Oral History and Public History in Canada: Interview with Alexander Freund

RODEGHERO, CARLA SIMONE; FROTSCHER, MÉRI

doi:10.1590/0104-87752025v41e25057

PRESENTATION

The following is an interview with Dr. Alexander Freund, Professor in the History Department at the University of Winnipeg, Canada, where he holds the Chair in German-Canadian Studies. Freund is a specialist in Migration and Refugee Studies, North American and German History, and Oral History. His publications¹ and professional work make him a leading historian in the international field of Oral History. Freund served as a president of the Canadian Oral History Association, editor of Oral History Forum d’histoire orale, and, together with Nolan Reilly, co-founded the Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg.

He was interviewed for one hour and thirty-six minutes (1h36min) by Professors Carla Simone Rodeghero and Méri Frotscher on November 4^th, 2021, in pandemic times, through Meet platform.² Méri and Alexander had known each other previously and shared common research interests – Oral History and Migration Studies – which helped with both the interview preparation and the dialogue itself. Carla coordinates a research project on “Oral history collectives and digital archives – experiences in Brazil, Canada, and Italy”, whose main goal is to examine the oral history practice of institutional spaces in three countries. It was within the scope of this project that the interview was conducted. The research aims to explore and compare professional experiences of researchers, oral history centers, laboratories, programs and national oral history associations. The general script includes identification data, an overview of the oral history field in each specific country, the founding of oral history centers and national associations, experiences on participatory projects, strategies to organize oral history archives, ways to make oral sources available to public, implications of the use of digital technologies, discussions on ethics, challenges and changes brought by Covid-19 times.

To adapt the interview for publication – considering the dossier’s theme and the maximum word count – topics selected included an introduction of Freund to the Brazilian public as well his works on ethnicities, immigrants, and refugees, the trajectory of oral history in Canada, particularities of the two leading oral history centers, the use of the methodology to address sensitive subjects, and the development of Indigenous oral history in Canada. For the same reasons, topics on Freund’s academic background, the leading oral history researchers in Canada and the role of institutional ethic boards in the country could not be published.

This interview offers valuable contributions to the Brazilian debate on oral history and public history because it discusses the importance, and the challenges related to digital technologies in conducting interviews and in making them available online. At the same time, Freund’s interview highlights the power of oral history and participatory research with marginalized people. It emphasizes the importance of oral sources to face urgent and troubling topics, that have mobilized practitioners of oral history and public history, such as the cultural genocide of Indigenous people associated with the Canadian Residential School system. Freund also stresses the opportunities for intergenerational dialogue fostered by oral history and public history projects.

Alexander, could you start introducing yourself?

Thank you very much for inviting me to talk to you about Oral History. So, I’m Alexander Freund. I’m originally from Hamburg, Germany, where I did most of my schooling, including my undergraduate studies and, also, a bit of work in journalism when I was a student. In 1992 I went to Vancouver to do my master’s degree in history at Simon Fraser University and I decided to do my master’s thesis on the experiences of German immigrant women in Vancouver, who had arrived there in the 1950’s. And that got me into the academic field that I’m still in, Migration Studies and Oral History, because I found that, in order to find out something about these women’s experiences, beyond basic government documentation, I needed to interview them. And so that got me into Oral History and then I continued that for my PhD, which I did at the University of Bremen, in Germany. Broadening my subjects to immigrants, German immigrants in North America, again using more Oral History and from there on I continued doing more projects related to German immigrants, other immigrants, other ethnic groups in Canada and North America, and, also, using Oral History. That’s sort of a brief snapshot. In 2002 I came to the University of Winnipeg, so next year will be 20 years that I have been here at the University of Winnipeg. And I came to take on the chair in German-Canadian Studies, and I can talk more about it later on, but basically, it’s a research chair focused on the history of German immigrants and their descendants in Canada. And you know, shortly after I came to the University, I also started a partnership with a colleague of mine, Nolan Reilly, and founded, co-founded, the Oral History Centre here at the University.

