Tangent

On reflecting on the question I posed in my previous blog, what knowledge should be preserved for future generations I am stuck upon yet another conundrum: what particular knowledge found in the black river valley is of importance for future generations to know? Take topic that I chose to research, logging in the black river valley for example. Why should anyone care about what kind tools some old lumberjack from rural Vermont used to buck trees out of the woods? How is this going to be useful to my grandchildren who would be most likely better served by learning how to program cell phones than use a crosscut saw? I pose these questions rhetorically; personally I feel the value is intrinsic to the to the knowledge and the purpose for these project is self-evident - simply to hear the stories that they generate.

My own feeling aside, these questions still remain. What is the importance of doing this work? I find myself surprisingly ill equipped to answer these questions. Some obvious answers come to mind – to preserve a historical record, to understand the past, to learn from our elders – but none of these answers feel truly genuine to me. They seem more like excuses to gather stories than anything else. They lack a sense of validity, because there is no answer the question of why. Why should we preserve the historical record or learn anything from our elders? What do they know that we don’t know, that we should know?

I think it is the unquie perspective that oral history shows us that provide the value in the work. We want to glimpse the world through their eyes that lived in the past, to see the dirt road and horse drawn carriages, the old mills and dour New England fashion. We crave this historical perceptive so that we can compare it to our own present perspective, curious to see how our cultural context has evolved. If we can learn about how people thought, spoke, lived and loved in our recent past, then it is possible to apply this knowledge; if we can learn how cultural perceptions changed over in the past, then maybe we can learn how to change cutural percptions in the presant Useing this knowledge will help us understand and shape the ever looming future. The value that oral history holds for future generations is more than just the stories themseves- these stories to teach us how cultural and personal perceptions change over time and prepare us to create our own shift in ideology.