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News

Prof teaches survivors to make history

Lindahl has recruited people affected by recent hurricanes to record peers’ stories

by MATT COOPER 
Senior Staff Writer

UH English professor Carl Lindahl is collecting the most accurate accounts of Hurricane Katrina survivors the best way he knows how ­ by recruiting the evacuees to tell the stories.

Lindahl plans to record the stories evacuees tell one another in the Library of Congress with help from the American Folklore Center and graduate students in his Folklore Theory and Fieldwork class.

Lindahl said he got the idea while researching survivor accounts of 9/11 for a book he was writing.

"The stories told by the survivors to their best friends or other survivors ­ people in a similar situation to theirs ­ tended to be a lot stronger than the stories that were told to outside specialists like myself," Lindahl said.

Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath were historically significant and survivors’ viewpoints should be recorded, Lindahl said. 

His solution is to train Katrina and Rita evacuees to act as researchers by collecting survivors’ accounts. 

Participants in the project will be interviewed about their experience and then will interview members of their communities with similar experiences. 

The goal of the project is to tell the story of the evolution of the communities affected by the hurricanes, how people are recovering from the natural disasters and what has changed about newly formed communities in areas affected by the hurricanes. 

After some phone calls, including a Labor Day e-mail exchange with UH President Jay Gouge, and a $150,000 grant from the Houston Endowment, Lindahl had secured the means to establish schools to train the evacuees to become researchers.

"The schools are quite small and quite expensive," Lindahl said. "They’re very hands-on."

Student researchers in the class are paid for their time. The researchers and the education they receive are top-notch, Lindahl said. 

He was able to import staff from the Library of Congress and other universities to help teach students how to tell their stories. Lindahl said that the student to teacher ratio is three to one.

"We could put together a program that could not only reflect the viewpoint of the survivors, but help them in some way," Lindahl said.

The first class finished its project Sunday. Lindahl said it was wildly successful and that the teachers learned as much from the students as the students did from the teachers.

"The individuals we taught had Katrina and Rita in common, but they did not have common educational experiences," he said. "We had a Ph.D. student from Tulane, for example, in a classroom with people that hadn’t finished high school."

Lindahl said that what they found was that prior education was not an indicator of who would perform the task well. The instructors had to rework their curriculum to reach everyone as quickly as possible.

"These schools are taught in a very short period of time. We just can’t afford to put up three members from the staff of the Library of Congress for a three-week period," Lindahl said.

He said he is already hearing results from his newly minted researchers as they work in their individual communities. He said he expects the stories students of the project uncover will be historically significant.

Lindahl plans to put some of the stories on the radio and work with the media to help ease tensions in Houston that may have resulted from the influx of Katrina survivors.

"It is my belief that Houstonians, in looking at this material and listening to the survivors, in listening to some of the public programming that we’re going to put on, are going to learn a lot more about their new neighbors," Lindahl said. 

The first class, while taught at UH, included no UH students. Lindahl advertised his first class by contacting community leaders and otherwise using word of mouth to garner attention in and around the Houston area. He said he would like to see some UH students who are Katrina survivors in the next class.

"We’re trying to reach everybody," he said.

For more information about the project, e-mail Lindahl at clindahl@uh.edu.
 

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