Alexander, in your retrospective today, what do you think are your main contributions to this field of migration and refugee studies? And what new questions and challenges have you been facing in these fields in recent times?

That’s a big question. My main focus is on German immigrants in Canada, also in the United States but mostly in Canada. The way in which ethnic history and immigration history in Canada have been done, mostly is as a form of contribution history, where the basic argument is that different ethnic groups, different immigrant groups have contributed to the country and therefore they should receive a fair share of recognition. As a German myself, having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s and part of the 1990s in (West) Germany, you know, there was constant debate about the Nazi past and the Holocaust, and sort of a historical responsibility that we have as Germans to history and to not forgetting this history. To me it smacked of a sort of strange kind of nationalism, to simply focus on people’s contributions to a country. I was very hesitant, to all of sudden after moving to Canada, to embrace Canadian nationalism and to me that sort of… It really tries to invoke Canadian nationalism when you try to show your own ethnic group’s contributions to the country. It also raises questions about the sort of a hierarchy of who’s valuable and who’s not. Because it implies that smaller groups shouldn’t get the same acknowledgement as bigger groups. What I’ve been trying to do in studying German immigrants in North America is to change the debates and to talk about the fact that Germans are interesting to be studied not because they made so many wonderful contributions to Canada. If you want to talk about contributions you have to talk about Germans as colonists, colonizers as well. But rather that there is a long history. It’s a very diverse group, from many different countries, from many different religions, different dialects, even different languages. And that provides a wonderful field for asking all kinds of academic questions about migration and ethnicity. Also, the last book that I edited was about these whole questions of generation, memory and migration, these questions of how the different generations interact with each other; how do the children and grandchildren of immigrants interact with their parents and grandparents; and how do the different national histories, in this case German history and Canadian history, collide and intermesh and so on. So those are the kinds of questions that we’ve been asking. I just want to briefly talk about refugees as well.

So, we started a project on refugees that came out of the concern that refugees are really not a topic in history and historiography. In Canadian historiography they are usually subsumed under immigration history, and I think that refugees, who have experienced state violence, have different experiences and have a different history to tell. Subsuming that under the broader terms of immigrants is therefore difficult, so I did a project with a number of refugees from different time periods; from different origins in the world; from post-war Europe; from El Salvador and other Latin American countries in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s; from Afghanistan; from Burma, or Myanmar. And that allowed me to create an archive of Oral Histories with refugees, to explore a whole bunch of methodological and ethical questions and to help me write a sort of a history of refugees in the city of Winnipeg in the second half of the 20th century. That hasn’t been finished but I’m still working on that.

Let’s talk about Oral History in Canada and about the Canadian Oral History Association. I’d like to know how strong Oral History is in Canada and if you can explain a little bit more about the particularities of the practice in your country.

So… Oral History in Canada has a fairly long history, back to the late 19th century and ethnographers and folklorists’ recordings of Inuit people in the North and rural people in the Atlantic region. And then in the early 1970s at Simon Fraser University there was a major conference on Oral History that brought together a wide range of people, academics, historians, journalists, a lot of archivists, and teachers. They decided to found the Canadian Oral History Association, then shortly after they created the journal Oral History Forum d’histoire orale. It’s a bilingual French English journal and… I don’t know if it ever thrived, but it certainly developed over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. It was very much carried by archivists, they were the people who did all the administrative work, organized conferences and so on. And then it began to falter in the early 1990s, there was no longer enough funding for state archivists to really participate in this association and they carried it for another decade, they were close to closing it, to shut it down in the 1990s, but they didn’t. And then about 2004 my colleague Nolan Reilly and I organized an Oral History conference at the University of Winnipeg and at that point we were asked to take over the Oral History Association and the journal, and we did that. One of the things that we did for the journal was to turn it into an online publication, which at that time was still very difficult and there wasn’t a whole lot of support for this. There was really little that we could do with the association, and we eventually passed it onto others. At this point I think that both the journal and the association are no longer functioning. The journal has been shut down and I don’t think there’s anyone, actually, running the association and that’s been the case for a number of years now.

