Navajo Oral History Project from Gathering of Tribes

This session is an overview of the Navajo Oral History project from Gathering of Tribes, including a short film with testimonials about the importance of the project from Navajo community members and the oral history interviewers who work on the project. The goal of the Navajo Oral History project is to create a new database of names of Navajo people and their ancestors so family members can do more in-depth research in the future. In communities with written historical documents, this work is done by taking names from government, church, community, and other records and entering them into a database, sometimes called "indexing." With Navajo community knowledge being orally transmitted, this project will help families record and document this information from the living holders of historical knowledge: community elders. The information is compiled into a report and returned to the interviewee to keep for their records, as well as entered into a database for future access.