Article body

In Winter 2022, as I taught my last ethnography course as a faculty member in Memorial University’s Department of Folklore, I found myself questioning how well much of Folklore’s disciplinary foundation – its theoretical base and methodologies – will serve folklorists and their communities in the future. I was particularly moved by the powerful presentations Diana Baird N’Diaye, Anand Prahlad, and John W. Roberts delivered as part of the Francis Lee Utley Memorial Panel on Race and Racism and the Study of Folklore at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society. Together N’Diaye, Prahlad and Roberts argued strongly that folklorists must continue to rethink core concepts and methodologies in Folklore Studies; in Roberts’s words, folklorists must adopt “a more energized and politically engaged stance toward our work as folklorists by developing new approaches and methodologies for studying American vernacular traditions both within and between groups” (Roberts 2021: 270). Focused on anti-racism in the American context (the Utley panel took place five months after police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020), the panelists highlighted the need to recognize, as Prahlad noted, “the relationships between folklore studies and the systems of racism, white supremacy, and oppression that Black people have been protesting since the colonial period and people across the United States have joined to protest in recent months” (2021: 258). Prahlad continued, “In American folklore studies, for example, until recently, there has been little emphasis on the fact that the field of folklore evolved during the Atlantic slave trade or that its basic methodologies and ideological frameworks evolved out of colonialism and empire building” (2021: 259). He noted that earlier folklorists’ focus on “lower-class and exotic people” […] reinforced their whiteness, power, and privilege by erasing it, thereby establishing it as the norm and as the only legitimate point of reference” (Prahlad 2021: 260). He pointed out that “the three basic steps in folklore study – collection, classification, and analysis – are derived from Carl Linnaeus and other scientific pioneers of the eighteenth century […] and this methodology was designed to be essentially a colonizing practice” (2021: 261).

While the panelists were speaking of anti-racism in the American context at a particular moment in 2020, their call for folklorists to diversify, decolonize, and create anti-racist folkloristics has resonance for the study of folklore throughout North America and the western world and is part of a larger demand for a review of folkloristic practices (for example, see Greenhill 2002; Greenhill and Marshall 2016; Zhang 2020; Briggs 2021). N’Diaye, Roberts, and Prahlad’s remarks helped affirm my growing conviction that folkloristics requires significant paradigm shifts in order to thrive, and perhaps even survive, into the future. Pivotal moments can also be opportunities for change, however, and the panelists’ presentations were a catalyst for me to think more deeply about folkloristic methodologies and what positive, constructive ways forward might look like as we grabble with Folklore’s colonialist past. I began to think about our responsibilities, as a discipline that was shaped by colonialization, to Indigenous scholars and communities. What alternative methodological models might work better for all of us? What follows here is my attempt to begin to answer this question by applying Indigenist research principles to a body of fieldwork I conducted at the beginning of my career. I reflect both on their applicability to conventional folklore collecting practices at the time and on what future benefits they might bring to Folklore Studies.

To think through all of this, I turn to Shawn Wilson’s conception of Indigenist research. Wilson, an Opaskwayak Cree from northern Manitoba, is author of Research is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008) and co-editor of Research & Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing through Indigenous Relationships (2019)[1]. For Wilson, “Indigenist” describes “a philosophical approach to research that centres Indigenous ontology, epistemology, and axiology (Wilson 2008). Or Ways of Knowing, Ways of Being, and Ways of Doing (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003). Indigenist research is about who we are, how we know and engage with Knowledge, and what we do as researchers, and the ways we enact relational accountability […] we’re using Indigenist to label a philosophy that includes a relational and emergent understanding of reality and Knowledge, requires a particular way of behaving on the world” (Wilson, Breen and Dupre 2019: 7). Relationship is at the centre of Indigenist research. As Wilson stresses in Research as Ceremony, “Indigenist research is all about relationships: with ourselves, one another, the land, spirit, and with ideas” (quoted in Wilson, Breen, and Dupré 2019: xii). Elaborating on the nature of this relationship, he writes: “1. The shared aspect of an Indigenous ontology and epistemology is relationality (relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality). The shared aspect of an Indigenous axiology and methodology is accountability to relationships. 2. The shared aspects of relationality and relational accountability can be put into practice through choice of research topic, methods of data collection, form of analysis and presentation of information” (Wilson 2008: 7).