Oh, so sad!

Yes, it is sad. On the other hand, there’s a lot of Oral History going on. It has become a common practice among historians and other scholars to use Oral History and other interviews. Canadian historians who use oral history do not identify as oral historians and I’m not quite sure why, it may have to do with the fact that Canada is such a small country in terms of population, and it’s so big and disconnected in terms of geography that it’s difficult to sustain anything that is very small. On the other hand there is the example that I always look at of Australia and New Zealand, they have very strong associations; a very strong infrastructure for Oral History; a very strong identification. For Australia there is a lot of support from the State, through the State libraries and the National Library. That we just don’t have in Canada. So there are two Oral History Centers in the country, two major ones and that’s not enough to really build a national infrastructure. Concordia University is an English language university in Montreal and they have a big Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. It was founded by Steven High. That is a very big Oral History Center, they organized a whole bunch of conferences, they work with museums, they really broadened the field, made it much more into public history and Steve published several books that came out of a huge project with refugees, but it’s very much focused on the region, I don’t think it has any ambition to serve as a national institution, it’s a city-based, regional institution. And here at the University of Winnipeg I think it’s much smaller in that sense, but I think that what we are trying to do is create something more… that is sustainable. So we have two full-time staff and they try to run workshops and create an archive for academic researchers but also for the community. And there are numbers of smaller ones that I don’t know if I would call them centers. They might be centers in name but not in practice. They are around the country but even here in the University of Winnipeg we don’t regularly teach actually. We haven’t taught any Oral History courses in a long time in our History Department. So, you know, it’s difficult.

Alexander, which were the main developments of indigenous oral history in Canada today and how strong is indigenous oral history in universities, for example at your university. Does it dialogue with your own practice?

I mean, it begins with the question “What is Oral History?” and there’s a discussion about [the question] if it is legitimate to differentiate between oral history and oral tradition; what constitutes oral history from indigenous perspectives. So, we are just at the beginning of indigenizing the curriculum and that includes indigenizing oral history as a field; as a methodology; as a way of knowing things. Especially I think my university is quite strong in this program of decolonizing the curriculum and indigenizing the curriculum. And that has to do in part with the fact that in our part of Canada, in the Prairies, there’s a lot of… We have a large indigenous population, I believe it’s about 10% of the population. There’s indigenous, and there’s also, I think… The student population is also about 10% or 12% indigenous at the university as well. We also have several indigenous historians at the university, but I do believe that is fairly exceptional for Canada. You know, indigenous history is taught, but in many cases I think it’s taught by non-indigenous scholars. So that is slowly changing, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools made a whole bunch of recommendations, and that includes recommendations for education, and so our university has been trying to meet some of those recommendations in terms of indigenization. At the Oral History Centre we did a few indigenous projects and that was quite interesting for Nolan [Reilly] and myself. We didn’t do the projects by ourselves; we facilitated the projects. We applied for the funding, we provided the space and the technical expertise of our staff members, for a number of indigenous scholars to do oral history projects and that sort of challenged our ways of thinking about what an oral history interview is. We think of an oral history interview as a one-on-one interview, we really focus on the individual’s life story and some of the indigenous scholars called that into question. You know, they wanted to do sharing circles and more collaborative group-based interview projects. So, we are just beginning to understand what all of that means and how we can collaborate; and communicate; and find the best practices for this as well.

Can you explain the creation of the Centre and which was your role in it. And if oral history at the University of Winnipeg changed after the creation of the Oral History Centre.

