Here in Canada, there is a movement for making pre-colonial Indigenous history a standard part in the education. I learned it and it was very interesting, but the most common source for a lot of it is “oral tradition”.

What do historians require from “oral tradition” in order to prove that somebody existed or that something took place?

Whenever I see topics regarding biblical history being discussed, sources are challenged because they were written decades after the event took place or after the person would have lived.

Doesn’t that make basically every bit of Indigenous “oral tradition” even less reliable?