In this article, I think through research in Wilson’s terms of relationship to people, place, and ideas in the context of the conventional folklore fieldwork practice I was taught as a student in the 1980s. What kinds of relationships did it create, and conversely, what kinds of relationships did it discourage or even prohibit? I conclude by returning to the issues raised by the 2020 Francis Lee Utley Memorial panelists as I reflect on what Indigenist research methods, with their emphasis on relationships with people, place and ideas, might mean for folklorists committed to moving beyond our discipline’s colonialist past and transforming our fieldwork practice. I ask what folklore research as relationship looks like when the goal is taking on the kinds of difficult challenges, such as addressing anti-racism and understanding whiteness, that the panelists see as imperative to the discipline’s future.

I applied Wilson’s principles to a body of fieldwork I completed in 1986-1987. It was the research for my 1989 PhD thesis, “Local Characters and the Community: A Case Study of Tradition and Individual Nonconformity in the Maritimes” (and it subsequently spawned two articles and seven conference presentations). Shaped by the ethnographic practices of the late 1970s and 1980s I was taught as a graduate student, this research predated the emergence of later, more reflexive and community-centred models of fieldwork (Lawless 1991, 2000; Morales and Alvarez 2022) that are now widely practiced by folklorists and have led to so much exciting work that challenges earlier academic frameworks (Orejuela and Shonekan 2018; Otero and Martínez-Rivera 2021; Fivecoate, Downs and McGriff 2021; Frandy and Cederström 2022). It also bears remembering that both subsequent folklore fieldwork practice and Indigenist research methods were significantly shaped by feminist theories and methodologies, just as my own work would be from the 1990s onward. Finally, it is also important to acknowledge that there were always folklorists who worked outside the classic methods I was taught and who offered valuable alternatives in terms of both how folklorists could understand folklore and work with communities. While the contributions of many of these individuals have since been re-evaluated and appreciated (Briggs 2012; Gillespie 2004; Tye 1993), in the 1980s figures like Zora Neale Hurston and Helen Creighton were held up in my graduate classes as examples of how not to be. I was taught that a professional folklorist always maintained a significant social distance between themselves and the people they worked with and that the recorded interview was central to the academic study of folklore. With this in mind, beginning in 1986, over the span of several months I recorded thirty-one oral interviews. I wrote a set of accompanying fieldnotes based on the interviews, as well as several informal unrecorded interviews I conducted, and on my observations of aspects of daily life. I also took photographs, scoured archival resources, and read the local newspaper from its beginnings in the 1890s to the 1980s.

When I returned to this fieldwork in 2022, I hadn’t thought of it for more than thirty years and reading through the transcripts and notes led me on a kind of time travel. I was transported back in the 1980s. I remembered how when I entered the PhD program at Memorial in September 1985, writing a thesis on local characters was the furthest thing from my mind and yet six months later, through a little serendipity, I was committed to it. A few years prior, in 1981, I had written about Watson Weaver, a local character from my childhood (Tye 1982). When I was casting around for a thesis topic, that I was required just a few weeks into my PhD program to submit a SSHRC fellowship application, my supervisor David Buchan suggested I expand this work to a larger discussion of local characters. Rather unexpectedly the SSHRC funding came through and a few months later I found myself studying local characters.

Initially Buchan conceived of my thesis as a work that would encompass all of Nova Scotia; he wanted me to compare local characters in Scottish descent communities in Cape Breton with those in German descent communities in Lunenburg County. When I arrived in the province to begin my fieldwork, however, I could not figure out how to accomplish this. I made a concerted effort to visit communities throughout the province, and consult their local museums and archives, but I could not identify an approach that would allow me to finish the thesis within years rather than decades. How do you go into a community where you have no connections and find out who doesn’t fit in? How would you get people to open up to a stranger about sometimes disturbing forms of nonconformity in their community, share gossip with you, and probe sensitive issues? I decided to work this all out by locating the first case study in my home community of Amherst. As I identified scores of local characters who had lived there over the town’s history, and began to explore their roles over time, I quickly realized that Amherst would be my only location. Although it had never been mentioned in my graduate classes, the first lesson of my PhD research was that Folklore fieldwork, or at least the kind of fieldwork I wanted to do, was deeply rooted in relationship. What is perhaps more surprising looking back, is how much this ethnography ended up teaching me about all aspects of research of relationship as Wilson outlines them. As I reflect in the following pages, it showed me how to be in relationship with place, people, and ideas in ways that profoundly shaped my life. The questions it raised about my ability as a folklorist to contribute to those relationships are ones I continue to struggle with.

