NOTES AND COMMENTS ORAL TRADITION AND ORAL HISTORY: REVIEWING SOME ISSUES Compelling questions are being raised - in the mass media, in museum exhibits, and in both popular and academic writings - about how historical depictions of cross-cultural encounters are constructed and gain authority. One issue in these debates concerns the status of indigenous oral traditions, specifically how oral traditions can contribute to documenting the varieties of historical understanding in areas of the world where written documents are either relatively recent or even absent. In many ways, historians and anthropologists are converging in their approaches to historical reconstruction, pointing to the need to unite anthropological attention to cultural categories, cosmologies, and symbols with historians' disciplined control of written records. 1 A related question, though, concerns who gets to frame and to tell the story - whose voices are prominent in these discussions and whose are marginalized. Increasingly, indigenous peoples are demanding that their oral traditions be taken seriously as legitimate perspectives on history. The issue, for them, centres on who controls the images and the representations of their lives portrayed to the larger world. While there is growing awareness in Canada about the need to re-evaluate the history of Native-white relations, it is clear that Aboriginal peoples' views of their own history rarely appear in academic literature. This debate is as much about epistemology as about authorship. Indi­ genous people who grow up immersed in oral tradition frequently suggest that their narratives are better understood by absorbing the successive personal messages revealed to listeners in repeated tellings than by trying to analyse and publicly explain their meanings. This contrasts with a scholarly approach which encourages close scrutiny of texts and which contends that, Studies pointing out the need to investigate symbolic and metaphorical elements in both written documents and oral accounts include, for example, Renato Rosal­ do, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974 (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1980); Richard Price, First Time: The Histmual Vi.non of an AfrrrAmmcan Peop!,e (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 1983); Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maon and Europeans, 1642-1772 (Aukland: Viking 1991); Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters wzth the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven and London: Yale Univer­ sity Press 1993). Canadian Historical Review, LXXV, 3, 1994 0008-3755/94/0900-0403 $01.25/0 ©University of Toronto Press Incorporated CopyriQht © 2001. All RiQhts Reseved. 404 THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW by openly addressing conflicting interpretations, we may illuminate subtle meanings and enrich our understanding.2 The challenge, then, is to ac­ knowledge this dilemma without dismissing it as insoluble, to respect both the legitimate claims of First Nations to tell their own stories and the moral and scholarly obligation to write culturally grounded histories that can help us learn from the past. This short article attempts to do three things. First, it summarizes how anthropologists and folklorists have shifted their evaluations about the kinds of historical evidence embedded in oral tradition. Second, it provides some cross-cultural perspective about how contemporary peoples are currently using oral traditions to speak publicly about their past. Finally, it asks whether such an overview provides any ethnographic instruction. What, if any, guidelines emerge for historians re-examining the history of colonial encounters in Canada? HisWrical APfrroaches to Ana~sis of Oral Tradition The terms 'oral tradition' and 'oral history' remain ambiguous because their definitions shift in popular usage. Sometimes the term oral tradition iden­ tifies a body of material retained from the past. Other times we use it to talk about a process by which information is transmitted from one generation to the next. Oral history is a more specialized term usually referring to a research method where a sound recording is made of an interview about first­ hand experience occurring during the lifetime of an eyewitness. 3 Because every culture has passed essential ideas from one generation to another by word of mouth, the serious study of oral tradition spans more than a century. 4 A brief review of this literature suggests that even though the questions are old, they keep resurfacing and the same kinds of answers keep being reinvented as though they are somehow original. 2 A thoughtful discussion of this point is made with reference to Yup'ik narrauve in Alaska in a working paper by Phyllis Morrow, 'On Shaky Ground: Folklore, Collaboration, and Problematic Outcomes,' Department of Anthropology, Uni­ versity of Alaska, Fairbanks. 3 For a discussion of the differing definitions of oral tradiuon and oral history see Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as Hzstury (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1985), 12-13; Trevor Lummis, 'Oral History,' in Richard Bauman, ed., Folklme, Cultural Perfurmances and Popular Entertainments (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), 92-7. 4 A concise historical overview of theoretical approaches combining perspectives from British social anthropology and North American folklore studies can be found in Ruth Finnegan, Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts: A Guide to Research Practices (London and New York: Routledge 1992), 25-52. <!>op;: 1;:;1 a & zoo:. Ail :CIQI It§ Reseved. NOTES AND COMMENTS 405 In the nineteenth century, for example, European folklorists saw orally narrated accounts as disembodied 'things' to be collected, much as museum collectors viewed objects of material culture. Folklorists treated oral narra­ tives as cultural artifacts that had survived from earlier periods - as a kind of freeze-dried history- and hoped that these traditions might provide a key to the past. Embedded in an ideology of social evolution, this perspective had serious flaws. At best, E.B. Tylor and Sir James Frazer recognized the intel­ lectual character of oral narrative, albeit treating it as kind of proto-science or proto-religion. At worst, their approaches embodied a crypto-racist analy­ sis of so-called primitive thought. Ironically, both 'intellectualist' and 'spiritualist' formulations are resurfac­ ing in contemporary debates where the state becomes involved in evaluating oral tradition. One variation on the first emerged in the 1991 British Columbia Supreme Court decision that evaluated oral traditions in terms of how well they answered questions posed by the courts in terms accessible to the courts and judged them inadequate by those criteria.5 The second for­ mula more often emerges when broadly based interest groups, claiming the best and most politically correct intentions, appropriate indigenous tradi­ tions, claiming to find in them evidence of innate spirituality or a 'natural' understanding of ecology.6 In both prescriptions, indigenous traditions are expected to provide answers to problems created by modern states in terms convenient fur modern states. If many nineteenth-century analyses ignored the social character of narrative, a subsequent generation of scholars showed much more concern for the social context in which oral tradition occurs. However, they were more interested in what oral narrative said about the present than in what it said about the past. Emile Durkheim, writing in 1915, saw narrative as the glue that (with ritual) helped to bind communities together.7 Bronislaw Malinowski, immersed in Trobriand society a decade later, pointed out that one can only speculate about what oral tradition actually means to parti- 5 Allen McEachern, Reasons for Judgment. Delgamuukv v. B.C (Smithers: Supreme Court of British Columbia 1991), 4. For a discussion of this judgment see Anthropowgy and H1stury in the Courts, ed. Bruce G. Miller, theme issue, BC Studies 95 (autumn 1992). 6 For a discussion of how these images, once established, may ultimately be used against indigenous people see Ann Fienup Riordan, 'Original Ecologists? The Relationship between Yup'ik Eskimos and Animals,' in Ann Fienup Riordan, ed., Eskimo Essays (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press 1990), 167-91. 7 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms ofRel1gwus Life, translated J.W. Swain (New York: Free Press 1915) CopyriQht © 2001. All RiQhts Reseved. 406 THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW cipants, and that the more legitimate question was to observe how it is used. 8 To legitimate social institutions, he argued, people need a charter. The rules that govern everyday life are always in doubt. Daily life is fraught with inconsistencies, differences of opinion, and conflicting claims. Oral tradi­ tion provides one way to resolve those claims. People reflect on their oral traditions to make sense of the social order that currently exists. In the mid-twentieth century, structuralists offered a more complicated perspective. Scholars influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss proposed that oral narratives are not about either past or present, that they are essentially statements about the human mind. Far from being straightforward explana­ tions, this argument continues, oral traditions show the capacity of humans to think symbolically about complex problems. Real life is full of contradic­ tions, and myth gives us ways to cope in a world riddled with such contradic­