Reading Oral Tradition, Writing Cree History
This paper follows from an earlier one in which the author questioned whether non-Native historians have the linguistic and analytic tools to interpret oral traditions and oral histories in ways that retained their integrity and cultural meaning; it concluded we do not. Here, the focus is on salvaging what is possible from these oral accounts as a way of drawing Native understanding and insights into the writing of our western-dominated histories. Under the auspices of museum programs, anthropologists have been in the field in eastern James Bay since the late 1960s and have deposited extensive reports, consisting not only of interviews but translations of oral traditions and history of an era before the Crees were more closely drawn into the industrial society. This paper analyzes these collections to furnish examples of the subjects covered and ways in which the orientation of the subjects has been determined by the interviewer. Although the author continues to maintain that such reproduction of the oral accounts wrenches them from their cultural context, she argues that what can be extrapolated from them provides vital insights into the activities and outlook of the Crees of a bygone era and are essential to writing twentieth century history.