Font Size: 

In recent years more and more oral history projects have focused on documenting the lived experiences of individuals and communities impacted by state-inflicted violence and systemic racism. For example, Fanny Garcia’s Separated: An Oral History Project documents the stories of immigrant parents forcibly separated from their children at the U.S./Mexico border under the Trump Administration’s Zero Tolerance policy. While Alissa Rae Funderburk’s work at the Margaret Walker Center in Jackson, Mississippi  brings her into contact with Black oral histories which consistently demonstrate the economic disadvantages of racism that often impact the narrators that participate in these projects. In this paper, we will provide a case study of how narrator compensation in Separated: An Oral History Project served as a symbolic gesture of restitution for families who contributed their oral histories to the project. Through specific project examples, we will also explore how and why narrator compensation as a form of reparations and restitution should be considered in projects focused on documenting instances of state-inflicted violence and systemic racism which has deprived individuals of basic human rights and economic stability. Some of the questions we seek to answer are: What is the role of oral history in reparations and restitution for survivors of harm? How is narrator compensation an acknowledgement of the harm inflicted? How and when does the practice of narrator compensation intersect with the movements for reparations and restitution?

narrator compensation; reparations; restitution; immigration; state-inflicted violence; slavery; systemic racism; human rights