How to be in relationship with place

Located near the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border, Amherst has a long history of settlement (Furlong 2001). The town is built on the edge of a large marshland that the Mi’Kmaq traditionally used as a hunting area and from the seventeenth century there were several Acadian settlements in the vicinity. In the eighteenth century the village was renamed in honour of Jeffrey Lord Amherst, commander-in-chief of the British army in North America during the Seven Years’ War. The arrival of the Intercolonial Railway in the 1870s resulted in rapid industrialization and by the early 1900’s, Amherst had transformed from a small market town to a significant manufacturing centre. Attracting workers from throughout Maritime Provinces, the population grew to 10,000 in the early years of the twentieth century, where it has generally remained ever since. These nineteenth-century residents of primarily Acadian, African, British, and Loyalist descent shaped the town’s demographics for the next century. Known during its heyday as “Busy Amherst,” the town produced a wide range of items from clothing and confectionary to building supplies, furnaces, and coffins. In industrial decline since the early twentieth century, Amherst is no longer home to any of the earlier industries; it now serves primarily as a retail and service centre for the surrounding district.

In the 1980s, the community still had many vestiges of the significant Canadian manufacturing centre it had been in the early 1900s. So much lay beneath the surface that the town was like an iceberg. I soon learned that every space had a history that, to borrow from Yi-Fu Tuan, made place a type of object to be read (Tuan 1977: 17). Where I saw an aging store front, older residents pictured the Chinese laundry that used to be located here. When I walked on a downtown side street marked by a few commercial buildings, a parking lot, and a popular take out, they vividly remembered “Ram Cat Alley,” a lane lined with overcrowded rooming houses and associated with drinking, violence and rowdy behaviour. One person spoke evocatively of the dangers of walking there that might include having a chamber pot dumped on one’s head from an upper window. People and spaces intermeshed so that local characters from the past were etched on the landscape, referred to as “landmarks” and remembered in place names like “Sonny Gould’s Crossing.” It paralleled Gerald Pocius’s findings in Calvert, NL in the 1970s where he wrote that “belonging is still tied to a series of spaces that make up the place, spaces that extended both throughout the community and back in time” (Pocius 2000: 25). Just as in Calvert, residents read Amherst’s history through its landscape. One of the greatest gifts of this research was that it allowed me to see more of the iceberg hidden beneath the surface. I developed a much more immediate relationship with the spaces that make up the town as I began to read them in new ways. As Gerald Pocius wrote, “Belonging, then, is directly tied both linguistically and experientially to place, and in a community like Calvert this means sharing the knowledge of a series of common spaces” (2000: 3). To know some of the past meanings of a space, to be the keeper of knowledge not shared by many people my own age, opened up the nuances that shaped Amherst and deepened my own sense of belonging to the community past and present.

In his work, Pocius recognized ways that residents of Calvert experienced place differently; for example, he argued that men intimately knew the water and the land whereas women’s knowledge was tied more closely to the home. His gendered findings have been challenged since (O’Brien 1999), but his observation that people live and know spaces differently depending on their social position held true in Amherst. Within a decade or so of Amherst’s rise to prominence as a manufacturing hub, Ram Cat Alley’s overcrowded rooms were replaced by a series of clearly defined neighborhoods (Tye 1986). Physical spaces were segregated according to a combination of cultural background, income, and religion: factory workers lived in distinct neighbourhoods from managerial staff; homes of factory owners dominated the upper end of Victoria Street, the main commercial street, as well as an adjacent neighborhood; and Acadians were interspersed through two or three workers neighborhoods and clustered in the nearby farming community of Nappan. African Nova Scotians resided exclusively on “Sand hill.” My interviews with older residents reflected the extent to which folks lived within these distinct spaces. For example, Grace, who was born in approximately 1905 as the daughter of a prominent white Protestant lawyer, confessed she found it confusing to navigate the West Highlands neighborhood where many of the factories and their workers had been located. There never had been any reason for her to venture into that part of town and, despite living in Amherst for over eighty years, it remained foreign territory. In interviews I conducted as part of another project based on the West Highlands, seniors living there echoed the extent of this physical segregation and they recalled rarely leaving the workers neighborhood when they were growing up (Tye 1986). The spaces that made up their childhood lives - home, school, church, corner stores, and recreational facilities - were all located within the West Highlands.

It was expected that people stayed within these distinct physical spaces. Grace commented, “I was hardly ever allowed to go downtown by myself until I was in high school […]. Pugsleys was a dry goods store […] and I’d be sent for perhaps a spool of thread when we had a dressmaker who stayed at the house for a week and sewed us all up. There were six of us - three boy and three girls. But I always had to ask permission to go downtown and sometimes if it was a worthy cause I would be allowed to go. It would be in the afternoon of course. Things were very much different then for people that I knew […]” (Tye 1986:16)[2]. Implicit in Grace’s recollection is the view that downtown was only for those who had a legitimate purpose for being there and that females did not belong in the male space of commerce.

