So please do not record his talk tonight.
I wish to introduce to you at this time a colleague of ours,
the uh,
head of the Canadian oral history association,
James Morrison.
He is currently the research historian for oral military history in the Halifax
defense complex parks Canada in Halifax.
His background tends to be in the African history. Uh,
and I invited him here today as our guests to tell us what is going on these
days in Canada in oral history.
We had a delightful time up at Montebello some years ago and learned about
Canadian oral history and what was going on there.
And I've asked Jim to come down and give us an update on what is going on in
Canada these days in oral history. James Morrison
0: [inaudible]
1: thank you bill.
I should first of all,
thank the oral history association and bill Moss for allowing me to come down
speak with you. Uh,
I would like to invite any of you who are going up to Nova Scotia where I'm
from. If we have a conference coming up, put it on your agenda.
We'll treat you as you've been treated here through a Nova Scotian seven course
meal, which consists of a boiled potato in a six pack
0: [inaudible].
1: No, as, um, professor Mackland Berg has been unable to address you today.
Your president,
bill Moss has given me the opportunity to monopolize your lunch hour a duty.
I have approached with some trepidation when first asked to address the American
oral history association.
I pointed out to bill that I have the reputation of being much more at ease with
small informal groups than with large gadget gathering such as this.
This is an ability which some of you know don't share. In fact,
the smaller the group,
the more decisive and incisive I become to the extent that I am most effective
in a group of one talent, which I'm sure all of you share
as this is the larger group,
I shall consider the rights of the majority and speak above an intent whisper.
I very definitely have a game plan for this talk. I'll get to it eventually.
And I'll outline one of my ideas to you now
in 1966 at the tender age of uh, well in my early twenties,
I received as a Christmas present,
a volume entitled a thousand days written by an American scholar whom I admired
and still admire very much due to unforeseen circumstances.
I am now in a most enviable position.
So this bill Moss has committed himself to allowing me to speak as long as I
wish.
I feel I can legitimately take advantage of this opportunity to fulfill a 15
year ambition.
As your dinner speaker is scheduled for eight o'clock tonight
0: [inaudible]
1: I fully intend to use the time granted to me to prepare you for his arrival.
Perhaps tell some Canadian jokes.
And if I end you last through the remaining seven hours,
I will in be able to have the great honor of introducing professor Arthur's last
name
0: [inaudible]
1: how's that for a foreign or using the great American tradition of the
filibuster. Now,
if I can turn to a slightly more serious matter and consider oral history in
Canada now
in any consideration of Canada's oral heritage,
two facts soon become abundantly clear.
The first is the geographic fact of Canada's enormous size.
The second is the historical fact,
the bilingual nature of this area of the continent.
The first fact has to do with the vastness of the country and the relatively
sparse population that attempts to fill this fastness.
This geographic fact has given rise to two related developments,
those of which attempt to overcome the difficulty of communication within the
country.
The first development is the tradition of regionalism,
which envelops Canada from coast to coast.
There are five areas or regions which sprawl across a continent and give rise to
five distinctive elements.
In our mosaic beginning in the East and moving West,
there are the Atlantic provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairie provinces,
and British Columbia. That's what you're dealing with.
Very well-defined regions.
The second development in this geographic fact comes later,
and this consists of the network of CBC, radio and television communications,
Canadian broadcasting corporation.
CBC radio was founded in 19 in the 1920s to span the continent and place
Canadians in closer electronic touch,
which with each other thus knitting the regions together with a skein of
electric pulses and radio waves. These two developments,
one divisive regionalism and one unitary.
The CVC are the results of the gr geographic fact counted as fastness and its
low population. The second fact,
as I've noted is historical Canada was is and many of us hope we'll continue to
be bilingual.
The presence of both the English and French languages spoken within our borders
is on historic fact,
which the majority language English has been quite slow to recognize.
The presence of both languages has shaped and enriched our attitudes towards
oral history. I hope it will continue to do so.
Having us set the context,
I will now take a brief look at Canadian oral history.
It's passed quite quickly and it's present in a more detailed manner.
There are no easily identifiable beginnings to Canadian oral history.
Only broken and paint peeled signposts scattered along a highway already
traveled. We are fortunate indeed,
if the author of an historical work provides us with a credit to our discipline.
This being a caveat we really enjoy. However,
it would be useful for me to establish here some evidence for the antiquity of
oral history in Canada.
Such evidence does exist in a book written in 1888 by Peter Sellers entitled the
history of Huntington Chateaugay and Bullhorn Harnois obviously a local history.
The author Mr. Sellers, makes the following statement in his preface,
failing to secure a documentary sources of information.
I had to depend almost entirely upon what I could glean in conversations with
early settlers and if there ever was a history written as taken from the lips of
actors in or eyewitnesses of scenes depicted.
It is that now submitted.
Following closely on the work of the historian was that of the folklorist.
Dr. Morris bowl of Quebec completed a massive work with the native Indians of
Canada.
While Helen Creighton compiled an equally massive work on selected areas in Nova
Scotia.
