ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration as a Catalyst for Valuesabout Varavīksne, she responded: “It’s all there in your house.” Initiallythis answer seemed to be her way of refusing “yet another” time-consumingrequest by Latvians from Riga, during the busy haying seasonno less. But when we began watching the tapes, we realized we hadaccess to the village’s autoethnography, thanks to the video camerathey had received from visiting Latvians. Dozens of VHS cassettesand hours of raw footage shot by film crews from Latvia dating fromthe late 1980s extensively enlarged and deepened our brief two-weekglimpse of village life. Villagers were at ease in front of the camera,partly because it was home video, partly perhaps from knowing thatlater they would gather at the club to enjoy a replay of the event—laughing and pointing to each other on the screen.As I understand it, Mūsu stāsts was first scripted, rehearsed,and staged with considerable input from two visitors from Latvia: aLatvian-language teacher who taught Latvian folks songs and culturein the club, school, and to the ensemble, and anthropologist RobertsĶīlis, who, in the course of his doctoral research, unearthed historicaldocuments and discovered that 1997 would mark the 100 th anniversaryof the settlers’ arrival in Siberia. Mūsu stāsts seems also to havebeen motivated by the need to perform in the regional competition forstatus as a Latvian heritage village (nacionālais ciems), which providesa paid position for the director of Varavīksne and plentiful opportunitiesto perform on festival stages throughout Siberia. The video performancewe saw was presented in the late 1990s in the club to anaudience of villagers and visitors from Cēsis, Latvia, whose choir alsoperformed that evening. The video did not acknowledge authorship orprovide closing credits. It was simply home video.The narrator framed this early version of Mūsu stāsts as a compositetext: as a “story we all hold sacred, even as we have our ownindividual hurts and memories.” The evocative and emotive power ofthe concise script relies on what folklorists term kernel stories (Kalčik,1975), that is, referential allusions in the form of key words, phrases,and images, each of which has the potential to trigger myriad insiderstories, known from family and community. We heard both kernel storiesand elaborated life stories during our interviews. Mūsu stāsts, inthis early version, is an emigrant saga in dramatic and sung form. Such42