This article is a reflection on my approach to conducting oral history research in community. Focusing on a research trip I conducted in March 2012 in Kwadacha, British Columbia, it argues that the fundamental aspect of community-based/community-engaged research is the relationship the researcher forms with community and/or specific individuals in the community.
In this article, I examine Mi'kmaw oral histories as living sources of law that ground Mi'kmaw sovereignty, governance, and collective memory. Within Mi'kmaw legal traditions, stories are not simply historical accounts but forms of legal narration transmitted through relationships between storytellers and witnessing communities. Narrative authority arises through protocols: who can tell the stories, how ancestral memories are shared, and why there can never be one interpretation of a story. While elders are central in the transmission of oral histories, other knowledge keepers also carry the legal teachings embedded within stories. And while Canadian legal institutions privilege written records as authoritative legal texts, Mi'kmaw legal traditions have long been transmitted through oral narratives, storytelling, songs, ceremony, and land-based teachings. Drawing on Mi'kmaw narrative traditions and Indigenous legal scholarship, I explore how oral histories function as authoritative laws that encode principles of jurisdiction, environmental stewardship, and relational responsibility. Stories connected to figures such as Kluskap and the cosmological narrative of Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters illustrate how governance protocols and ethical obligations are embedded within narrative form and transmitted through oral pedagogy. I also examine how Canadian courts treat oral histories as evidentiary supplements rather than authoritative expressions of law, reinforcing epistemic barriers that marginalize Indigenous knowledge systems. Situating Mi'kmaw storytelling within broader debates about oral history and Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that oral histories are active sites of legal interpretation.
This research explores the role of the Indigenous Chakma relationality and reciprocity in unearthing community oral history and challenging British colonial narratives in contemporary Bangladesh. Through framing and implementing the Hudum framework, a method rooted in the Chakma worldview and everyday practices, this article aims to emphasize the centrality of "relativeness" in navigating the narrator-listener relationship and transcending conventional research practices employed in Western institutions. I highlight my experience of conducting oral history interviews on Dr. Manik Lal Dewan-the first Indigenous Chakma academic from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh-and contend that the Hudum practice provided an expansive methodological framework for foregrounding the remarkable legacy of an Indigenous figure within historically marginalized communities. In a hierarchical academic setting of Bangladesh that is dominated and surveilled by mainstream Bengali researchers, Indigenous peoples and history are not given space in the school curriculum and public discourses and therefore lack the insider perspective that dispels the colonial misrepresentation. Through the oral history of Dewan's educational journey, my research aims to destabilize the biased narratives of colonial administrators and unveil the intracommunity support model that has not received scholarly attention.
From Maryland to Florida, and westward to Kansas, interviewers for the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) spread out across seventeen states in the 1930s to record formerly enslaved African Americans' firsthand accounts of slavery in the American South. Unbeknownst to many oral history scholars, the FWP's "Oklahoma Slave Narrative" archive holds thirteen distinctive interviews with persons formerly enslaved by Southeastern Native Americans. My discovery of four informants whose narratives refer specifically to influential leaders of my Chickasaw tribe initiated my journey as oral historian and enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation to make sense of a slaveholding past that has been all but erased from Chickasaw media. In this article, I present the historical context of settler colonialism that helped shed light on how Indian nations came to participate in chattel slavery in the antebellum South and Indian Territory. Drawing from primary sources found in my mother's genealogy archive, I discovered important errors in the FWP interview transcripts-misidentifications of the tribe affiliations of the narrators' former slaveholders that I believe have enabled many of today's Chickasaw to disavow the existence of slaveholding ancestors. My comparative reading of these four narratives points to an overlooked political motivation for these narrators' favorable representations of Indian slaveholders: the narrators' quest to secure tribal affiliation and citizenship. Yet through these narratives, I have gained a more nuanced understanding of my Indigenous ancestry and a much more profound appreciation of the sovereign debt owed to the Chickasaw freedpeople and their descendants for the survival of my ancestors and our Indigenous nation in the face of territorial loss and colonial catastrophe.
