By Rebecca Kiil

In a world of posturing, posing, and curated sound bites, it can feel like a rare treasure to find intentional spaces for creativity, risk-taking, and knowledge sharing. The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) at Concordia University is one of those spaces. Rebecca Kiil, recipient of OHMA’s Alumni Conference Travel Award, traveled to COHDS in Montreal to attend the symposium and present “Chasing Ghosts: Using Oral History and Imagination to Give Voice to Those Who Were Silenced.”

The panel chair catches my eye to indicate it’s time for me to wrap up my presentation. Through a few quick gestures with the person running the PowerPoint, I determine that too many minutes remain in my multimedia piece to allow it to complete within my allotted 15 minutes. I spoke more than I planned to at the beginning, trying to over-compensate for feeling that my presentation wasn’t sufficiently “academic” compared to the panels I’d attended yesterday. So, now I’m running short on time.

I can feel my face beginning to flush.

I abruptly turn off the film using the remote-control device in my hand. Viewing the footage on the large screen – clips of my grandmother’s filmed interviews, a few photographs of my grandfather, my voice reading his diary entries as images of the diary pages filled with his beautifully neat script linger on the screen – impacts me more than I expect it to. And that, combined with the jarring way I cut the experience short, has me feeling very unsteady.

I jump to the end of my talk, where my intention is to leave the audience with questions to ponder – the two questions I’ve been grappling with as an oral historian. As I speak these final words, I try to recover my composure … but it’s no use.

The tears come.

As I drove the six-hour route winding my way through the darkness and the mountains of New York state, I slowly shed the pressures and mindset of my day job. By the time I arrived in the beautiful city of Montreal around midnight, I felt fully present and ready to experience the 10 th Emerging Scholars Symposium on Oral History, Digital Storytelling, Creative Practice.

The inspiring, intimate symposium was put on by Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), held onsite in Montreal and virtually on Thursday, March 23 and Friday, March 24. Two panels ran concurrently throughout the symposium, one in each of their presentation spaces: the Sunroom and the Act of Listening Lab (ALLab).

This year’s theme was Storytelling and Intergenerational Memory.

For the past 10 years I’ve been exploring my own family’s stories and the intergenerational impact of communal trauma. My parents’ families fled from their homeland of Estonia (one of the Baltic States bordering Russia) in September 1944, when my parents were small children, to escape the dueling German and Soviet occupations over several years that were tearing their country apart. The Soviet regime forcibly disappeared my mother’s grandfather and great-uncle, then later captured her father and sent him to Siberia. My mother grew up with no men in her family. So, the topic of the conference was extremely relevant to my own graduate work, and I was excited to immerse myself in two days of related panels and presentations, and to meet and learn from the attendees about different approaches to the work around these themes.

After the rush of the final months of my master’s work at the Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program at Columbia University, the COHDS symposium presentations and conversations I had, coupled with my many hours of solo driving, ended up being the perfect time to pause and reflect on where I’ve been and where I might want to go next with my work. I appreciated the spirit of the conference being for “emerging scholars” and the focus being on “in process” works. While the presentations were very polished and professional, the atmosphere felt almost like ideas were being workshopped, with constructive interaction and questions from the audience of students, presenters, professors – a very collaborative, supportive climate.

Compared with other conferences I’ve attended, this event was also smaller, so it felt intimate and almost as if a community were being built over the two-day period. Some of that might also have been due to its being the first time back in person post-COVID, but nonetheless, there was a general sense of joy of being together, coming together in those gatherings. The conference was also run beautifully. All presentations had to be submitted ahead of time. This created two benefits: The presenters did not have to worry about managing their presentation while speaking (which I found to be a great relief!). This also eliminated technical issues. And throughout the symposium, COHDS generously offered refreshments and snacks and beautiful lunches. The effort the organizing committee put into planning all aspects of the event was evident and appreciated.

I have come to love the field of oral history for many reasons, not the least of which is the variety it offers – from the types of narrators we work with, to the backgrounds of the practitioners who are drawn to this field, to the methodologies used, as well as the types of output created from the oral history interviews.