The downtown business section was also largely off limits to residents of the African Nova Scotian community who lived on Sand Hill, located away from the town centre. Apparently they didn’t have any business there either. Repeatedly the white folks I interviewed, who were recalling times from the early 1900s to the 1960s, told me that they could not remember seeing Black people downtown. It was not their space. Black employment opportunities were severely limited until the 1970s. A few residents worked as porters for the Canadian National Railway, and there were a handful of jobs open within industries (many, like molders in foundries, did the hot and dangerous work that few others wanted) but most Blacks worked as casual labourers for wealthier white residents. Women cleaned homes while men looked after the yards, or did tasks such as light trucking, garbage removal, and minor repair jobs. Perhaps part of the logic underlying the informal segregation of Blacks from the downtown commercial area was that, like women and children, without money, they had no place there. Whatever the rationale, it was an effective form of marginalization that excluded Black residents from spaces of social and economic power and helped to perpetuate the town’s existing social and gender and racial hierarchies. That they did not belong was underscored by their informal exclusion from at least one restaurant and all of the barbershops. Wesley, born in the late 1920s, recalled, “when we were growing up there was a complete segregation of the hill from the town. I don’t remember the Black people coming downtown. In fact the Black people didn’t come downtown. They couldn’t get a haircut, no. The barbers wouldn’t have anything to do with them […]. The Blacks on the hill could do certain types of work, they could collect garbage, they could work in the foundries, in the shaking our or in the moulding shop. They could work down at the rolling mills. They could do any one of a dozen types of touch manual labour […] women worked for the white women in town who wanted maids. When it came to school, there weren’t too many of them to my knowledge that went along through high school” (Tye 1986:15).

As Wesley’s comments reflect, prior to the 1960s or 1970s informal barriers prevented most residents of African Nova Scotian and Acadian descent from attaining assets like education that could help better their financial position. Several interviewees shared their memories of frequent fighting between Black or Acadian pupils and white school children who defended school territory as their own. Ralph told of an Acadian family he had grown up with where the children had very little education: “When I started school in 1918, I was eight years old. The Goulds from Nappan, three or four of them came to school that same year I did. Three of them I guess it was. The older ones had been there the year before and they had been beat up so bad they had to go home and stay there and so when there was more come along, there was more in numbers, then they came back to school and some of the older boys, the bigger ones that were there when the first ones came, were gone” (Tye 1986:19). Similar to downtown commercial space that was white and male, educational spaces were primarily intended for those of white Anglo descent. Thinking back to the mid 1970s, one interviewee could not recall any Black students in his classes beyond Grade 8 (Tye 1987:6).

How to be in relationship with people: Nothing is as it seems

The town’s stratification led to residents having distinct experiences depending on their social position. My interviews highlighted how much people’s informal stories and knowledge varied according to their location. While Wesley referred to a complete silence around sex when he was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s as a white middle class Protestant boy, another resident, who operated a shoe repair shop that had been owned by his father before him and was recognized as a space of male interaction, struggled to tell me a story about anyone that wasn’t bawdy. Often an individual who was considered a local character throughout parts of the community, would not be viewed this way by his neighbours and others who knew him well. Repeatedly close contacts would be puzzled when I raised a name of someone in their social circle as a possible local character, almost always shaking their head and dissuading me. This division was especially clear around some members of African Nova Scotian community who were recognized as characters by white residents who lived in other parts of town but considered a neighbour, relative, or friend by Black Amerstonians. For example, Ronald, a Black resident born around 1918, repeatedly countered my suggestions that many of his neighbours, relatives and friends were characters. He saw them in other terms; one was a farmer and a blacksmith; another a quiet man who was known as a hard worker, while a third was the biggest coward he had ever seen. Even those he agreed were characters had other equally important identifiers: Emma Moses would give you the shirt of her back; Henry Treadwell did well for himself despite having “no education whatsoever” (Tye 1986:21).

