The American Indian Oral History Manual ─ Making Many Voices Heard

Charles E. Trimble is an Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. He was principal founder of the American Indian Press Association in 1970, served as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1972 to 1978, and has been a trustee of the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. He is President of Red Willow Institute, a non-profit corporation he founded to provide technical and management assistance to Native American non-profit organizations, and is a columnist for Indian Country Today.

Barbara W. Sommer, M.A., has over twenty-five years of experience in the oral history field. She has been principal investigator and director of more than twenty major oral history projects and has taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Vermilion Community College. She is a long-time member of the Oral History Association and is author of many key publications in the field, including, with Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual, 2nd ed. (AltaMira Press, 2009) and with Charles E. Trimble and Mary Kay Quinlan, The American Indian Oral History Manual: Making Many Voices Heard (Left Coast Press, Inc., 2008). Her award-winning book Hard Work and a Good Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008) draws on oral history interviews about the Civilian Conservation Corps, as does her essay, “’We Had This Opportunity:’ African Americans and the Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota,” in The State We’re In: Reflections on Minnesota History, Annette Atkins and Deborah L. Miller, eds, (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2010). She also is the author of a history of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln based on oral history (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). She holds a bachelor’s degree from Carleton College and a master’s degree in history from the University of Minnesota.