Interviewing Radical Elders

Sandy Polishuk

As a graduate student I researched a fascinating local woman, clearly important to history and dead only twenty years, but no one had bothered to interview her while she was alive. I could find documents and I could figure out the where and when, but I was interested in story. I was frustrated by its absence.1 Frustration turned to anger and anger finally into ambition: to interview people around me who were important to history before their stories died with them.	1
As a peace and human rights activist myself, I have found inspiration and wisdom from my elders, so my interest has been primarily in interviews with activists. Activists, for the most part, spend their time organizing, not writing their memoirs. Too few of the ephemeral documents of activism—flyers and the like—make it into archives. Many of the decisions of activists are made verbally, at meetings without minutes or even over the telephone. Much of this history dies with the participants unless oral historians intervene. I now have several sets of taped interviews and a book manuscript based on the life of Julia Ruuttila, a labor journalist and labor, peace, and human rights activist in Oregon for over fifty years, and I co-produced a slide-tape/video on women who worked in the local shipyards during World War II.2	2
But it soon became clear to me that I could not interview all those deserving of attention on my own. I attempted to convince other activists to conduct interviews but discovered, though they possessed the enthusiasm and the background, they could not seem to make the time. Finally, Melissa Kesler Gilbert, of Portland State University (PSU), suggested I teach a class and use the students as interviewers. They would be compelled to do the work by their need for a grade. When I accepted her offer, my motivation was purely selfish: building the archive. I had not given much thought to how the students would be affected.	3
One of the most rewarding aspects of oral history is the intimacy the situation creates between the participants. It is easy to understand how the elder activist is seduced by the attention, recognition, and opportunity to influence a young mind. But a good interview demands an intensity of listening that draws the interviewer into the magic as well. Most of my students form strong bonds with their narrators as they begin to understand history in a new way: through the eyes of a participant. Their vision of the past as a record remote from contemporary life is forever changed; it becomes a dynamic unfolding that encompasses, affects, and is effected by ordinary people.	4
My course, "Radical Elders," is part of the Senior Capstone program at PSU, a program designed to help students make the transition to the "real" world during their senior year and to encourage involvement in the community while creating a product or a tangible outcome. The papers my students write and the interviews they tape live beyond the course and are available to the public at the Oregon Historical Society (OHS) Library.3 This is usually the first time that their work has had such meaning and potential impact. As a result they take the work very seriously.	5
The Capstone program also strives to enhance students' ability to collaborate "with persons from different fields of specialization."4 In the first three years of teaching I had only one history major. Students came from such disparate departments as computer science, philosophy, and education. Oral history is particularly well suited to those who think they do not like history; it makes the past come alive, makes students realize that history is created every day by people.	. . .