The local character stories I collected highlighted how people assume different roles in different social locations. Being a character was a performance role that required a little distance. The narratives also pointed to the different ways various segments of the community recognized resources and made use of them. Becoming a character was sometimes an attractive option open to those without means at their disposal, especially members of marginalized populations personally affected by compounded factors that in the 1980s, following Erving Goffman, I thought of as “stigma.” These might include physical disability, poor mental health, or alcoholism. To some extent individuals consciously adopted the character role; it was a designation that required mutual agreement. The character performed and the community willingly supported the performance. Some saw advantages to becoming a local character: it could earn them attention and perhaps acceptance as well as offer them opportunities to better their own situation as well as that of the others they sometimes spoke for. It was the resourcefulness of making the most of what one had, including wit and well developed social skills. Differing access to resources necessitated different strategies to navigate life.

Everyone I interviewed struggled to talk about these things and even to describe the town’s history of informal stratification; none of it had been spoken of openly. Words often let us down. Participants tried to piece together both what they knew and how they knew it. White interviewees reflected on why they had the idea as children that Blacks did not belong downtown. What was that based on? Where did it come from? In a culture where social facts are communicated nonverbally, and speech is almost always indirect, the people I interviewed tried to fit together pieces from their memory to explain how life had been when they were growing up and why it had been that way. Based on the lack of overt conflict between social groups he had witnessed, Joseph reasoned that the hegemonic stratification basically had worked well. It was a common sentiment shared among the group of elderly white residents I interviewed. Born circa 1900, he used the polite term of his generation, “Coloured”:

Well the Coloured people were really pretty well thought of in Amherst. I mean decent, respectable people. They were on the poor side as far as money was concerned and the jobs that they had and that sort of thing, you see, but to my knowledge they never ever caused any trouble.

DT: Would they ever go to downtown churches or anything?

AM: Yes, but they purposely, the whites didn’t shun them at all but I think they figured that we wouldn’t be particularly welcome, we prefer to stay up here among our own crowd. But my mother was very broad minded and Dad the same way too. It didn’t bother either of them to hire a Coloured person to do work for them (Tye 1986:2).

A white retired Protestant minister echoed Joseph’s feelings that the town’s stratification had been benign and agreeable to all: “I think in most older towns, in this part of the world where we haven’t been exposed to the pressured of immigration and mobile populations, I think there’s bound to be a certain class stratification. But it doesn’t necessarily need to indicate a lack of charity or good will. It’s just a natural affinity that people with common interests to be together and work together and have common outlook. Something like that you know” (Tye 1986:12). From their place of white male privilege, both men felt it wasn’t that bad. African Nova Scotians with few employment opportunities, or Acadian children who experienced such violence that they could not attend school, would have told other stories.

It is clear from the interviews I conducted in 1986-87 that it was very difficult for individuals to challenge the town’s informal segregation and stratification. Interestingly, the community rink provided one of the only common meeting grounds and, even during my high school years in the mid 1970s, fans came from all backgrounds and all parts of town on Saturday nights to watch the Amherst Ramblers play hockey. The rink was also the primary performance venue for several local characters, some of whom were the frequent butt of jokes and others who usually were the prankster, but all of whom were widely recognised for their quick wit. These character performances, that often bettered, or one upped, another resident of higher status according to the town’s stratification, were an effective tool for upsetting power dynamics and temporarily putting someone “in their place.” As I observed in the 1980s, however, any change was temporary; if a local character turned the tables on the mayor, the next morning nothing would be different. The mayor was still the mayor and the local character continued to face whatever financial and other challenges shaped their life (Tye 1989). But, as I argued, in the 1980s, these local characters were instrumental in introducing ideas of change. Significantly, they represented some of the very few people who moved between different segments of the town and created bridges. In a community where residents kept to their “place,” the very presence of local characters and their performances were transgressive and pointed to possibilities of transformation.

How to be in relationship with ideas

The local characters at the heart of my 1980s study were essential to bringing the community into relationship with important ideas. What does it mean to belong to a community? What does it mean to be a member of THIS community? They reminded people that whatever differences divided them, they had shared community values. The characters’ performances, as well as the stories told about them, encouraged residents to prioritize the common good. For example, stories ridiculing misers taught that one should not be too self-interested but instead to work towards the benefit of the larger community. Personal legends that circulated about local characters helped stress the importance of treating others compassionately and looking out for their welfare. The wounded war veteran could just as easily be someone in my family; they could just as easily be me.

