Editing Oral history (section)

== Legal interpretations ==
In 1997, the [[Supreme Court of Canada]], in the ''[[Delgamuukw v. British Columbia]]'' trial, ruled that, in the context of "[[Aboriginal title]]" claims, oral histories were just as important as written testimony.

Writers who use oral history have often discussed its relationship to historical truth. [[Gilda O'Neill]] writes in ''Lost Voices'', an oral history of [[East End of London|East End]] hop-pickers: "I began to worry. Were the women's, and my, memories true or were they just stories? I realised that I had no 'innocent' sources of evidence – facts. I had, instead, the stories and their tellers' reasons for remembering in their own particular ways.'<ref>{{cite book |author=Gilda O'Neill |publisher=Arrow |title=Lost Voices |isbn=978-0-09-949836-0 |page=146 |year=2006}}</ref> [[Duncan Barrett]], one of the co-authors of ''[[The Sugar Girls]]'' describes some of the perils of relying on oral history accounts: "On two occasions, it became clear that a subject was trying to mislead us about what happened – telling a self-deprecating story in one interview, and then presenting a different, and more flattering, version of events when we tried to follow it up. ... often our interviewees were keen to persuade us of a certain interpretation of the past, supporting broad, sweeping comments about historical change with specific stories from their lives."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/oral-history-creative-non-fiction-telling-the-lives-of-the-sugar-girls/ |title=Oral History & Creative Non-Fiction: Telling the Lives of the Sugar Girls |publisher=History Workshop Online |date=11 March 2012 |access-date=2012-03-11}}</ref> [[Alessandro Portelli]] argues that oral history is valuable nevertheless: "it tells us less about events as such than about their meaning [...] the unique and precious element which oral sources force upon the historian ... is the speaker's subjectivity."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Portelli |first1=Alessandro |title=The Peculiarities of Oral History |journal=History Workshop Journal |volume=12(1) |issue=1981 |pages=96–107}}</ref>

Regarding the accuracy of oral history, Jean-Loup Gassend concludes in the book ''Autopsy of a Battle'', "I found that each witness account can be broken down into two parts: 1) descriptions of events that the witness participated in directly, and 2) descriptions of events that the witness did not actually participate in, but that he heard about from other sources. The distinction between these two parts of a witness account is of the highest importance. I noted that concerning events that the witnesses participated in, the information provided was surprisingly reliable, as was confirmed by comparison with other sources. The imprecision or mistakes usually concerned numbers, ranks, and dates, the first two tending to become inflated with time. Concerning events that the witness had not participated in personally, the information was only as reliable as whatever the source of information had been (various rumors); that is to say, it was often very unreliable and I usually discarded such information."<ref>{{cite book |author=Jean-Loup Gassend |publisher=Schiffer |title=Autopsy of a Battle, the Allied Liberation of the French Riviera, August September 1944 |isbn=978-0-7643-4580-7 |page=12 |date=February 2014}}</ref>

In 2006, American historian [[Caroline Elkins]] published ''[[Imperial Reckoning]]: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya'', detailing the [[Mau Mau Uprising]] against [[Kenya Colony|British rule]] and its suppression by the colonial government. The work received both praise and criticism over its usage of oral testimony from Kenyans. Three years later in 2009, a group of Kenyans who had been interned in concentration camps during the rebellion by the colonial authorities filed a lawsuit against the [[Government of the United Kingdom|British government]].<ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-22797624 |title=Mau Mau uprising: Kenya's Victims |date=6 June 2013 |access-date=25 October 2019 |language=en-GB}}</ref><ref name="Parry 2016">{{Cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/news/2016/aug/18/uncovering-truth-british-empire-caroline-elkins-mau-mau |title=Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire {{!}} Marc Parry|last=Parry|first=Marc|date=18 August 2016|work=The Guardian|access-date=7 November 2017|language=en-GB|issn=0261-3077}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/19/deaths-during-mau-mau-emergency |title=Letters: Deaths during the Mau Mau emergency |date=18 June 2010 |work=The Guardian |access-date=25 October 2019 |language=en-GB |issn=0261-3077}}</ref> The case, known as ''Mutua and Five Others versus the [[Foreign and Commonwealth Office]]'', was heard at the [[High Court of Justice]] in [[London]] with the [[Richard McCombe|Honourable Justice McCombe]] presiding. Oral testimony detailing abuses by colonial officials, recorded by Elkins in ''Imperial Reckoning'', was cited as evidence by the prosecution during the case, British lawyer [[Martyn Day (lawyer)|Martyn Day]] and the [[Kenya Human Rights Commission]]. During the trial, over the course of [[Discovery (law)|discovery]] the FCO discovered some 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files that validated Elkins' claims in ''Imperial Reckoning'' and provided new evidence supporting the claimants' case. McCombe eventually ruled in the Kenyan claimants' favor, stressing the "substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses".<ref name="Parry 2016" /><ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.leighday.co.uk/International/Further-insights/Detailed-case-studies/The-Mau-Mau-claims/Hanslope-Park-disclosure |title=The Mau Mau Claims – Hanslope Park |website=leighday.co.uk |access-date=25 October 2019}}</ref>