Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2022This dissertation explores how folk history and historiography is constructed and performed through various forms of oral tradition and how folk history, which implicates and enacts social memory and forgetting, is political by its nature. Following the pioneering work in folk history of Américo Paredes (1961), Henry Glassie (1982; 1986), Alessandro Portelli (1991), Ray Cashman (2006), and Guy Beiner (2007), this dissertation expands the horizon of folk history studies to Huaitom Community, situated on the periphery of Thailand, where a group of hill people called the Karen, the Sino-Tibetan speaking group, is living their present and their past in a place they call home. While Huaitom folk history comprises diverse genres of expression—oral tradition, material culture, rituals, and festivals—this research will focus mainly and primarily on the verbal forms of folk history, especially the ethnic genre called ‘talerpler’, with occasional references to other verbal and nonverbal genres, for their intertextual relationships could also significantly contribute to an alternative vernacular history of the Huaitom Karen. Talerpler is a Sgaw Karen word that means ‘old story.’ It contains folktales, mythology, legends, and anecdotes referencing the past. Historical legends will be a big part of Talerpler collected and analyzed in this dissertation, since they are richer in information and are told more frequently. This dissertation offers a collection of stories gathered from the field site between 2014 and 2021. It then explores the place and time consciousness as revealed through storytelling. It later summarizes that story and storytelling can be used as a tool to establish vernacular ‘histories’ and ‘identities’ that are contested and differ from official narratives.