As should be already clear at this point, the people I interviewed were also in relationship with difficult ideas and they generously brought me into that relationship with them. Together we talked about what it meant to belong to our town. Who had earned a reputation for not fitting in and why was that? At my lead, we worked out a definition of the purposefully ambiguous label, “local character.” What exactly did each of us mean when we used the term? Importantly, we spoke of the unspoken. We tried to work out what racism and prejudice looked like in the past, who it was directed at, and who benefitted. We pieced together how it was expressed in economics and social relations. We considered what racism and other forms of social injustice looked like in the town in the present day of 1980s. What had changed over our lifetimes? How should those changes be assessed? How and why had they taken place? How might future change happen? In a town with a long history of not speaking openly, it was the first time I had engaged in this kind of direct conversation. I believe that was also true for many of the people I interviewed, most of whom were two generations older than me. It certainly was unprecedented for us to be discussing such challenging and painful topics as strangers or social acquaintances. Not that our conversations changed anything. They were no more effective, and might have been less effective, in changing the town’s inequities than the coded expressions I was studying in my thesis on local characters. That said, like the local characters’ performances I was analyzing, these interviews highlighted the possibilities of change. To quote Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” (Cohen 1992). It felt, at least to me, like we were working together through serious matters. We were building relationship and there was reason to be hopeful for the future.

Ethnography as relationship: “I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you”

This working out of shared understandings with interviewees, many of them concerning challenging and unpleasant aspects of community life, felt collaborative. It was collaborative. But it was not the reciprocal ethnography Elaine Lawless calls for (Lawless 1991; Lawless 2000). I did not return with transcripts, thesis chapters, or drafts of articles, seeking the participants’ interpretation to be incorporated into the final analysis. I’m not sure how many people would have been interested in this level of involvement but it was not something that I offered. In fact, it didn’t even occur to me to offer it. My fieldnotes reflect my embrace of the fieldwork model I was introduced to during my graduate studies. I was the sole leader of an extraction mission and my notes are based on ambushed unrecorded casual conversations as well as recorded interviews. I was a “collector” and a consistent thread running through my entries is the anxiety I felt that I wasn’t collecting enough “real” folklore quickly enough.

At times community members also questioned the type of “folklore” I was “collecting.” On March 4, 1986 I arranged to interview Joyce who had grown up in an established merchant family and was in her 80s at the time. I wanted to speak to her about Blanche, who had died by 1986, but had been widely considered to be a local character during her lifetime. Blanche was well known within the town because her parents had operated a small farm and she helped her father with door-to door milk deliveries. After her father’s death, when Blanche was forced to sell the farm to pay off his debts, she became a domestic helper and worked for many years for one of the town’s most wealthy families. Through hard work and frugality, she eventually managed to save enough to purchase a home for herself. In my experience, Blanche was generally regarded as a kind person with a good work ethic who had been harshly treated both by her parents and her employer, but she was also seen as odd and her eccentricities were the source of humour. Some of her comical analyses of social issues, such as her linking of the introduction of the old age pension with an observation that senior citizens had taken to wearing finer underwear, were widely shared. Joyce had befriended Blanche in her later years but in her eagerness to help with my research, she attempted to gather more information before the interview by reaching out to two other women who knew Blanche well and had hired her as a cleaner. To her dismay both were appalled that I would include Blanche in a folklore study. Consistent with Anand Prahlad’s observation in his contribution to the Utley Panel at the American Folklore Society, the women considered ‘folk” a slur (Prahlad 2021). They advised Joyce not to talk to me. When I spoke to one of them later, she insisted I should find a better thesis topic. Senior’s housing would be a much more worthwhile project she argued. She stated flatly, “You can’t study Blanche. Blanche isn’t folklore” (March 3, 1986). I think I eventually managed to ease some of her concerns but probably not to persuade them of the value of my study. In the meantime, Joyce was left in a very difficult position. She had agreed to the interview and wanted to help me but that obligation now meant going against her friend’s advice and possibly risk hurting Blanche, who all of us agreed had suffered more than enough pain in her lifetime. She greeted me at the door, “I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you” (March 4, 1986). Remarkably Joyce went ahead with the interview although she was clearly uncomfortable and restrained when we talked about Blanche. Even more remarkable to me now is that I forced her to go ahead with the interview.

The women’s rallying around Blanche and their efforts to protect her memory were, of course, based in their long-time relationships with Blanche, all of which were characterized by not only fondness but a paternalism and protectiveness during her lifetime. I unintentionally tested Joyce’s allegiances when I interviewed her and forced her to choose between people she knew and respected and a folklorist outside her social circle who she only knew of but had invited into her home for an interview. Fortunately for everyone, this experience was uncommon because I normally navigated relationships carefully and, drawing on my knowledge of the community, generally confined my interviews to people who had some distance from the local characters I was interested in. Only on a couple occasions did I interview characters’ family members. As a result, interviewees willingly invited me into their existing relationships. Sometimes people I arranged interviews with invited family members they thought would be more knowledgeable to join us or reached out to those in their social circle in order to fill in information I was asking for that they didn’t have. Interviewees often referred me to other residents they thought could help me, sometimes reaching out to pave the road for me by making an initial contact. The majority of the people I interviewed knew who I was and could easily place me within an existing web of relationships; even if they didn’t know me personally, they knew my family or of my partner and his work at the local museum. Already being embedded in community relationships meant that (at least to my knowledge) interviewees did not struggle to identify me and my motives as I experienced on other occasions, such as when working on a project to document workers housing. At that time people figured I was most likely an undercover assessment officer.

