 ThinkTekAway. Civil engagement lives here. What a surprise we have for you at the two o'clock block here on a given Friday. This is likable science, but science is not just limited to technical science. It sometimes contains, includes, refers to social science. Social science like they have at the social science school at UH Manoa. We have a representative of that department here. The oral history department, the founder and progenitor of the modern version, right? Of the center for oral history, Daviana McGregor. I'm just a new director. New director, okay, okay, okay. But you know, can you tell me, it's really important that we know about this. Where did it get established? When did it get established? How did it get established and how did it get established at UH Manoa? Well, the state legislature wanted to have a center for oral history established. And originally it was in the Foundation for History and Humanities. But in 1976, I worked with other colleagues, actually Koji Ariyoshi and Carol Takahashi. We worked to have the center transferred to the University of Hawaii, Manoa. And the first director actually was Chad Taniguchi. And it was under the Department of Ethnic Studies, well, we were a program at the time. And then in 1983, the center transferred to the Social Sciences Research Institute. And then just this year in 2018, the center is now again back in the Department of Ethnic Studies. And I've been made the director in the interim. In 1983, when it transferred to the Social Sciences Research Center, the director was Warren Nishimoto. And he served as the director until 2017. So it's a part of the School of Social Sciences. And it's like every other school, or rather center, so to speak, in the Department of Social Sciences. Am I right? Yeah. Well, it's actually a college of social sciences. College of social sciences. Yeah. We're one of the centers. There are other centers like the Public Policy Center, for example. Right. Which runs the Energy Policy Forum and all that. Right. And so, yeah, the Center for Oral History is one of those centers. Okay. So who's on top? Is it Denise Conan? Is she right on top of you? Correct. Yeah. Denise Conan is the dean for College of Social Sciences. Okay. Now we're going to find out. This is my big question. I asked you this on the phone, too. I'm going to find out what is oral history? Because, you know, an uninitiated person, like my own self, I would say, how do you keep history if it's oral? I mean, you can't keep on telling the story. But no, that's not it. That's the wrong concept. It's oral, and then you document people. Yes. Tell me how it works. Well, you know, you have a plan for a topic or someone whose life history you want to document or a key event in history. And so you make a plan to, you know, what kind of questions you want to ask and you get someone who narrates the story about their life involvement in a particular time or place or event. And then you get that person's permission to transcribe and they review it. And after they look at the record of it, then we post it on Scholarspace at UH Manoa Hamilton Library, so it's online. And we have, under Warren Nishimoto and Chad Teriguchi, there are 800 interviews that were done of men and women in Hawaii and over 30,000 pages of transcripts that were approved for sharing with the broader public. This is since when? I mean, when did this collect? Since 1976. That's the first time. Yeah, that we started. I was saying, I don't know if this fits in the right context, but around that time there was a renaissance in Hawaiian culture. Yes. And it seems to me just as an observer that this is part of that renaissance, am I right? Yeah, I think Hawaiian culture and I think a consciousness among local people about having our history told our way. In fact, when our Department of Ethics Studies got founded, that was our slogan, our history, our way. And we recognized that a lot of history that was recorded and written was only told from the point of view of those in authority and controlled oligarchy that had controlled Hawaii during the territorial period. And so we wanted to document the stories of everyday men and women and all the contributions that working people and farmers and fishers made to building Hawaii and not just have one perspective of our history. Oh, that's so valuable and it must be so rich to be an NYU job. But it's not limited to native Hawaiian culture. No, not at all. It's like all cultures. Yes. This is really valuable. So like our first project was the history of Waialua and Haleiva. We have histories of the native Hawaiian community, but also Filipino community, Japanese community, Portuguese community, and many of them shared their experiences working for the plantation. And it was at a critical time when the plantation was closing down in Waialua. So it was really important to document the histories and the experiences of the people on the plantation at that critical moment in time. And the other thing is they were getting older. Yes. This is a consideration. Of course. If I was taking oral history, I would line everybody up in terms of age. Yes. I would talk to the oldest ones first. And if you were infirming in any way, you jumped in the beginning in front of the line. Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And one of the other stories that we did was the Filipino labor strike, Hana Pepe. That was one of the second projects that we did. But over the years, we've looked at people in different occupations, teachers, store owners, and other kinds of businessmen. And we've done histories of communities in transition. Like this is, I brought this example. Well, let's talk about this. What is this book? Well, so this is an example. I can't lift it. It's heavy. It's fine for it. It's a history of Waikiki in transition. And it goes from 1900 to 1985, because I think the people who we were interviewing, their memories went back as far as 1900. And then it has photos that we collect. First, we do a background history and we do a timeline of if it's a community, then the history of the community and changes in the community. And then this is the transcribed interview. So it has the question and there we spot. This is strictly a transcription. Yeah. It looks like a typed page is what it looks like. Yeah. And this, though, has also been put on the Internet and it's available at Scholarspace at UH Hamilton Library. So this is volume four of, you know, four volumes. So there's four volumes of just this period. And the photographs are the people that were interviewed. People that were interviewed, yeah. And then we also collect pictures that people we interviewed shared of the area as well. We did Waipio Valley also and Kakaako. Don't put it away. I don't want to embarrass you, but I would like to ask you to find a paragraph and read it to us so we can get the feeling of what it reads like. Okay. So let's see. Let's see. They're talking about Crab. Let's see. Oh, here, Limu. Did a lot of the neighborhood women pick Limu. Yes. But when it was time to pick, everybody went out and picked the same time. Oh, yes. The crowd, but the different Hawaiians would go out and they pick and they clean it. Whenever you go out to help them pick, they divide the Limu. So did they have seasons when you could pick? Yes. There were seasons for different types. Right in that bay, the seasons. And I'm telling you when the crabs, the big white crabs were done. Oh, you ought to see. They were just, it was, especially was crab season when they came in. And oh, they came in by the thousands. So we would line up on the beach and we'd have these long, actually they used to take sheets and strip them. We saved the strip. And when the wave brings them in, we would take it and we'd scoop the water and roll the crabs on the dry part of the shore from the beach. With the sheets, yeah, with the sheets, just scoop them. Then the others who were on the other side would gather all the crabs and put them in the bags. You know, it strikes me. I mean, of course, there's so much to be gained by going through that. And in fact, parsing out that language is what are we really talking about here? But the one thing that strikes me, Daviana, is that life in those days was so completely different than our lives, all of our lives today. That's right. It's a disconnect of sorts. And you have to travel through the time machine, through the Proustian keyhole, as the case may be, and find, you know, our roots, our childhood and their childhood. It's a trip. It's a voyage. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, in Hawaii today, about 45% of the people who live here were not born and raised here. So having this kind of community history is a way to help build a common identity and a sense of legacy here in the islands, so that whether you were born here or not, you have a way to begin to connect to the stories and the histories of the people who were, you know, living here before you. Do you find there's redundancy in there? Do you find that the histories of one person and another are similar? You find that the one, well, I'll ask one question at a time, and we'll explore. Do you find that, you know, there are common touch points in one history and another? Well, I think maybe when you talk about plantation era, you know, there's a lot of, maybe, commonalities about the, you know, the struggle and the hardship and the role of the lunas, for example, and how hard it was in waking up early. And, you know, the hardships there. So that probably is a theme that runs throughout in plantation stories. Myself, I'm now involved in an oral history of people who picked limu. That's why it's interesting that I open it to that page. Because our limu areas, you know, the seaweed areas are being impacted very seriously from pollution, from runoff, from like things like chemicals from golf courses going to the ocean and contaminating the limu. And, or sediment running into the ocean, more sediment than, you know, normal in the seasonal. So we have a group of kupuna who are on every island, who are practitioners and taking care of those limu areas, reseeding where necessary. And so we've been interviewing them. And of course, they each come from a different island, so they each have different stories to tell. But when I ask them about, oh, how do you prepare it, it's very similar preparation, you know, how they prepare the imu to make it ono to eat. So if I wanted to do research, and