In just the presentations I was able to attend at the COHDS symposium, there was such a wide range of subject matter. (The full program of presentations is here.) And the final media for the various projects were also very diverse, ranging from graphic art renderings of family interviews, to community-based enrichment and experiential activities, to multimedia poetry, to “performance as self.” In most of the presentations I observed, I found myself connecting, at least for a moment, back to my own work and thinking about how something I was seeing might be or have been possible with my own project. It’s amazing (or a little crazy making, depending on your perspective) how many directions our work could go in, based on which point of influence happens to catch your attention on any given day or in any given way when you are making critical decisions and moving forward in your work.

Two OHMA colleagues also presented at the symposium:

Nairy AbdElShafy and her partner presented Living with Intergenerational Trauma: An Introspective Look into Palestinian Resilience Building and Well-Being in Egypt
Ariel Urim Chung presented Murmurs in the Kitchen: Navigating relationships between listeners and oral history makers through experimental audio

Because of the structure and schedule of the symposium, I was able to attend only Nairy’s panel. I appreciated that she and her partner talked about going back to old interviews to reflect and reevaluate them within new context and with new perspective, experience, and wisdom and come up with new conclusions.

I have experienced this with my own interviews. After I learned new things from one or another person, or after I took a semester-long class on the refugee regime learning about human rights law, or after I spent the summer researching my family history in Estonia, and then went back to my grandmother’s interviews, I would hear sections or facts as if they were new – they would have completely different meaning to me once I knew more, understood more, had more wisdom or different context. Each interview could take a lifetime to unravel, layer by layer, in this way.

The last event of the symposium on Friday morning, from 10:30 a.m. to 12 noon, was “a moment of reflection.” We were honored to be led by invited elder Kan’ahsohon Kevin Deer from the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory. We formed a circle and Mr. Deer shared with us the Iroquoian perspective and philosophy, as well as a beautiful personal story about nature and a “sign” he received in the form of a bird on a clothesline. Then he allowed anyone in the group to share whatever we wanted to say about what our experience of the symposium.

One young man shared gratitude for being reminded by some of the presentations that oral history work is about people – something that, when he is buried in research and analysis, he can sometimes forget. I thought back to my presentation earlier that morning, and how disappointed I’d been with myself that my emotions had revealed themselves, that I had not remained what I perceived to be professional. But then I remembered the narrators and collaborators who share their lives with us. Each time we sit down with our recorders, we wait for them, we hope for them, to be real with us. They entrust us with their life stories, they put themselves out on that line every time. It is never easy to share parts of ourselves with another. I can never take for granted what my narrators are giving of themselves.

I continued to spend the next few weeks after the COHDS symposium grappling with the fact that I hadn’t presented as perfectly as I would have liked. And then I suddenly remembered the conclusion of my master’s thesis, in which I’d essentially made a vow – to myself and to my ancestors – to use my voice, however imperfectly, whenever I’m given the chance and remembering what a privilege it is to have that opportunity. Here is a small portion of my “vow”:

My grandmother and her family were silenced by outside forces, and they silenced themselves to survive. By contrast, I don’t need to be silent to survive, but it sometimes feels that way in my body. Living so vividly within this history, my history, through these conversations with my grandmother and my parents, I realized I’d inherited this tendency toward silence in my body, but it wasn’t mine. This realization profoundly impacted my desire to speak my truth, no matter how imperfectly I do so and regardless of how it is received by others.

The people who came before me were silent out of necessity. I owe it to my family, and myself, to use my voice whenever called upon and whatever form that might take, and to continue my oral history work of providing space for voices that might otherwise be silenced, because too many of my relatives lost their lives exercising theirs or were silenced before they could.

I am so grateful to COHDS and this forum where students, recent graduates, and practitioners are encouraged to present, discuss, and experience our own and each other’s work. How often in today’s world are we given opportunities, space to try, to mess up, to fail, to learn from our mistakes? I would highly recommend this symposium to anyone considering attending in the future. And I am so grateful to OHMA, for so many things, but most recently for granting me this travel award that enabled me to experience the COHDS symposium in person.

Rebecca Kiil is a writer, editor, oral historian, photographer, and filmmaker. She recently graduated from Columbia University’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) program. Rebecca’s master’s thesis, Roots of Silence, explores themes such as intergenerational trauma, women and war, and ethical loneliness, as well as the limitations of traditional oral history practices when we consider individuals who have been forcibly disappeared or otherwise silenced.