While I thought of myself as “folklorist,” interviewees conceived of me largely as a “guest” and our exchanges conformed to local models of hospitality. The people I interviewed invited me into their homes, and along with the customary offer of tea or coffee and a light lunch, complied with my request to share their memories. That they sometimes reached out to others in their networks to supplement those memories was a further extension of that hospitality. I now understand this sharing of memories as a gift. At my request they talked about things that were not usually subjects for polite conversation with a guest. They broke informal rules of gossip by sharing their stories with me and by speaking negatively about the town and some of its residents. They trusted me with slanderous rumours and brutally honest observations about their neighbours and, on occasion, their friends and family members. These days I reflect on what kind of a guest I was.

The thesis and articles that I wrote based on this fieldwork certainly benefitted me personally. The research helped earn me a degree and get me a job which led to an incredibly rewarding career. I’m sure at least some of the people I interviewed would be happy about that. They invited me in as their guest to help me out and they did that. In spades. For that I have been deeply grateful for over thirty-five years. In writing about Indigenist research, Shawn Wilson insists, however, that “research must maintain accountability to all the relationships it forms” (Wilson 2008: 137). He writes “the knowledge that the researcher interprets must be respectful of and help to build the relationships that have been established though the process of finding out information” (2008: 77). Here he highlights respect, reciprocity and responsibility as the key feature of any healthy relationship and qualities that must be included in Indigenous methodology (2008: 77). It is in this light that I am left wondering what I gave back to the community and how I have treated their gifts.

As I re-read the transcripts and listen to the interviews, I recognize a thread running through them, an example of what Shawn Wilson would refer to as a relationship with ideas. It is a collective working out of what constituted Amherst’s social dynamics in an earlier time period, including the town’s informal unjust and racist practices. Together we were trying to figure out what should be remembered. How should life in this town be remembered? Looking back, I am increasingly conflicted about my own view on this. How do I reconcile my remembering as a folklorist and as a community member? How do I facilitate remembering that is true to complexities and injustices of the past as well as true to the generosity of the people who helped construct that remembering?

Folklore fieldwork as relationship: lessons, realities and reflections on research as a vehicle for change

Thinking about my fieldwork of the 1980s, I am struck by how deeply this research was embedded in relationship and also how it deepened relationships for me. It intensified my relationship to place and helped give me a firmer sense of belonging to a community I had moved to at the age of ten and sometimes felt on the outskirts of. At times the fieldwork renewed existing relationships I had with people while at other times it extended my social networks and introduced me to new residents. Reading through the fieldnotes I recall how interesting and enjoyable it was to talk to people in their homes, perhaps precisely because the interviews helped us to deepen or create relationships. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this fieldwork enriched my understanding of what to meant to belong to this town and to live there. It highlighted factors that shaped community life, not just for me but for others who had different social locations or had grown up there in earlier times. Interviewing residents brought me into a meaningful relationship with ideas about power, justice, and social change. It changed my thinking. Shawn Wilson describes research as ceremony: “the purpose of any ceremony is to build stronger relationships or bridge the distance between our cosmos and us. The research that we do as Indigenous people is a ceremony that allows us a raised level of consciousness and insight into our world” (2008: 137). My work in Amherst did all of those things for me.

As much as I benefitted, however, it is also true that the research was not ceremony for the people I interviewed and I cannot help but reflect on the ways that being a folklorist constrained as well as facilitated these wonderful relationships. It has to be said that Folklore Studies, even in the 1980s, was ahead of many other disciplines in terms of practicing sensitive research methodology. Some of my professors emphasized the importance of prioritizing the needs of the individuals we worked with above all else and in 1988 the American Folklore Society issued its “Statement of Ethics” stating that a folklorist’s primary responsibility is to the individuals and communities they work with.[3] Nevertheless, in the 1980s being an academically based folklorist, by definition, put me in a difficult position. In some ways I was like Joyce whose allegiances were torn and faced with hard decisions, although I might not have understood them to be as challenging at the time as I see them retrospectively. I remained most loyal to the academy. I wonder now if I could have done otherwise and still built a career. At times, being a folklorist forced me to violate my responsibilities as a guest, which was the role the people I interviewed primarily placed me in.

