Memory: More Than Recall 135Historical Memory
Historical memory recognizes a dynamic tension between the
construction of histories and the understanding of memories, which
challenge official narratives that deny or minimize abuses of power
(Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica & University of British Columbia,
2013). Historical memory takes seriously questions of power, in particular
regarding the authorship of history to ensure space for victims to
interrogate the past, name harms, and vision redress as acts of memory
(Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica & University of British Columbia,
2013). Memory in this construction becomes an agent of social change, a
necessary check and balance against power systems that might wish to
avoid accountability and change by erasing records of political and
historical abuses of power. This echoes Vallega’s (2014) concern that the
past and its construction served as a tool for erasure during colonization
and continues to operate in the systems that descended from original
colonial structures. Memory in this construction includes stories told by
individuals (this is what happened to me) that are then placed into a larger
narrative (this is what happened in the civil conflict). Memory in this
construction addresses sites of contestation. It does not begin from a
premise of history, choosing instead the orientation of histories and clearly
maintaining that the goal of this memory work is not to produce one
unified telling of history. Rather, historical memory envisions an ongoing
encounter with memory and histories as sites of reparation and
transformation. The construction of past here would be closer to what
Lederach and Lederach (2010) name simultaneous to the present.
Contested Memory
By opening to context and multiple sites of memory, we can begin to
see how memory and the identities it informs weave across multiple sites:
individual, collective, historical, and contested memory. For example, a
Black person in the 1920s in the United States would have a completely