Uncovering & Preserving Our Stories
NEXT TALK STORY
150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad
January 27, 2019, 2 – 4 PM
Join us as we launch into the 2019 season of Talk Story Programming with an exciting community discussion on the 150th anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, coming up in May 2019. Joining us from New York will be activist and photographer Corky Lee and our Executive Director Ted Gong.
Talk Story, often associated with Hawaii, is both concept and process. For the 1882 Foundation, it refers to the set of activities and programs that we associate with collecting oral histories and preserving story sites. These include our monthly Talk Story Events and efforts to record and store oral histories. They include the production of the Through Chinatown’s Eyes short documentary series. They are related to heritage tours.
Talk Story encourages individuals to reveal their stories in their own words and to share them with others. There are two parts to this—telling and sharing. “Telling” refers to people saying what is historically important to them. This is empowering. It allows them to define themselves, the elements of their identity, as opposed to having an “historian” define for them what is historically important.
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To the extent the stories resonate with others and groups coalesce to listen, our communities become defined. The “sharing” of a common legacy and the inspiration to re-tell them in a modern setting and even to go out and create new stories make the community alive.
This leads to our Talk Story slogan, inspired partially by Bonny Tsui’s observation in American Chinatown: