The University of Winnipeg’s Oral History Centre is hosting its second annual Oral History Conference on Saturday, November 30 from 10:00 am, to 6:00 pm in Room 2B23, Bryce Hall.

The Oral History Centre, which had its grand opening last Spring, seeks to become a national leader in preserving oral tradition through oral history teaching, research and community development. 

“Oral history is a stem of social history, and social history is a history of everyday people,” explains Hayley Caldwell, a history student at UW who is giving a presentation on the Bernstein’s Deli Project at the event. “It is trying to democratize history by getting voices of underprivileged people heard [by] the wider masses.”    

During the conference, presentations will be given by both UW students and professors about historical topics they’ve researched, in large part through oral interviews with relevant people of interest. These interviews are spliced together for a comprehensive final presentation.         

Presentation topics include Feminism and the Labour Movement in Manitoba, Inquiries into Franco-Manitoba Metis Identities, Traditional Foods: Local Histories from Fisher River Cree Nation, and the Bernstein’s Deli Project.

Caldwell, along with project partner Laura Finkel, got the idea to research Bernstein’s Deli while looking into small businesses that used to be a thriving part of the North End during an era when it was primarily a Jewish and European community.

“Delicatessens are a staple in Jewish culture, but it’s something that was invented in North America,” Caldwell says. “We found that Bernstein’s was a really unique example and they were still really trying to hold on to those cultural traditions.”

Caldwell and Finkel conducted interviews with several people, including the owner and her son, a patron, a deli enthusiast and an older gentleman who was around when delis were a popular sight in the North End.

This research, once collected, is later filed to the archive at the Oral History Centre.

“[Oral History] is a social movement, but also a methodology,” Caldwell describes. “So instead of just relying purely on documents and archives which are created by governments and usually the elite, you can then go to the people directly and ask them how their experiences were, instead of relying on the government’s perspective.”

Caldwell explains that the movement of oral history itself is young, emerging more prominently in the 1940s at Columbia University, and gaining momentum in the 1960s. It was the invention of the small hand held recorder that allowed for its real transformation.

“The reason that we do oral interviews as opposed to writing them is that it makes it more difficult to distort what they [subjects] are trying to say about their own lives and their own experiences in the past,” she clarifies.

Technology is important to the faculty, and members of the Oral History Centre are given access to technical support and equipment in order to conduct and archive oral interviews. 

For more info on the Oral History Centre and their event, please go to  http://www.oralhistorycentre.ca.

Published in Volume 68, Number 13 of The Uniter (November 27, 2013)