Honouring the Validity of Oral Histories in Canada
Did you know that when Canada was first colonized, one of the ways they determined Indigenous peoples to be “primitive culture” was because many Indigenous cultures did not have a written language?
To quantify that a bit, another assessment of whether a culture was “primitive” in the European understanding is whether they used the wheel for transportation (many Indigenous communities used canoes and the river/lakes/waterways for transportation just as Europeans used roads).
Reducing Indigenous peoples to “primitive” based on these pretty silly qualifiers is what allowed European settlers to dehumanize and colonize Indigenous communities and lands. They discounted oral history as having any validity, which was a form of cultural genocide, even though Section 35 of the Canada’s Constitution Act claimed to recognize and affirm the rights of Aboriginal peoples.
In 1997, through the Delgamuukw case, the Supreme Court stated and made clear that oral history is an important type of evidence that courts must treat as equal to other types of evidence. Unfortunately, it’s taken a long time for the rest of Canada’s data, information, knowledge, and communication systems to catch up to this.
Because European cultures created our educational and research institutions, it also put qualifiers on what constitutes knowledge, information, and data that has essentially wiped out a whole wealth of valuable information contained in oral histories because it didn’t fit the European view of “counting”.
Heck, Words for Impact has discussed, and oftentimes placed great value in concepts of “evidence-based” when it comes to research and data, including the notion that data used to inform research “should be” credible, transferable, dependable, and confirmable, showing how deeply engrained colonized thinking can be. Posts on the Words for Impact Instagram account are reflective of that.
One of the ways we can decolonize the way we collect data and knowledge is to recognize the importance of oral histories and oral communications when reflecting on, writing about, and compiling the history of Canada as well as building its future. This format of data is just as credible as a written record, a numerical data set, or other forms of qualitative research, and knowledge systems need to be dismantled and rebuilt to accommodate (and celebrate) this in the name of decolonization. It’s about time.
As an ally organization, Words for Impact is dedicated to helping be a part of that by actively reflecting on the ways our knowledge systems can be decolonized and taking active steps to ask the questions that keep our systems colonial. It’s a long process of learning, but we’re working on it.
(Knowledge and opinions informed by the oral histories shared by Bob Joseph of the Indigenous Relations Academy from the course “Working Effectively with Indigenous Peoples”)
Anne-Marie E. Fischer, BA (Hons), M.Ed., blends her passion for the written word with her vocation to create a better world through effective communications, education, and Community Based Research (CBR).
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