I wanted to learn about the way people spent their day, you know, it was like a documentary kind of research. It'd be fiction, but it would be exactly how people spent their day. I could go into this book, or any of the four volumes here, and I could study what they did all day. And then I could be really accurate, and I could reflect, you know, how it was, couldn't I? So is this available to me? Can I go look at this? Yes. As I said, online, at Scholar Space. Yeah, okay. Well, you know, to me, that's very valuable. I'm just a comment on the Descendants movie. Descendants movie, to me, it was skin deep. And sure, there were some things in there we all know about and appreciate and all that. But, you know, the rule against perpetuities and holding of land and kawaii and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in fact, I don't think they captured it the way a Hawaii producer-director team might have captured it. They had some kind of daily experience kind of, you know, narrative about what was going on. And I could see doing the Descendants, but moving it back into 1930 or so. Oh, yes. Looking at what you have online, and really coming down with a really valuable piece of work. I mean, narrative would be fictional, but it would be very close to the way it was, which we don't know, because we forgot already how it worked. Yeah, right. The other thing I was going to ask you is now, 1900s to 1985, in there there is some significant historic events that took place in Hawaii. I mean, World War II, for example. Yeah. And of course, a lot of the statehood, a lot of the, you know, huge social changes that have happened. Yeah. I mean, it's been a very, very period. Correct. Do you find that these oral histories include discussions of those things? Yes. These are made to look at the transition that this area, Waikiki, went through and what happened to the families when the development occurred? Because I don't think, I mean, most of the people who were interviewed no longer live in Waikiki, but they were recalling what it was like to grow up there. But, you know, it's only memories because they no longer live in that area. And, you know, this is an experience common in a lot of people, especially on shorefront, ocean fronts, have no longer can afford to live in that area because the property taxes got so high. And so, you know, they have been displaced. And you need to talk to those original families to get a sense of what that area was originally. You know, it's only part of our imagination at this point. Yeah. But there is a sea change thing here. Yes, true. I mean, if I went back to the 1900s stories, they'd be down at Copilani Park and they'd be wearing their Sunday frilly dresses. Yeah. And the gentlemen would be on the arm and they'd be riding horses and having picnics with umbrellas and all this. Right in 1900. I mean, I don't know if you have pictures of that, but that would be my imagination of what, you know, the oral history would be like in that period. Well, as time went on, maybe they weren't along the water so much. They weren't in Copilani Park. Their lives had changed from generation to generation. And I can track that here, can I? Yeah, I think so, yes. That would be really interesting. There's a good research start for anybody who really wants to understand the sea changes in Hawaii. Yes. That's right. I mean, they're talking about thousands of crabs coming in. You don't have that anymore at Waikiki. You know, maybe like a Hanna, but not Waikiki. I have a million questions to ask you, Daviana. But I'm going to have to hold up for one minute while we take this little quick break. In the fullness of time, you know, this was in 85 years. It won't be long. It'll be one minute. Okay. Thank you. Hello and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly. Today we are playing two truths and a lie, and I will tell you two truths and you will tell me which one is the lie. Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly with Out of the Comfort Zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Hawaiian Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all of your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaiian Uniform. Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Okay, we are so delighted to be here with David Adam McGregor, the director of the Oral History Center in the College of Social Sciences at UH Manoa. She has a trove, a treasure trove of history. So just to clarify, if you didn't get it before, oral history is oral, but the idea in the center is to memorialize it. So we capture it so it doesn't run away into the nether. Okay, and so we're collecting this in the center. And we have a pretty good collection now, thousands of these oral history interviews. Many of the people, I'm sure, have died by now, yeah. Yes, unfortunately, yes. That's true. So tell me, you know, who comes and sees it? I can look at it on my internet, right here in the studio. I can go look at it. Right. But do you have people coming around? Do you know how popular these are? Who's looking? Yeah, well, we get a report on the internet scholar space. So, you know, there's thousands of people who look at it every month and, you know, over the whole collection, which