What Has Passed and What Remains (review)

A good introduction should serve as a contract between reader and writer. The introduction to What Has Passed and What Remains does just that, Peter Friederici—author, journalist, and editor of this book—gives readers a solid primer on what they will get when they read What Has Passed. To craft this book, Friederici built upon the extant Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) Ecological Oral History Project—in collaboration with an archivist at NAU—by teaching an oral history class to NAU graduate students. They required the students to conduct video oral histories as their final project, as well as be a part of the Ecological Project. The book’s primary text came from excerpts from the transcripts created from those videos. The book, through the oral histories, focuses on describing the ecological changes in northern Arizona through the stories and memories of those men and women who lived and worked there from pre-World War II to the early twenty-first century.

As Friederici claims in his introduction, these anecdotes allow historians, scientists, and others to get first-hand accounts about changes (and persistence) in this land. One can find out how plants, trees, and animals thrived or died throughout the myriad small communities and physical features that comprise this part of Arizona. Along with the memories that depict transformation in flora and fauna, the book’s narrators also furnished stories about changes in weather, including droughts and blizzards. These specific anecdotes, along with the men and women’s opinions about population density, road building, and local-state-national government interactions with people and the land, give readers the late twentieth century’s history of a place from its inhabitants. This spot in the review seems an appropriate place to note that, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, few oral history books have dealt with the environment or ecological considerations. What Has Passed, therefore, helps to fill that void while functioning beautifully as both an oral history and an ecological study or a human ecological study. The book’s leaders provide a great service to readers, too, by including a brief introduction to each chapter/narrator, providing some context before letting the person’s words flow.

The book’s editor or publishers likewise provided many other devices to augment the narration. For example, at some point during the project, two photographers took pictures of the narrators and the land they lived in or worked on. These photos, along with a few photos from the narrators’ personal collections, give the reader a visual to accompany the audio. (And unlike other published works, one can find the photos within each narrator’s story, not placed en masse in one section of the book.) Also, an artist created a map of northern Arizona, which appears in the introduction, to orient those unfamiliar with the area by providing some points of reference.

Along with the stories and the nonnarrative visual and written devices just mentioned, readers also should enjoy the end sections of the book, because they, too, enhance the overall narrative. First, the endnotes, comprised of a few explanatory notes from each narrator’s excerpt, do offer those interested more specific information about the person and the land, or the event that affected both. Plus, whoever decided to include not only a brief biography of Friederici but also blurbs on the photographers and the student interviewers should earn high praise. In recent oral history discussions, current practitioners and users bemoan the fact that one can find little information on the interviewer. Albeit brief, these snippets do illustrate how useful such background information can be and should help to remedy this oversight in other oral history literature.

With all that does work in What Has Passed, many small improvements could have made it even better. First, those in charge of creating the book chose to put the narrators’ stories in alphabetical order. A topical placement of narrators (Forest Service folks together, ranchers together, etc.) or chronological...