Oral History as Identity: The African-Canadian Experience (original) (raw)

It has been It has been almost 400 years since the first person of African origin stepped freely onto Canadian soil. In those centuries, the African Canadian population has seen slavery and freedom, poverty and racism, resistance and survival. It is on the last two that this paper will dwell the resistance to the European culture of the white majority and the subsequent survival of important components of African-Canadian culture. Because of the lack of written documentation, resistance and survival must be traced through the oral testimony that has been preserved through memory and in many cases, electronically recorded for future generations. There is an old saying that "the winners write history." However, living history composed of oral history and oral tradition has allowed for a rewriting of the past in the past quarter century and has also allowed the marginalized and peripheralized to maintain their cultural voices.