is the 800 interviews, 30,000 pages. But so, yeah, we get a sense. And it's from all over the world, really. I think a lot of scholars are looking at, if they're doing research on a particular topic, then this is really a great resource for them. You know, if they're doing, if they were doing Waikiki or tourism, this would be wonderful to look at. It's a great start, isn't it? Yeah, impact. We did a story about World War II survivors. We did a story about the tsunami survivors. And so, yeah, there's a lot of really important primary data material that's in the collection and available through the scholar space. You know about a Wahoo cemetery and the Pupu dinner? Sort of, yes. I'll tell you. I go every year. Oh, okay. In a Wahoo cemetery, it's an old cemetery. They stopped putting bodies in it a long time ago. But the Mission Houses Museum, okay, conducts this Pupu event. Oh, okay. And they take you around from grave to grave. And they have an actor at each of these half a dozen graves that you go visit. And the actor has a script written by people who research off this kind of material. And the actor tells you what his life was like, or her life. Okay, what I find interesting though is that, you know, we don't realize that back in the day, there weren't that many people here. And so, you talk to one person buried in the cemetery. And then you go down the other side of the cemetery and talk to another person. And they knew each other. You're part of the same community. They may even not have liked each other. But I just wonder if, in the case of these oral histories, they refer to each other. They talk about their lives and how their lives touched others. And then you have others whose lives touched them. Right, right. Yeah, I think so. Probably there's a collection of political leaders. So definitely that would happen. And you have that exchange. Also, one of our ongoing projects is to interview the delegates to the 1978 Constitutional Convention. So, of course, they would interface with each other as well. That's so interesting. Yeah, we're hoping to get as many delegates as possible to contribute to this project. Well, there might be another con con. You have to be out there. That actually, you know, provokes my next question is, what's the ongoing process? Are you out there Monday through Friday with your pad or your recorder interviewing people so that they can be put in a modern version, a modern, you know, book, a collection of these interviews? Well, as I said, there's myself and then I have a graduate researcher and two undergraduate assistants. So we've been doing interviews, as I said, of the Kupuna who gather Limu and then in conjunction with the Limu Hui. Right now. And they're being accumulated and they're on the website also. Well, we are in the process now transcribing the interviews that we did in March. And then when they're finished, we will share it with them and then they will have the opportunity to decide what goes in and what comes out if they want everything taken out. And then we'll put that collection on the transcription. We'll go on Scholarspace. But the video that we took, we are arranging to hopefully have it on the moving image archive at Ulu Ulu at West Oahu so that if they want to arrange to see the video of it, then they can do so through that archive and that repository. So we're partnering with a lot of different repositories. Yeah, really lighting me up now when you say video, yeah. Because I told you in the break, you know, I'm interested in a Steven Spielberg show-up project which means Holocaust. Where he interviewed thousands, video interviewed thousands of people, you know, who survived. And the deal there, by the way, is they don't show the video until the individual dies. It's a matter of privacy. And, you know, just good taste. You know, one question comes to mind is if people decide they really rather not, if they rather not you actually publish their interview, or... They're prerogative. You just, you pull it. Yes. That's the end of that. Yeah, it's only up to them. And, you know, maybe they want it just for their family and that's fine. And some people do, while limited. So in the case of Spielberg, they keep these videos. The videos are all done by students or interns, that sort of thing, as far as I know. And they are, they follow, there's a pattern of questions. Of course, they never have the same questions as another, they want to get the same kinds of information. So how do you do this? I mean, if I said to you, Daviana, I want to, I like interviewing people. I really, I really like it. Yeah, yeah, you're very good at it. Can I actually go down and interview people? This would be interesting. Well, we would want you to go through a training. You know, we're going to start offering workshops so that you could have a more systematic approach to it. There's a oral history association and they have a set of best practices to follow. To protect the narrator and make sure that the narrator understands that they have the right to, you know, recall whatever they say or not to have published what they want. But also if they want to, then to fully participate and let it be, you know, available to the public. So there are standards to follow