“If you’d told me you wanted to talk about the ’60s, I wouldn’t have called you back”: Reflections on Collective Memory and the Practice of Oral History

Abstract

The cultural memory of the 1960s is a preoccupation in recent scholarship. Revisionist histories that challenge the progressive narrative of the decade argue that a romantic and uncomplicated collective memory of it makes interviews with political activists from this period unreliable. My current research project is about the back-to-the-land movement in the West Kootenays of British Columbia in the 1960s and 1970s. This region, located in the southeast part of Canada’s most western province, became a hub of the counter cultural back-to-the-land movement. Back-to-the-landers were attracted to this bucolic area because land was cheap. They also built relationships with the Doukhobors and the Quakers, communities that had moved to the region in the early and mid-twentieth century and shared the back-to-the-land movement’s commitment to simplicity, self-reliance, and sustainability. I am interested in how the back-to-the-land community transformed the political, cultural, and economic landscapes of the region. In the 1970s, logging was the primary industry and the area suffered high unemployment due to the precariousness of mill closures. By the end of the 1980s, tourism became one of the most important industries, in part because of the influence of the rural counter culture. Promotion of the area as a tourist destination not only rests on the natural beauty of the area, but also invokes stereotypical images of “aging hippies” and the counter culture. The deeply political motivations of people who went back to the land are overshad-owed by romantic 1960s narratives.