When Oral History Calls on You: Stories from Nunavut

Abstract

This chapter offers several stories that help us explain how oral history has called on us through our work and research in education in Nunavut, a territory in northern Canada. It addresses the following questions: Why does oral history call on us? What invitations and potentialities are produced when conversations and relationships turn into oral history, or are called oral history, instead of something else? We use theoretical tools from Arthur W. Frank’s Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology to explore theories, dilemmas, and practices of oral history, wherein curriculum is the nexus for relationship—between storyteller and learner, and between place, identity, and history. We undertake this exploration dialogically: with each other, with Frank’s theorizations, and with our experiences of oral history in educational change. While one can participate in oral history and benefit from it without theoretical supports, theory may illuminate why and how learners (students, educators, or anyone involved in schools) could be called by oral history—as we were—to practice in particular ways and produce particular kinds of pedagogical experiences. We selected and analyzed these stories as exemplars of oral history because they illuminate potentialities associated with Nunavut’s decolonizing goals for schooling: ongoing processes of creating culturally responsive schools for Inuit communities, disrupting the Eurocentric approaches that otherwise characterize schools, and reexamining colonizing histories and the implications therein for non-Indigenous school staff.