A project to record 22 oral histories with three community-based organizations to explore community response and resilience after hurricanes and other climate-related disasters in Puerto Rico. 

The project aims to preserve and build access to a collection or oral histories about community responses to climate change in Puerto Rico. Collective Care is a partnership between the UPR-Cayey, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (NMAH), and community-based organizations in Puerto Rico and its diaspora. Through this partnership, the project documents community-led responses to disasters, beginning with hurricanes Irma and María in 2017, the 2020 earthquakes, the covid-19 pandemic, and the underlying economic crisis.

A participatory, community-based study to document and preserve Indigenous reproductive health practices of the Dakhóta and CHamoru. 

This project proposes to engage a participatory, environmental humanities inquiry exploring Indigenous reproductive health and reproductive justice (IRH/RJ) within Dakhóta and CHamoru communities and homelands. Through a series of three phases, this project will utilize conversation and storywork methods to document, identify and protect this unique cultural heritage and its related resources; engage community reproductive health workers and birthkeepers in participatory efforts to safeguard and foster the resurgence of this knowledge; and to appraise the risks of climate change on IRH/RJ and develop strategies that ensure the continuity of this cultural heritage in Indigenous communities facing imminent risk.

The collection of oral histories and scanning of materials from six at-risk communities in Harrison County, Mississippi, located on the Gulf Coast.

This project will retrieve history from six communities at risk of hurricane flooding in Harrison County, Mississippi. These groups have unique culture and history that has already been changed due to Hurricane Katrina. The Local History and Genealogy Department of the Harrison County Library System would collect their history through scanning documents, images, and recording oral histories. These will be collected through community events and programs. Then shared online with a digital copy being preserved in the Local History and Genealogy Department. The Local History and Genealogy Department will also educate these communities on best practice methods to preserve their own histories.

The gathering of 100 oral histories documenting the impact of COVID-19 and climate change within Detroit communities. 

The Detroit Historical Society (DHS) seeks to expand its growing oral history collection by capturing stories from Detroit residents and others, with a particular effort on reaching underserved populations in the region. Entitled Collecting Detroiters’ Stories of Courage, Struggle, Loss and Resili-ence: An Oral History Project, DHS will collect new stories from those that have experienced the impacts of the pandemic for its ongoing Detroit Responds: Stories from the Time of Covid-19 collection, and will create a new project area called The Neighborhoods: Where Climate Change Matters that focuses on the effects of extreme weather events on individuals living in Detroit.

The documentation and preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage resources about Black and African American Appalachians.

A project to identify, preserve and amplify Black Appalachian experiences and voices through cultural mapping, oral historic collection and dissemination, and national cultural exchanges and organizing. This is a cross-programmatic project within the arts and media non-profit organization Appalshop, Inc. It features work by project coordinators in three programs of the organization: Archive, Community Development, and Roadside Theater. We will collect and map Black churches and faith experiences in central Appalachian communities in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, collect oral histories from an integrated community in Knott County, Kentucky, and participate in residencies with other organizations working with historically disadvantaged communities through the Performing our Future program.

The collection of fifty oral history interviews, a full-time oral history storyteller-in-residence program, and the creation of a digital exhibit, social media, and website content. The project would document South Asian American healthcare workers’ experiences of being employed on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

“Communities of Care” is a digital collection of oral histories from South Asian American healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fifty interviews will be conducted by the Healthcare Storyteller-in-Residence: a medical professional who will be trained by professional oral historians. Other products include a digital exhibit interpreting the collection and live broadcasted dialogues. Themes include treating patients with COVID-19, loss of family members, the emotional impact of death and dying, South Asian values, and the privileges and challenges of healthcare work. South Asian Americans have faced increased vulnerability during the pandemic due to a high number of frontline workers, restrictive visa policies, community-specific health risks, and income inequality. Not only will SAADA’s collection amplify voices from a diverse community rarely represented in archives, but it will preserve the lived experiences of a crucial workforce at a time that America needed them most.

The collection of 10 oral histories as well as other documentation about the cultural heritage of Islote, Puerto Rico, a small and historical fishing village on the north coast endangered by climate change.

The Island Resilience Project is a collaboration between the Social Research Observatory of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo and the Luciérnagas Foundation in the Islote community. Our project aims to enhance the cultural and community resilience of Islote Puerto Rico against the impacts of climate change from a decolonial perspective. We will achieve this goal through the collaborative documentation, preservation, and promotion of the unique cultural and natural heritage of the area while empowering community members. To work with the Islote school and community in gathering and disseminating geographical, oral, and historical information about the origins of their community, the natural resources surrounding it, and the strategies developed to survive by their elders.

The collection of 40 photovoice oral history interviews and archival materials documenting elderly Asian American community members’ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project would train community interviewers and deliver a five-minute documentary video, an open-access digital archive, and academic publications.

CARE is photovoice oral history and community archival project about elderly Asian Americans (AA) in San Francisco during COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate pandemics. We support preservation practices with community-based co-creation of knowledge through partnerships with two local groups that serve low-income, elder Filipino, Laotian, and Thai. CARE trains young community interviewers to conduct photovoice oral histories of elders and offers community archival workshops for elders. We consider how the survival mechanisms from past collective traumas of migration or world events and cultural practices help elders during the pandemics through the exploration of the humanities themes of impact, survival, community, and resilience. The stories will be accessible via the CARE collection in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library’s open access public search engine in order to reach a broad audience.

The collection and curation of 25 oral histories from Apsáalooke elders and tribal members who hold knowledge about the development and governance of a coal economy on the Crow Indian Reservation.

