Can I Get a Witness?

UNM’s recent ‘What Use is History?’ conference featured many prominent scholars that have found work outside the academy. Like my undergraduate advisor at Lewis & Clark College, many of these PhD’s augmented (or comprised) their income as expert witnesses. This gives public attention to some of the near-supernatural powers historians are said to possess; for example, we can prove the navigability of a river in the late 1700s. But are we really just participants in a trial, enlisted because of our specialized knowledge? Or are we actually arbiters of larger matters? Are we witnesses, or are we judges?

Adele Perry’s “Colonialism on Trial” sheds light on this issue through the lens of Delagamuukw v. British Columbia, a landmark tribal property case of the 1990s. The words of Chief Justice Allan MacEachern (who eventually dismissed Native title to the lands in question) ring disturbingly true for historians:

“…[I]t will not be possible to mention all of the evidence which took so long to adduce, or to analyze all of the exhibits and experts’ reports which were admitted into evidence, or to describe and respond to all the arguments of counsel. In these circumstances I must do what a computer cannot do, and that is to summarize. In this respect I have been brutal. I am deeply conscious that the process of summarizing such a vast body of material requires me to omit much of what counsel and the parties may think is important.” (332)

MacEachern is almost apologetic in this passage. He admits that he was an inadequate interpreter of evidence, that he merely tried to summarize the effect of the thousands of pages put in front of him. There is not a historian alive that can’t relate to that feeling. Earnest as he sounds, MacEachern neglects to mention the historiographic biases that informed his verdict. The plaintiffs — like many Native polities — used primarily oral evidence to mark important events in their tribal histories. Legally, though, the rule of hearsay disqualifies evidence not given directly to a witness; Perry notes that this “codifies and puts into legal language the same distrust of orality that historical methodology is premised upon” (334). In other words, the longstanding binary pairs of writing-civilization and orality-savagery are still with us today. Our source biases are our cultural biases. Both are challenged by alternative modes of narration.

I return to MacEachern’s words above. It’s commonly said that empires run on paper; in this sense, written records legitimate imperialistic claims both geographic and cultural. Many historians are hired to scrutinize or support claims of past empires, but are we really just witnesses? Or are we charged with something more substantial, like the task MacEachern describes? Expert witnesses validate isolated claims so that a larger discussion can proceed accordingly. Judges, however, must address large volumes of evidence in the simplest format possible: yes or no. Historians are such specialists that it’s easy to forget the larger implications of our writing. When we write a monograph, we give detailed information about a certain place/period/issue; we also (sometimes) take a stand on our work’s political relevance in the present-day. The ‘sometimes’ of the previous sentence hides an underlying truth: the evidence we use says just as much as the evidence we neglect or refuse.

As MacEachern mentions, the process of omitting is of grave — and “brutal” — importance. Historians do the same. We may purport to liberate our historical subjects from the bonds of colonialism, but the sources we use say more than our actual arguments. We footnote our important quotes, maps, and paraphrases, but we don’t explicitly mention the mechanisms that caused us to value these sources. As Perry asserts, what we know matters — but also how we know it. What may appear to be a historical argument based on sources is often an argument about sources. And so, while historians find alternate employment proving specific parts of larger arguments, our deployment of certain modes of memory marks us as judges — although we may (mis)conceive of ourselves as merely witnesses.