As I said in 2004 my colleague Nolan Reilly and I [created the Centre]. He was a labor historian and he’s retired now. He had done oral history interviews with workers and so on. We sort of sat together, we had done this conference and people asked us to take over the journal and the association and we saw projects in different parts of the country and elsewhere. And we said that we didn’t want to do a project, because the way the funding in Canada is time limited, so you get a big grant for five years, and that’s it, that’s the end. So, you might get follow up funding, you might not. We said we wanted to create something sustainable, something that’s long lasting, some sort of an archive and outreach, so that we train people in oral history. Those were the two main goals, to create a teaching centre, a public teaching centre and the archive to allow communities to do oral history projects, to do them well and to archive them. And we decided rather than applying for project funding, which was time limited, we would do a fundraising campaign to create some sort of endowment or so and over a number of years we raised about one and a half million dollars. That was not enough to create an endowment but it was enough to convince the university to give us a number of rooms that we converged into a sort of a larger classroom, a smaller workshop room, a recording studio, a small library and a few offices, and that was quite a bit for a small university like ours where space is always at a premium. So, we got quite a bit of space, we had money for renovation and construction, for buying good equipment and for hiring two staff members temporarily. It took a lot of negotiation for the university to eventually take those two positions on as full-time employees, so that’s now the university… It’s on the university payroll, so that made them permanent, and I decided that I would step away from, you know Nolan [Reilly] had retired, there was a new colleague, Janis Thiessen, who was co-director for a while, and then I decided to step way from my role as director of the Oral History Centre. And we, just at the time when Kim and Kent were hired by the university as full-time staff members, we then decided to affiliate the Oral History Centre with the university archive and library. So right now, the head-archivist is also the director of the Oral History Centre. That really helps to integrate and create an archive, an oral history archive.

Now talking about archiving and dissemination practices or policies in Canada, where do you and other Canadian oral historians, and Canadian researchers who work with oral history, where do usually they archive the interviews? And are there consultants for the material? Is it usual to have a secondary use of the interviews?

I think until the early 1990s it was quite possible to archive oral history interviews in public archives, either at the Library and Archives Canada, those are our national archives in Ottawa, or at the provincial archives, so in Winnipeg this would be the provincial archives for Manitoba, and each province has its own archive. But then because of the reduced funding for archives a lot of archives lost their positions for archivists who could focus on oral history. I know at one point, archivists in Canada could, actually, do their own oral histories, but that was… So, we had an archivist here at the provincial archive of Manitoba, and he went out, did his own interviews in the 1970s and 1980s and helped people to prepare oral history collections to be archived at the Manitoba Archive and when he retired in early 2000s he wasn’t replaced. My understanding is that there’s no one doing oral history at the provincial archive. I think that has been the national story. You know, oral history is just not seen as important for public archives. They have been focusing mostly on collecting government documents. A number of years ago I asked if I could archive and deposit my collection at the provincial archives and they said “no, we don’t have the funds for that”. And that was one reason why we decided to create this oral history centre archive. I don’t know if Concordia University has an archive, they have an archive for their own collections, but I think it’s mostly a digital archive. I’m afraid, but can only speculate, that a lot of oral history interviews are not archived in Canada. At the Oral History Centre here, you know, we try our best to archive as much as possible and to create standards for that. We have sort of an idea of what an archive of interviews looks like, and I can talk more about that but in terms of archiving oral histories it has been sad in Canada. Really quite sad. Very disappointing.

I would like [to talk about the] last book you published, you edited. To ask about the contributions of oral history to deal with troubling memories in the Canadian public sphere. It can be this question, about the memory of the Holocaust, and the more recent question of the Indigenous Reconciliation [Commission]. Do you think that oral history has an important role in the discussion of these troubling memories in Canada?