In many ways Indigenist research methods parallel the reciprocal and collaborative ethnographic methods folklorists now routinely utilize. They may differ in one point of emphasis, however, the insistence that the community be involved in all aspects of the research process. For example, Shawn Wilson stresses the importance of Indigenous communities deciding exactly what areas are to be studied (2008: 15). Perhaps this is the bottom line that all other relationships depend on. As much as this was a process of researching with others, my position as sole inventor and guide of the central research questions stood in the way of deeper relationships.

As I leave my re-examination of this fieldwork as relationship, I find myself in much the same conflicted position as Anand Prahlad who questions if the discipline of folklore is the best location to make radical social change, at the same time he observes that folklorists are better equipped than many to bring insight to aspects of North American society, including systemic racism (Prahlad 2021: 263). Maybe as much as I liked to think differently as a PhD student, the academic study of folklore is not the best vehicle for advocacy or social change. Neither, as it turns out, was it a very reliable vehicle for honouring and building relationships with the people who agreed to be interviewed as part of my research. Looking back now, I am personally appreciative of this body of fieldwork with both its rewards and challenges. It laid the foundation for my future, more critical reflections on the field of folklore and its methodologies that led me to explore alternative autoethnographic methods, for example (Tye 2010). And my personal search for fairer, more collaborative research methods mirror developments in Folklore Studies more generally (for example, see: Otero and Martínez-Rivera 2021; Fivecoate, Downs and McGriff 2021; Frandy and Cederström 2022).

Diana Baird N’Diaye ends her contribution to the Francis Lee Utley Panel on Race and Racism in the Practice and Study of Folklore at the 2020 Annual Meeting of AFS with words of encouragement for folklorists committed to creating an anti-racist field of Folklore. Reminding us that “folklorists do not own folklore,” she urges that while “we may have to dismantle the monuments to academia and remake them,” folklorists’ goal must be to work with and be in service to the communities we work rather than to impress other scholars (N’Diaye 2021: 256). “Work collaboratively and with reciprocity,” she advises. For N’Diaye, hope lies in areas like reciprocal and collaborative autoethnography for BIPOC scholars and the field as a whole. She urges that we must be “in service” to communities. Fortunately N’Diaye’s views reflect more general trends in the field of Folklore Studies but they also relate closely to the Indigenous concept of research as relationship I have been thinking about. Similarly, they echo Barre Toelken’s recommendations after reflecting on his fifty-year career as a folklorist working with the Navaho. Like me, Toelken felt that he had got some important things wrong as an ethnographer. He stressed the importance of collecting from all members of a community (rather than concentrating on the men as he had) and taking the long view (when he realized how his own interests had shifted over time). Importantly, he also suggested co-authoring articles on other cultures (Toelken 2004: 444). Given that ethnographers are always at least partial outsiders, I’d suggest that it could be extended to all cultures.

Figuring out how to best move forward in ways that build relationships, rather than primarily extract from people, while also making meaningful and sometimes critical contributions to larger conversations about difficult topics, remains immensely challenging for folklorists because as N’Diaye writes, this is work that “requires being comfortable with being uncomfortable” (2021: 256). Like N’Diaye, however, I find hope in the fact that “our field is examining itself; some of us are examining our own assumptions and practices” (2021: 256). While my review of my own past practices does not provide any definitive answers, Folklore has never been a field of sure answers. Critiques of earlier ethnographic work, whether our own or that of others, can provide important first steps in building fairer and more useful ethnographic practices and happily the list of retrospective examinations is burgeoning (for example, see: Ó Giolláin 2000; Toelken 2004; Mullen 2008; Naithani 2010; Boratti 2019; Leary 2020). Looking outside the discipline to practices such as Indigenist research methods where the goal is research as relationship and ceremony for participants as well as researcher, will help folklorists create even more collaborative, community-centred relationships that benefit participants as much as folklorists. It is essential work if Prahlad is correct in his belief “that folklorists are in many obvious ways better equipped to bring insight to such aspects of American society [like racism] than in any other field and that “the process of a profound ‘shake-up’ would make place for new ideas, theories, and methodologies that place Folklore Studies (or whatever the new name might be) among the most relevant and respected disciplines of the twenty-first century” (Prahlad 2021: 264). Folklorists have much at stake but they also have much to contribute.