“Hands-on” history generates relevance and enthusiasm

The act of collecting oral histories deepens students’ appreciation for the discipline and their understanding of the events and trends that connect our lives, notes Kim Porter, associate professor of history and department chair.

Writing history is sometimes called a lonely profession, the realm of highly educated specialists who teach and do their research as university professors.

But although she’s a professor herself with a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, Kim Porter disagrees, and is doing her best to make it possible for average citizens to partner in the work of documenting days gone by.  The chair of UND’s Department of History, she believes the mechanism of “oral history” is an important way to encourage this kind of collaboration.

Porter has worked on so many collaborative projects that it’s hard to sort them out.  For starters, there’s the project with the Red River Historical Society to identify remaining WPA buildings of the Great Depression era, primarily in Walsh County.  There’s the project involving college students in documenting the history of Grand Forks through interviews with residents “as far back as we can reach” — generally the era of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s.  She also is in the middle of a large project funded by the U.S. Department of Education to improve the teaching of American history in North Dakota schools.

“Kim demonstrates a strong loyalty to local history,” noted Janet Daley, executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council, a historian herself who has known Porter for a decade.   “For her, that has meant not only teaching North Dakota history at UND, but also personal involvement with the recording of local history, such as the story of the San Haven Tuberculosis Sanitarium near Dunseith.”

The sanitarium project typifies Porter’s philosophy and working methods.  She is doing a study to determine if an oral history project is viable.  The sanitarium was operated for about 70 years during the era when there was little alternative but to isolate victims of the contagious and often fatal disease.  Many of its staff came from the nearby Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation.

Porter’s plan is to train 16- to 17-year-old American Indian high school students to interview their grandparents who had worked at the sanitarium.  “These kids grew up with a tradition of oral history,” she said.  “They’ll be able to talk to their elders in ways I never could, being a white Iowa farm kid.” 

Local history often means oral history, and those are the projects Porter finds most exciting.  Oral history started as a way to add depth and understanding to the historical record with a top-down orientation, interviewing presidents, secretaries of state and similar decision makers.  It has evolved into a broadly based bottom-up discipline that seeks to tell the story of the soldier at D-Day, the first woman in a family to go to college, or the grandfather who remembers playing game after game of baseball in the 1930s because he had no job and it was too dry to farm.  Oral histories make history more vivid, personal and understandable, she said, and are valuable as a deepening, a confirmation or contradiction, of a bigger national story.

“I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the expanding role of federal government, but nothing will give students a sense of that like comparing expectations of the federal government after the 1997 flood to the expectations of earlier generations,” Porter said.  “We expected FEMA to make us whole again.  Our grandparents or parents would not have expected it.”

Her own interest in history began with living in a multigenerational environment and hearing her grandfather talk about his uncles’ experiences in the Civil War.  She believes that when children don’t know grandparents well, they lose a tremendous amount — a sense of history, a sense of self, a connection to place.

Oral histories may be particularly important in North Dakota, which has a dearth of primary historical resources, Porter said.  In her own history classes about the state, students have the opportunity to add to the historical record by interviewing parents, grandparents and other relatives.