scholarly journals Telling Our Stories / Animating Our Past: A Status Report on Oral History and Digital Media

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven High ◽  
Jessica Mills ◽  
Stacey Zembrzycki
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Status Report ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Hard Drives ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Many ◽  
Oral History Interviews

Tens of thousands of oral history interviews sitting in archival drawers, on computer hard drives, or on library bookshelves have never been listened to. Thousands of new interviews are being added each year by the many large testimony projects now underway, including Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Historica–Dominion Institute’s Memory Project. Although the existence of these immense collections is widely known, the interviews are difficult to access. How can we combine oral history and new media to ensure that the potential of such important projects is fully realized? Emergent and digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for accessing Canadian memories and transmitting them to various audiences. New forms of media are changing the ways we think about and do oral and public history.Des milliers d’entrevues d’histoire orale oubliées dans des tiroirs d’archives, sur des disques durs et sur des étagères de bibliothèque n’ont jamais été écoutées. En même temps, chaque année, de nouvelles entrevues viennent s’ajouter par milliers dans le cadre de grands projets de témoignage, y compris la Commission de vérité et réconciliation du Canada et le Projet Mémoire de l’Institut Historica Dominion. Bien que l’existence de ces collections immenses ne soit guère un secret, les entretiens sont difficiles d’accès. Comment peut-on combiner l’histoire orale et les nouveaux médias afin de réaliser pleinement le potentiel de projets si importants? Des technologies numériques récentes présentent de nouvelles possibilités pour accéder aux souvenirs canadiens et les transmettre à divers publics. En effet, de nouvelles formes de média sont en train de changer les manières de penser et de pratiquer l’histoire orale et publique.

scholarly journals Improvising Reconciliation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Charlton
Keyword(s):  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Necessary Condition ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Racial Democracy ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
The Many

Improvising Reconciliation is prompted by South Africa’s enduring state of injustice. It is both a lament for the promise, since lost, with which non-racial democracy was inaugurated and, more substantially, a space within which to consider its possible renewal. As such, this study lobbies for an expanded approach to the country’s formal transition from apartheid in order to grapple with reconciliation’s ongoing potential within the contemporary imaginary. It does not, however, presume to correct the contradictions that have done so much to corrupt the concept in recent decades. Instead, it upholds the language of reconciliation for strategic, rather than essential, reasons. And while this study surveys some of the many serious critiques levelled at the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-2001), these misgivings help situate the plural, improvised approach to reconciliation that has arguably emerged from the margins of the cultural sphere in the years since. Improvisation serves here as a separate way of both thinking and doing reconciliation. It recalibrates the concept according to a series of deliberative, agonistic and iterative, rather than monumental, interventions, rendering reconciliation in terms that make failure a necessary condition for its future realisation.

scholarly journals Introduction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Bell ◽  
Hadley Friedland
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
The Many

The articles in this special issue all take up some of the many challenges and opportunities that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) identified as crucial for reconciliation in its 2015 Final Report. Some engage with the current Canadian political and legal system’s impact on Indigenous peoples, while others acknowledge these but focus more on the enduring principles and possibilities of Indigenous legal traditions and the potential for operationalizing jurisdictional spaces for implementation. All speak to the importance of developing a narrative and understanding of intergenerational responsibility and relationality at the core of any enduring reconciliation.

scholarly journals The Narrative Turn, Corporate Storytelling, and Oral History: Canada’s Petroleum Oral History Project and Truth and Reconciliation Commission Call to Action No. 92

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANIS THIESSEN
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Potential Impact

As business historians embrace the narrative turn, they would do well to consider the opportunities provided by oral history. For-profit corporate storytellers offer one approach. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada’s call to action no. 92, however, offers a better one. This article explores the potential impact on business historians of the TRC, using the Petroleum Industry Oral History Project as an example.

scholarly journals The Ethics of Reconciling: Learning from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-48
Author(s):  
Emily Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Public Education ◽  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Indian Residential Schools ◽  
Education Goals ◽  
The Many

In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was initiated to address the historical and contemporary injustices and impacts of Indian Residential Schools. Of the many goals of the TRC, I focus on reconciliation and how the TRC aims to promote this through public education and engagement. To explore this, I consider two questions: Ethical queries arise which speak to broader concerns about the TRC’s capability to fulfill its public education goals. I raise several concerns about whether the TRC’s plan to convoke the collective will result in over-simplifying the process by relying on blunt, poorly defined identity categories that erase the heterogeneity of those residing in Canada, as well as the complexity of the conflict among us. I attempt to situate myself in-between proclamations of “success” or “failure” of the TRC, to better understand what can be learned from contested truths and experiences of uncertainty.

Telling Sacred Stories Eersterust and the Forced Removals of the 1960S

1999 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-427 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Landman
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Religious Healing ◽  
New Era ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Sacred Stories ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractThe Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has introduced a process in South Africa in which healing became possible through storytelling. The Research Institute for Theology and Religion (University of South Africa) has taken up the challenge of extending this process to people who, for a variety of reasons, did not have the chance to tell their stories to this commission. This introduces a new era in oral history research in South Africa in which healing, that is discontinuity, and not truth or the establishment of a continuous tradition, is the aim of research on and through storytelling. Also, the present government, by withdrawing from moral legislation, now allows for religious communities to assist civil society in the formation of a social ethos. Consequently, the aim of oral history research for the RITR has shifted from establishing the liberational and interventionary moment in storytelling to that of focusing on its religious, healing and moral subtext. This article deals exclusively with the stories of coloured people in Eersterust, a town just outside Pretoria, which focus on the forced removals of the 1960s.

Using African Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentation for truth telling and reconciliation

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
Reconciliation Process

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Anah-Jayne Markland
Keyword(s):  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Mandatory Education ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Appropriate

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

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