functions as a critique of state multiculturalism and postcolonial capitalism. The government persistently markets Malaysia as a uniquely diverse nation where racial harmony is bolstered by rapid development. Postcolonial capitalism in Malaysia is thus structured according to a narrative of multiculturalism and modernization which, as Menon illustrates, relies on the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, lands, and resources. Employing the tools of postcolonial capitalism, Highland Tales disrupts narratives of racial harmony and development by amplifying Orang Asal narratives and advancing Indigenous cultural and economic interests.