Category: oral history

Image above: Jennifer Keil and Cindy Keil at SOHA at OHA 2019

1. Jennifer Keil, how did you become involved in SOHA?

I presented at the 2013 Oral History Association meeting in Oklahoma City organized by Cora Granata at the Center for Oral and Public History with a panel of graduate students chaired by Alessandro Portelli. Karen Harper, SOHA Past-President, invited our panel to present at Tempe, Arizona the following spring. During these years, I realized my passion for the spoken work and preservation techniques to make it accessible to communities online. As a graduate student, I instituted a community oral history project at the Balboa Island Museum with Cindy Keil, SOHA California Delegate. We founded 70 Degrees in order to facilitate historical consulting and conduct oral history interviews. We led a workshop at the 2017 Tempe SOHA conference.

Continue reading “An Interview with SOHA President Jennifer Keil” →

Mary Gordon has been interviewing interesting people since a National Park Service anthropologist, Phil Holmes,  suggested she interview Charlie Cooke, who some considered a hereditary Chumash chief.  Phil referred to that work as oral tradition. In the same time frame, she interviewed many people on her cable TV show and as part of her responsibilities for a major  corporation.  Looking back, she wondered , Was this oral history?  Well, aspects were.  One day, Linda Valois, then managing  archives for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, suggested she attend a SOHA conference.  She did, found it welcoming and certainly worthwhile.  One of her first reactions was, Am I an oral historian? She enjoyed meeting  SOHA members, listening to their presentations, and talking with them at lunch and dinners out.  Well, she said to herself, Maybe I am an oral historian.  With her published biography about Charlie Cooke and all the lessons learned from that project, she began giving presentations herself.  The first was a dramatization from Charlie’s story working with Julie Little Thunder.  That punctuated the fact for her that not all historians are the same, that we all have much to learn from each other, and that she could fit in. Next she wrote a family business history and started giving workshops based on that experience from venues as diverse as an NPS amphitheater, to bookstores, to community center classroom settings.

Continue reading “SOHA 2020 Spotlight: Mary Gordon” →

Ryan Morini, SOHA 2020 Conference Co-Chair, describes his involvement with SOHA and oral history:

I was drawn to oral history before knowing much about it formally; shortly after I started grad school at the University of Florida, I started learning about Black history in Gainesville from people in the historic 5th Avenue/Pleasant Street neighborhood. When Paul Ortiz arrived at the University of Florida (UF) and became director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP), I continued my work more formally through SPOHP’s African American History Project. Around the same time, I started my dissertation research with Western Shoshone communities in Nevada, and it was again impossible to know meaningful histories or really work with communities without listening directly both to people’s firsthand experiences and the oral traditions passed down through families.

Continue reading “SOHA Spotlight: Ryan Morini, SOHA 2020 Conference Co-Chair” →

Midge Dellinger became a SOHA member in 2017, during her first year as a graduate student.  She received her Master of Arts degree in American Studies with an emphasis in Native American Studies from Northeastern State University, located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in May of 2019.  From 2017 to 2019, Midge served on the SOHA Board of Directors as the Student Representative.  It was also in 2017 that she received the SOHA Eva Tuelene Watt Award.

Here is a message from Midge:

Hello everyone, this is Midge Dellinger from Tulsa, Oklahoma!  Well, since the last time I saw many of you in Salt Lake City, Utah, for the annual Oral History Association conference, I have experienced great change in my life.  As many of you know, it has been my goal and ambition since becoming introduced to the Southwest Oral History Association (SOHA), in 2017, to engage Muscogee peoples with the practice of oral history.  Today, I am very proud to tell all of you that beginning on January 6, 2020, I became the Oral Historian for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.  It is a great honor to be given the responsibility of revitalizing oral history in the Muscogee Nation and creating what I hope will be a very successful oral history program for my fellow Muscogee citizens.  I have been busy re-organizing our current online oral history archive, ordering new recording equipment, writing a procedure manual, and preparing for a project on traditional Muscogee foodways.

Continue reading “Spotlight: Midge Dellinger, SOHA member since 2017” →

SOHA is featuring our members and presenters of SOHA 2020. This week, our spotlight is on Sarah Moorhead, who wrote the following piece about her experiences with SOHA. Sarah has been a dedicated SOHA member for about 20 Years. She has served as the SOHA President (2008-2009), and she received the SOHA Life Achievement Award (2013).

“SOHA AND ME”

By: Sarah Moorhead

In the 1980’s and 1990’s SOHA would send experienced oral historians to other cities to provide workshops. Sylvia Arden and Rose Diaz gave two workshops in Arizona which I attended, but it wasn’t until the Museum Guild President and retired Assistant Librarian, Mary Olive Mott, asked me to restart the Mesa Historical Society’s (MHS) oral history program, which had been in hiatus since 1985, that I actually began oral history work in 1998.

Continue reading “Spotlight: Sarah Moorhead, SOHA member of 20 Years” →