Like many Indigenous nations and communities, the Apsáalooke (Crow) in Montana face two-pronged threats in the form of climate change and COVID-19. In collaboration with community leaders and elders, this project will preserve that knowledge by collecting oral histories from Crow elders. This project will conduct over twenty interviews with elders on the reservation over the course of two years, which will be preserved and hosted at the tribal college—the Little Big Horn College—archives. Climate change is causing chronic and acute shocks to the Crow Reservation, including flooding, water access issues, and extreme weather. These effects fall on vulnerable communities that are ill-prepared to respond due to historic inequalities. COVID-19 directly threatens tribal elders and their role in the community as knowledge-keepers because of disproportionate morbidity and mortality that has radically accelerated the erosion of vital knowledge held by community elders.

The creation of a StoryMap to document the history of the hitch fish and its cultural significance to the Tribal peoples of the Clear Lake region of California.

“Hitch Stories” is an Esri interactive StoryMap that documents and preserves oral histories and contemporary efforts surrounding the threatened and culturally significant Clear Lake Hitch. Robinson Rancheria and other Clear Lake Tribes, for whom the Hitch are a sacred species of fish and traditional food source, will lead the project with the support of UC Berkeley researchers. This team will recruit and train Tribal youth in interview techniques, ArcGIS, and audio/visual recording and editing software to gather Tribal Elders’ stories about the Hitch, land use histories in and around Clear Lake, and related archival materials. These materials will then be curated on the Esri platform and, through a process of Tribal review, made available online to the public. Possible additional outcomes, depending on Tribal priorities, include additional trainings in GIS and data management, fisheries ecology and watershed management experience, and certification in these skills with Robinson Rancher

The recovery of documentation and the organization of in-person gatherings to collect oral histories associated with the history of racial violence in Forsyth County, Ga. The oral histories would be made available online via a portal, along with an interactive map and educational materials.

This project seeks to safeguard cultural resources by recovering and documenting oral histories of the Forsyth Expulsion with the community of descendents and the wider diaspora of people impacted by this historical legacy, many of whom are now navigating the disproportionate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The racial violence directed toward the Black community in Forsyth County, Georgia, at the turn of the 20th century and in the decades following, intended to erase all evidence of a substantial and vibrant Black community life in the county. The Expulsion created a diaspora resulting in significant cultural loss for the community, including burnt and hidden property records and a disconnect from violent physical expulsion from the land they previously owned and resided on.

The recording of 10 oral history interviews detailing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Spanish-speaking and Indigenous language-speaking communities in Kansas. The project would transcribe and translate the oral histories and make them available online in addition to hosting team and community workshops, producing teaching materials, and creating presentations and publications to share findings.

Alce su Voz (‘Speak Out’), a Kansas-based organization that supports health equity for Spanish speakers and speakers of indigenous languages, will integrate the community practice of testimonio with the Wichita Public Library’s “Tell Your COVID Story” project. The objectives of the proposed project are to a) create and archive a collection of video-recorded pandemic oral histories shared by Spanish speakers and speakers of Latin American indigenous languages who reside in the state of Kansas, (b) produce short videos of segments of those stories for public dissemination, and (c) curate the collection for a variety of public, educational and research purposes. This process will be supported through collaboration with faculty in Wichita State University’s departments of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures and History, and a national team of applied linguists whose scholarship focuses on the intersection between language and health equity for speakers of minoritized languages.

Recording 20 oral history interviews to document the impacts of and adaptations to climate change on cultural heritage and folklife in two desert regions of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

ClimateLore, a program of Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA) in partnership with Tohono O’odham Young Voices Podcast (Tucson, AZ) and La Semilla Food Center (Anthony, NM), aims to advance cultural and community climate resilience in the US-Mexico borderlands by documenting climate-related impacts on folk, traditional, and Indigenous communities. The project seeks to highlight practices of mitigation and adaptation within these communities, which are vulnerable to losing livelihoods, cultural practices, and spiritual sites due to heat, prolonged drought, invasive species, climate migration and other threats to food security, water availability, plant and animal species, and access to sacred sites, traditional knowledge, and traditional homelands. Documentation will take the form of oral histories to be collected by partner organizations within two specific communities: 1) Members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, living both on and off reservation land in Arizona; and 2) Residents of Pa

The recording of 30 oral history interviews in English and Spanish that document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Latinx community in the Richman neighborhood of California. The project would translate, transcribe, and index interviews and make them available online and host community events to share the deliverables.

Pandemic Voces is a community-based oral history project that will record the COVID-19 stories of this predominantly Latinx, Spanish-speaking, often undocumented and underserved community in Fullerton, CA. Like Latinx communities across America, the pandemic hit Richman residents hard with loss of jobs, high rates of exposure as essential workers, challenges providing pandemic and vaccine information to residents, technology barriers for students, and the stress and mental toll that resulted from these events. The Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History (COPH) will work closely with the Center for Healthy Neighborhoods (CHN) to make connections with local residents and record 30 oral history interviews (~20 in Spanish) which will be available on a searchable website. Stories of formal and informal assistance provided by community organizations will also be recorded. The stories of struggle and resilience in underserved communities like Richman must not be forgotten.

Training students, ages 14 to 20, to conduct and record 45 video oral history interviews with elders in Taos, N.M.

With the support of this grant, different groups of young learners (aged 14-20) will, under the guidance and tutelage of TK1 professional staff and a multi-stakeholder Advisory Committee, capture the resilience and cultural grandeur of our region by gathering oral histories. With an innovative, intergenerational knowledge-sharing process at its heart, this project will feature our youth soliciting and receiving the stories and experiences of the elders of their own cultural groups. As exemplars and leaders of our three land-based cultures, what can our elders tell us about cultures navigating and changing in their responses to both climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic? What experience and wisdom do today’s youth need to strengthen their own cultures?