<P> In 1997 the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw v. British Columbia trial, ruled that oral histories were just as important as written testimony . Of oral histories, it said "that they are tangential to the ultimate purpose of the fact - finding process at trial--the determination of the historical truth ." </P> <P> Writers who use oral history have often discussed its relationship to historical truth . Gilda O'Neill writes in Lost Voices, an oral history of East End hop - pickers: "I began to worry . Were the women's, and my, memories true or were they just stories? I realised that I had no' innocent' sources of evidence - facts . I had, instead, the stories and their tellers' reasons for remembering in their own particular ways .' Duncan Barrett, one of the co-authors of The Sugar Girls describes some of the perils of relying on oral history accounts: "On two occasions, it became clear that a subject was trying to mislead us about what happened--telling a self - deprecating story in one interview, and then presenting a different, and more flattering, version of events when we tried to follow it up...often our interviewees were keen to persuade us of a certain interpretation of the past, supporting broad, sweeping comments about historical change with specific stories from their lives ." Alessandro Portelli argues that oral history is valuable nevertheless: "it tells us less about events as such than about their meaning (...) the unique and precious element which oral sources force upon the historian...is the speaker's subjectivity ." </P> <P> Regarding the accuracy of oral history, Jean - Loup Gassend concludes in the book Autopsy of a Battle "I found that each witness account can be broken down into two parts: 1) descriptions of events that the witness participated in directly, and 2) descriptions of events that the witness did not actually participate in, but that he heard about from other sources . The distinction between these two parts of a witness account is of the highest importance . I noted that concerning events that the witnesses participated in, the information provided was surprisingly reliable, as was confirmed by comparison with other sources . The imprecision or mistakes usually concerned numbers, ranks, and dates, the first two tending to become inflated with time . Concerning events that the witness had not participated in personally, the information was only as reliable as whatever the source of information had been (various rumors); that is to say, it was often very unreliable and I usually discarded such information ." </P> <P> Another noteworthy case is the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya against the British colonizers . Central to the case was Historian Caroline Elkins' study on UK's brutal suppression of the uprising . Elkin's work on this matter is largely based on oral testimonies of survivors and witnesses, which causes controversy in academia: "Some praised Elkins for breaking the' code of silence' that had squelched discussion of British imperial violence . Others branded her a self - aggrandising crusader whose overstated findings had relied on sloppy methods and dubious oral testimonies ." The British court eventually ruled in the Kenyan claimants' favor, which also serves as a response to Elkin's critics as Justice McCombe's 2011 decision stressed the "substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses". After the ruling, newly discovered files containing relevant records of former colonies from the Hanslope disclosure corroborated Elkin's finding . </P>

Explain the validity of oral traditions as a source of history