How Good Is Oral History and What Is It Good For?

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• How Good Is Oral History and What Is It Good For?
• October 15, 2020, and December 15, 2021, interviews with Gary P. Nabhan and Laura Monti, Desemboque del Sur, Sonora

Popular and scholarly interest in the poetry and veracity of oral histories surges and ebbs like the tides in the Gulf of California, going in and out of fashion with various cultural conflicts, political challenges, and academic trends. And yet, few of us would disagree with Bruce Masse and Fred Espenak's (2006: 230) contention that "oral tradition is [still] viewed in a skeptical manner and its nature and validity are likewise subject to Western cultural biases." As the World Wide Web places at our fingertips more and more digital documentary histories, it may seem that oral histories have been further marginalized. One might wonder whether the precision of oral histories about the same events as those in digitized documents is now more routinely dismissed than at any point in human history.

In response to this dilemma, David Henige (2009: 128) has offered a counterbalancing view of the significance of oral histories in our digital day and age:

If…it can be demonstrated that certain information in oral data is thousands of years old and at the same time an accurate recollection, then reservations about much later (say, several centuries later) orally transmitted information might need to be reassessed, and with such rethinking would come new ways to approach great swaths of the past. [End Page 516]

One great swath of insights about the nature of cross-cultural tensions in the Sonoran Desert is elucidated in this issue, showing remarkable precision and attention to details surrounding events that took place in the desert more than 170 years ago.

This rather remarkable if not miraculous persistence of Comcaac cultural memories reflects upon the lives of a cross-cultural couple euphoniously called Lola Casanova and Coyote Iguana whose paths first crossed in February of 1850.

Meager but tantalizing and contradictory bits of documentary evidence about the abduction incident have been found in archives, including four notes from military leader Cayetano Navarro written within a year of the abduction (see Bowen 2000 and Irwin 2007). And yet, as Robert Irwin (2007) has perceptively documented, and elegantly interpreted, these fragments of field reportage have engendered a rash of wildly distorted sexist and racist tropes in the pulp literature and art films of Mexico for more than a century. Over the same period, far more relevant details from Comcaac oral histories have emerged about the lives of these two individuals than what were recorded between 1964 and 1970, when the first concerted effort was made to archive "Seri traditions" about this incident.

This immensely rich set of historical materials may allow us to reflect upon two curious questions about oral histories embedded in David Henige's (2009) big what-if:

1. 1. How good is oral history in maintaining the faithfulness or fidelity of oral histories in the same communities through time?

2. 2. What is oral history good for?

Reading the previous essays, perusing the related maps and photos, you may have come to your own conclusions in response to these perennial questions or interrogantes. But if I may intrude upon your own reveries elicited by the contributions present here, let me offer two brief but interlocking answers to these questions:

1. 1. Oral histories can be as "good" or better than documentary histories with regard to values, symbols, and narratives of struggles that hold profound cultural significance to a community. They may capsulize salient details of events that occurred decades or centuries before a particular retelling. Our greatest theorist of the identity systems of persistent peoples—Edward Spicer (1971: 796)—reminds us [End Page 517] that oral histories are not about "objectively organized historical facts" but offer "a history as people believe it to have taken place… with special meaning for the particular people who believe it." The deep remembering and frequent retelling of pivotal events in one's cultural history with verisimilitude—especially events like attempted genocide against Comcaac (Seri), Yoemem (Yaqui), Cherokee, Black Africa, Jewish, or Palestinian communities—should not surprise us.

To be sure, the capacity of surviving elders to hold such threats...