Both of the aforementioned were folklorists of international repute and serve
here to remind us of the debt owed to the early collectors of voice be had
raised in song or intending only to convey the folktales,
the oral history and the traditional crafts.
The folklores collected and secured Avast collection Canada,
which now forms an important part of our sound heritage.
The prime place in sound preservation must be left to the work of the CBC
in the mid 1920s the Canadian government saw the advantages of a radio system in
our two languages which would cross the country and allowed at Lee and would
allow at least an ethereal nationalism to pervade in Canada.
The early pioneers of broadcasting period of the depression years,
world war II and onto the present day are all valuable slices of our sound
heritage that had been preserved and kept in the CBC archives and Toronto.
The early broadcasters carried out a number of interviews with pioneers of the
West and of the North war veterans or simply the common man.
Every man has one speaker spoke of it yesterday.
Thus leaving a legacy of invaluable sound recordings
with the 1960s came an increase in interest in oral research as a source for
history and in the mid 1960s the CBC began to do a series of reminiscences or
rememberings called voice of the pioneer and this was a series of interviews
done by bill McNeil.
These are transcribed and published not too long ago in book form.
The reason it delayed so long in publishing was the fact that the 1970s has been
the boom period in oral research in Canada.
A flood of books that utilize oral research has been published on a variety of
subjects. The war brides, a world war II who came over from England,
world war one and Canadian society, the depression,
the transportation of Japanese citizens from British Columbia to the interior
during the second world war and political, I guess you would call them,
pseudo biographies of prime ministers, John Diefenbaker, unless your B Pearson
articles have also appeared in various journals on women of the early West,
the Canadian theater and broadcasting.
There was and still is grant money available from the Canadian government for
all history projects.
The public archives of Canada sound archives division has become very active and
various organizations across the country have sprung up to do local histories
based on oral research.
More recently the provincial archives have caught the virus no doubt transmitted
orally and in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan,
Ontario, Quebec and new Brunswick.
There has been great interest in an oral history archives,
Nova Scotia.
My home has just completed their sound archives and it is more than just a
collection of rememberings and something I think we should dwell upon.
It is also a collection of the visual and audio picture of what Canadians have
seen,
are now seeing or have listened to and are now listening to on the through the
electric media preservation, which is very important.
So slices of our lives are all important to the social historian of the future.
Other government agencies have also been active parks Canada,
which is our equivalent to the national park service,
has done a number of oral history projects on both national parks and historic
sites.
National museum of man has been doing oral history research projects with native
Canadians for some time and they've recently started a labor history program.
I'll be a little partisan now and talk briefly about the Canadian oral history
association. C OHA has
yet another product,
was yet another product of a widespread interest in oral research.
Our journal is published twice a year and it provides a perspective on the
projects and methodologies used across the country and I brought in a volume two
to give you some idea of the type of articles. Um,
we have, I'll list two or three of them here,
oral history and the archives family studies as an approach to oral history,
oral history and the history of Canadian art, theater history and oral history,
CBC radio drama project, and it's background,
some idea of what is in the journal
with the prodigious amounts of material being produced,
it has become necessary to correlate some of this math before it gets away and
becomes a mess and lost to most practitioners of oral history.
With this in mind. The COA Che has arranged to publish an index,
the oral history projects in Canada and this will appear in the next copy of the
journal which will be out in February.
The COH say over the last two years has come to realize the regional nature of
Canada a bit late I would say and thus is encouraging regional oral history
committees.
Such committees are better equipped to provide workshops and conferences at the
local level.
These can then join with the COA Che at the annual national conference which
this year will be in Montreal June,
1980 and provide the national organization with a volume of input from the
regions.
All these efforts will I hope alleviate some of the communication problems of
language and distance.
Thus with methodology in place a reliable index and regional organizations under
the umbrella of the COA Che.
I am confident that the 1980s we'll see further increase in interest in that
method which most accurately reflects the past oral history.
We are indeed moving towards a post literate society in which extensive reading
could become the optimal extra of the scholar as oral history.
Actuality tapes and video tapes will increasingly form the central part of the
researcher's work.
I like to leave you with a thought by Canadian or or George Stanfield McDonald.
He noted that the historians of Canada have been literary balloonist ascending
to a high altitude.
They have observed what was on the surface whilst the character of the Canadian
people and its changes in different stages of growth from the early settlements
of the 18th century to the Confederate nation of today.
All this has not yet been written.
People of Canada had been left out of Canadian histories.
This was written in 1884 but it's still applicable today.
I still look forward to the day when Canadian historians descend in their
balloons to hear the voices retelling the stories of our past.
Oral history is our way of ensuring that the Canadian people are allowed to
speak and thus add their voices to the chorus of history hitherto dominated by
the choir of courtiers and Kings.
0: Thank you.
[inaudible].
1: Thank you very much, Jim. Uh,
are there any other announcements to be made at this time?
If not, uh, I call your attention to the business meeting,
which will take place at one 30 in the Lincoln room. Thank you.
0: [inaudible] [inaudible]
[inaudible] [inaudible]
[inaudible]
[inaudible].