This year the OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center curated a new exhibit featuring its oral history program – and the hundreds of interviews within its collections – and the OMA and OSQA were highlighted!
Exhibit Information:
Title: “Catching Stories: The Oral History Tradition at Oregon State University ”
Dates: November 2016 – March 2017
Location: Oregon State University Special Collections and Archives Research Center exhibit foyer
Curators: Tiah Edmunson-Morton, Chris Petersen, and Natalia Fernandez, OSU Special Collections and Archives Research Center
For more information about SCARC Oral History Program, check out the website below:
Exhibit Special Features – Listening Stations with Clips of Interviewees’ Stories
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Listening Stations!
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OMA and OSQA
The Oregon Multicultural Archives (OMA) and OSU Queer Archives (OSQA) pro-actively reach out to African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and Native American communities, as well as LGBTQ+ people within OSU and Corvallis, to add their voices to the archives. In addition, both the OMA and OSQA collaborate with local community members and OSU students on projects to train them to conduct interviews and become active participants in creating a more diverse and inclusive historical record.
Oral history collections within the OMA include the stories of Japanese Americans living in Lane County (OH 15); African American railroad porters who were employed in Oregon during the 1940s and 1950s (OH 29); staff members of the Immigrant & Refugee Community Organization Asian Family Center in Portland (OH 30); members of the Latino/a community in central Oregon, Yamhill County, and the town of Canby (OH 32); staff of the Milagro theatre in Portland (OH 31); and interviews with members of the Coquille and Siletz tribes (OH 12). Another OMA collection is the OSU Cultural Centers Oral History Collection (OH 21) that documents the work-related as well as personal experience of staff members from various cultural centers.
The general OMA oral history collection (OH 18) interviews include, but are not limited to: an interview with a family who lived at Colegio César Chávez during the late 1970s/early 1980s; individual interviews with Rev. Alcena Boozer and Carl Deiz, two long time African American Portland residents; a three-part interview with Dr. Jean Moule, OSU College of Education Emeritus Professor; a student panel featuring the stories of first generation college students; and interviews with some of OSU’s first black men’s basketball and football team players. The OSQA oral history collection (OH 34), created in 2015, includes the voices of staff of OSU’s Pride Center and the organization SOL, as well as a set of interviews featuring LGBTQ+ 1990s and 2000s Benton County area activists and community members.