and just to uphold everybody's, you know, respect and treat their memories with dignity that it deserves. So that's a process that we will go through. So this is an ongoing living process of finding people who are willing to do it, finding people who'd be interesting and memorializing the history of Hawaii, which is so precious really to us all. Yeah, so another thing we're doing, since these are, you know, on the Internet, we wanted to highlight and spotlight some of the stories. And so we were working with Bill Dorman in the conversation at KHPR, and we were going to be doing podcasts. We have funding from Hawaii Committee for Humanities to do a set of six podcasts in this year. And where we go through and we excerpt some of the memories there and we have the voices and we leave together a podcast about that story. Our first one's going to be about the tsunami of 1946. And so we have different memories about, you know, how, you know, when they saw it, they didn't know what was happening. People were going down to the beach to get fish. They were running up the road, you know, and then in the aftermath, what, how they recovered. So we wanted to tell that story. And there's been a lot of attention to, with the volcano erupting, every time there's an earthquake, we hear, oh, there was no tsunami generated, which you're very fortunate for, because if there was a tsunami generated, we would only have 15 minutes to respond. And so in a way, we'd be in the same situation that people found themselves in on April 1st, 1946. No warning. They only begin to see the ocean receding, extraordinary, receding of the ocean. And then they have to escape to run to the hills. So first person narrative. Yes, yes. So they're telling their stories, you know, some of them were just in grade school at the time because they were being interviewed currently. And, you know, they didn't know what was going on, and they had to run up the road to escape the tidal wave as it was coming in. They were running up, you know, in Hilo. So you're talking about somebody looking at the raw research material, the interviews, and then writing it up in some way as a story. Yeah, extracting the, and then we'll find that section of the tape and then we're going to extract it and then weave together a podcast from that story. Oh, that'd be great. Oh, so you're taking the sound for Bill Dorey? Right, yeah. Oh, I love it, I love it. Because we don't, those were just audio. You feel the scare when lying on the floor sometime, you just said it to me? Yeah, so we'll, and then after we do the story, we're going to put it on our website so people can go and access it. So we figured by doing that, people would then become more aware of what we have and it would, you know, it makes it more accessible to the public. Yeah, and the public will find a continuing interest in it, which is good for the center and good for the whole notion. Yeah, and to let us know if there are other individuals we should be interviewing in stories that we should be following. I got a call about documenting the history of the painted church in Honownau in Kona today, so we're talking with someone about that. I was there about 60 days ago, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I guess they reconstructed the whole church, but they didn't restore the paintings. The paintings, you know, are, I guess, need to be... There's so many things like that. And unless you capture it, you know, it's... Yeah. So, you know, what I've learned with you today here, Daviana, is that it's not just social science, it's also science. Just like Ethan Allen, the regular host of the show is always doing, it's likable science. And that means that you have to move with the times. You have to keep on finding people, whatever means, and there's probably a lot of ways you can find people. It's not only word of mouth, it's more than that. And then, if you put this on the web, that means you can search using searches, so I can search for the tsunami, I can search for the painted church, and I can find it among thousands of pages of transcript. Correct. Yes. And then you spoke today about video, which always excites me, and you can do video just like Steven Spielberg of the people that give you these interviews. Yes. So we're going to do with the video, because it's right along our line, isn't it? Yeah. Well, again, the video we want to make small stories, storylines, we have another part of our project is our professor Tai Tengan has a field school in our history of Wailua, and the students that work with him in that field school have done story maps. So they have the individual, and they show the person is talking in the video of that person, and then they show the place that the person is talking about, and they also show a map of where it's located. So it gives us new dimensions to make it more visible, and then you can also see the person, hear the words, and it's just multifaceted. It's really wonderful. Totally charming. A treasure for Hawaii. Yes. You should all know about it, and look at it, and take advantage of it, read and write about it, and create a literature around it. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. It's been wonderful to talk to you. Aloha.