“Shut the tape off and I'll tell you a story”

In the 1990s, when I started working on my dissertation examining the production of Indigenous community in the urban context of Toronto, one of my goals was to critically consider both feminist and Indigenist approaches to research. I was intrigued by the primacy of orality and oral history in the current scholarship on the production of women’s and Indigenous knowledge, particularly as these shaped community organizing and resistance to the structural forms of violence sustaining the triumvirate of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. ¹ Many of the contributors to Women’s Words spoke about the need for feminist oral historians to balance the responsibility of illustrating these “larger cultural formations” and women’s experiences within them, while grappling with the potential to misrepresent. ² Calling for innovative community-based approaches to conducting oral history projects, they examined oral history as processual and engaged intersectional analyses and dynamics that might prove transformative for individuals, communities, and social justice work. ³