Legal Interpretation and Relationship To Historical Truth
In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia trial, ruled that oral histories were just as important as written testimony. Of oral histories, it said "that they are tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact-finding process at trial – the determination of the historical truth."
Writers who use oral history have often discussed its relationship to historical truth. Gilda O'Neill writes in Lost Voices, an oral history of East End hop-pickers: "I began to worry. Were the women's, and my, memories true or were they just stories? I realised that I had no 'innocent' sources of evidence - facts. I had, instead, the stories and their tellers' reasons for remembering in their own particular ways.' Duncan Barrett, one of the co-authors of The Sugar Girls describes some of the perils of relying on oral history accounts: "On two occasions, it became clear that a subject was trying to mislead us about what happened – telling a self-deprecating story in one interview, and then presenting a different, and more flattering, version of events when we tried to follow it up. often our interviewees were keen to persuade us of a certain interpretation of the past, supporting broad, sweeping comments about historical change with specific stories from their lives." Alessandro Portelli argues that oral history is valuable nevertheless: "it tells us less about events as such than about their meaning the unique and precious element which oral sources force upon the historian is the speaker's subjectivity."
Read more about this topic: Oral History
Famous quotes containing the words legal, relationship, historical and/or truth:
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Harvey: Oh, you kids these days, I’m telling you. You think the only relationship a man and a woman can have is a romantic one.
Gil: That sure is what we think. You got something better?
Harvey: Oh, romance is very nice. A good thing for youngsters like you, but Helene and I have found something we think is more appropriate to our stage of life—companionship.
Gil: Companionship? I’ve got a flea-bitten old hound at home who’ll give me that.”
—Tom Waldman (d. 1985)
“The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects—making it possible ... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“... in writing you cannot possibly be interesting if what you say is not true, if it is what I call “a true lie,” i.e., a truth which gives the wrong impression. For no matter how subtly you lie in writing, people know it and don’t believe you, and the whole secret of being interesting is to be believed.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)