Yes, I think in many ways. I mean, oral history is a form of documentation, so to understand how people think about the national past. You know, oral history is a great source, it’s not the only source, but it’s a great source to understand how individuals think about it. It’s an important source to find out how families talk about the Holocaust or about the residential schools, what it means to them; how it makes them feel; what it means to them in terms of their national identification. Oral history is also a way to stimulate intergenerational dialogue, I think. It has more practical and sort of ethical implications that are outside of academia. Communities involved in oral history projects begin a dialogue in a formal setting that they might otherwise not. Oral history allows children to ask their parents and grandparents questions that they wouldn’t otherwise ask them or at least allow them to record answers that they might not be ready to hear yet but later on. By archiving oral histories, you give people an opportunity to listen to their parents’ or grandparents’ stories once the kids are ready, or their grandchildren are ready. To give you an example, we interviewed Salvadoran refugees in Winnipeg and there was a lot of conflict within those families, that had to do with different political and ideological viewpoints, and it fractured families. There were a lot of feelings of guilt and shame… conflicts within families.

And that led to a lot of silence between generations, where parents wanted to protect their children from telling them what they have done in El Salvador and why they were forced to leave El Salvador, and the kids were afraid to ask their parents, or they wanted to protect their parents from these difficult memories, and so they didn’t ask. Oral history was a way for them to interview their parents’ generation without necessarily interviewing their parents, and to learn more about these experiences, and it gave the first generation an opportunity to tell their stories in sort of a save space, and to decide: “ok, you know, I don’t want people to listen to my story until I’m dead or in 20 years or so”. That sort of creates an opening for this intergenerational dialogue, and of course we know that kind of dynamic from survivors of the Shoah and their children and grandchildren, we still have a lot of those silences, what Marianne Hirsch called “post memory”, this idea of knowing something or remembering your parents’ experiences without ever having talked about it. So that’s not specific only to Holocaust survivors but to people who went through other traumatic or traumatizing, or potentially traumatizing events. So… and the same is true for the experiences of Indian Residential Schools, which is, you know, we have to remember that Indian Residential Schools… The last ones were closed in the 1990s and a vast majority of the indigenous population living in Canada today is affected by the legacy of Indian Residential Schools, and other racist policies. So oral history, I think, can play an important role in opening up dialogue and learning about this in the way that is… that creates dialogue across generations but also between indigenous and settler immigrants, and settler Canadians.

Alexander, you told us now about this project, you didn’t conduct these interviews by yourself. Could you talk about this participative research method? I understood that people from this community were the interviewers from people from their own community. Do you think this is a way to deal better with troubling memories?

I’m not totally convinced to be honest. So, I think it’s important to involve... When you do a community project, then it’s important… A participatory project, I think it’s important to allow as much participation as possible, which includes the project design; the project financing and funding… So, I tried to give the Salvadorans in particular, a lot of control over the way the money was spent. We provided a lot of training for community members to do oral history and eventually we ended up hiring someone from El Salvador who was not a refugee, a more recent immigrant with a journalistic background, so she did most of these interviews in Spanish, and she transcribed most of these interviews, and those were good interviews. But those were good interviews because she did our workshops in oral history and because she had a journalism background, so she knew about interviewing, and she is a great interviewer. You know, there were other interviews that were done by community members that were very short and of sort of limited usefulness. It takes a lot of work, but it also takes a lot of work for the community. Many communities that we want to work with just don’t have the resources in terms of time. To be trained and to do interviews, and to transcribe all of this. So, it’s a great ideal to have lots of people and communities participate but unless you can actually pay them full salaries, it’s really difficult to take time away from jobs and families, to participate in this project, it’s a real luxury.

So, I came out of this participatory project knowing that this could only be done if you had the funding to make these into full-time positions or into fully paid positions. Not necessarily full-time, could be part-time. We did another project that was very interesting with a small ethnic community of Karen, from Burma or Myanmar, where we trained and hired someone to do the interviews and transcribe in the original Karen language. Which is a different script, which is a different alphabet. This was very complicated; the person had to transcribe and then translate everything. So, this was very involved and took a lot of time. You know, one hour of interview took, I think, 20 hours or so to fully process. In terms of summarizing, transcribing, translating, and all of this. If you do this, you have to be prepared to do a lot of work and have a lot of money for this. But in general, there is a large literature out there on participatory action research. So, this is done in all kinds of social sciences, this kind of participation. And that’s very useful literature. I’m always surprised that oral historians do not tap into this at all.

