In Their Own Words

The author reviews three books written during the 1990s which rely on oral history to explore the lives of Japanese picture brides, refugees, and female Native elders. This article reveals how these three works succeed in using oral history to give voice to the individuals from these non-hegemonic groups that had been neglected by scholars in the past. It also explores some of the pitfalls that can arise when adopting an oral history method that fails to recognize the role of the interviewer as well as incorporate any authorial interpretation into the work. The article calls for more transparency and greater balance when producing oral histories. Picture Brides: Japanese Women in Canada. TOMAKO MAKABE. Kathleen Chisato Merken, trans. Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 180 p. ISBN 0-919045-68-5. Safe Haven: The Refugee Experience of Five Families. ELIZABETH McLUHAN, ed. Multicultural History Society of Ontario. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995. 228 p. ISBN 0-919045-67-7. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders. JULIE CRUIKSHANK in collaboration with ANGELA SIDNEY, KITTY SMITH, and ANNIE NED. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. 405 p. ISBN 0-8032-1447-2. Oral history has been used by academics from different disciplines since the In Their Own Words 205 1940s. The early practitioners tended to rely on this methodology to document elite male historical actors. With the emergence of social history during the 1960s and the 1970s in Canada, academics from many disciplines began to use oral history to give voice to the muted masses. In addition to creating new records about groups which left little or no written documentation behind, recent practitioners of oral history have tried to tap into the actual lived experiences of the people they interview, rather than recounting the stories of once historically marginalized groups such as immigrants, women, and Natives from the perspective of male elites. Oral history not only has enabled scholars to delve into previously unexplored areas of inquiry such as the private side of people’s lives, but it also has permitted academics to give something back to the people they interview; as Paul Thompson states, oral history “can give back to the people who made and experienced history, through their own words, a central place.” Oral history has therefore helped to draw certain groups out of obscurity and enabled them to speak for themselves. An added benefit is that their stories can become part of the written record. This innovative approach to research has been adopted by the three authors whose works are reviewed in this article. Their texts, produced during the 1990s, document groups whose stories had either been ignored or misrepresented by historians in the past. Although the authors are from different academic backgrounds and examine very different groups – Japanese women, Native women, and refugees – they all share a commitment to let the narrators speak for themselves. This kind of open interviewing style, through which the narrators tell their stories without any direction or interruptions from the researcher, is viewed by many social scientists as being more democratic than the traditional method of interviewing. In all three works, the authors rely on interviews with a small number of individuals who serve as representatives of their group. Two of these books, Picture Brides and Safe Haven, were produced by the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO). Established in 1976, the MHSO has developed, as part of their Ethnocultural Voices Series, a series of books on individual ethnic groups. In order to document these groups from the perspective of the community, the MHSO has encouraged the use of oral history and established an archive to house the products of these projects. On the whole, the books that it has funded richly document the experiences of various ethnic groups from “the inside,” relying on the testimony of community members rather than input from outsiders. These two particular projects remain true to form, in that they present new and valuable documentation about two groups who had been neglected by Canadian historians. Tomoko Makabe, who emigrated from Japan and has studied sociology in Canada, examines the lives of five Japanese women from the Issei (first) generation who came to Canada as “picture brides” around the turn of the twentieth century. These adventurous women, most of whom were in their early