At the OHL, we wrestle with the archival mandate to preserve for 100 years. Of course, we want our stories to survive and meet new generations, but with our focus on the climate crisis, we recognize that we may not have 100 years left if we do not take action now. How then can we develop the means of amplifying the experiential knowledge contained in eyewitness testimonies of surviving and creatively addressing climate change? These actions, accompanied by intergenerational marginalization from years of colonial practices and systemic racism—begun in 1493 when, on his second voyage, Columbus set foot on the island that would become known as Puerto Rico—led to the humanitarian crisis of failed governmental relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane María and prevented essential eyewitness testimony from frontline communities from contributing to global conversations and efforts to mitigate the climate emergency. Our challenge now is to think through how colonial practices and systemic racism intertwine in the global climate crisis to marginalize people in their spaces and lock them out of public discourse. What can we, as an international community interested in life narratives, do to disseminate widely narratives that connect readers to these crises that are defining the twenty-first century?
The OHL model of connecting three humanities-based campus assets allows us to rethink storytelling for social justice strategies by synthesizing oral history, archival practices, and multimodal dissemination as a means of circulating the critical information held in eyewitness narratives to internal and external communities. We uphold an integrated high-tech, low-tech, no-tech model to reach multiple audiences. This approach includes extensive attention to the dignity of access for our narrators and the rejection of extractive colonial practices that take stories out of communities and render them inaccessible to the storytellers, while at the same time curating public-facing outputs for wider audiences of stakeholders.