How have digital technologies changed your oral history practices? And which challenges the pandemic context is adding to your oral history practices too? Digital technologies and the challenges related to pandemic times.

In a way it’s kind of related, because we’ve been using digital technologies to work around the restrictions of the pandemic. I, luckily, was not affected by the pandemic in terms of my oral history research because I had finished that project and I am just writing now, and the next interviews will take place sometime next year by which time I think we can do in person interviews again. I think the pandemic has shown us that there’s value in using digital technologies for interviewing. It allows us to reach people that we would not otherwise reach, because we might not have the means to travel or for whatever reasons. So, I think we will see in the future more use of these video interviews. I think that will be… That will create its own interpretive challenges and methodological challenges. I have to admit I’m jealous of, you know, the ways in which Australians, for example, are able to make their interviews accessible through their public libraries. I think it’s fantastic, I’ve used those interviews myself as well. But I think oral historians, in general, have to become less enthusiastic and more critical of the interview [meant to say: digital technologies]. We are, there seems to be the mindset among a lot of oral historians still. That we are still in the 1990s when the internet promised to be this democratizing platform. By now it should be clear to everyone that it is a gated community of some very influential big players like you know, these big internet corporations that have very different interests in mind, and that create very powerful technologies to analyze digital information, not just text but also audio and videos files. And so, I think we have to be very cautious about how anything that’s uploaded to the internet might be used by these big corporations for their own purposes. So, I am... I think we have to be… skeptics when it comes to how we use the internet. Simply putting a lot of interviews up online is not always the best. There needs to be a lot of curation going on; and selection; and deciding what is useful for specific audiences and so on.

References

FREUND, Alexander. Memória, migração e identidade: Relatos de história oral no contexto de histórias familiares e nacionais. In: LAVERDI, Robson et al. (org.). História oral: Desigualdades e diferenças. Recife/Florianópolis: Ed. UFPE/Ed. UFSC, 2009. p. 247-258.
FREUND, Alexander; THOMSON, Alistair (org.). Oral History and Photography. New York: Palgrave, 2011.
FREUND, Alexander. Contesting the Meanings of Migration: German Women's Immigration to Canada in the 1950s. Canadian Ethnic Studies, v. 41-42, n. 3-1, p. 1-26, 2012.
FREUND, Alexander. Entrevistas de história oral como dados gerados em processo. Tempos Históricos, v. 17, n. 2, p. 28-62, 2013.
FREUND, Alexander. Os animais que confessam: Contribuição para uma história de longa duração da entrevista de História Oral. Tempo e Argumento, v. 6, n. 13, p. 203 - 239, set./dez. 2014.
FREUND, Alexander. Sob o encanto da contação de estórias? História oral numa era neoliberal. In: GONÇALVES, Janice (org.). História do Tempo Presente: Oralidade, memória, mídia. Itajaí (SC): Editora Casa Aberta, 2016. p. 159-224.
FREUND, Alexander. From .wav to .txt: Why we still need transcripts in the digital age. Oral History, v. 45, n. 1, p. 33-42, 2017.
FREUND, Alexander. Questioning Historians: Oral History as a Historiographic and Political Act. The Oral History Review, v. 46, n. 1, p. 155-160, 2019.
FREUND, Alexander. Being German-Canadian: History, Memory, and Generations. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2021.

Notes

1
We selected some of the interviewee’s publications: Freund, 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021. To see more click on: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/history/faculty-staff/alexander -freund.html.
2
Transcription was made by undergraduate student João Otávio Rodrigues (UFRGS) and reviewed by interviewers and interviewee.