Tribesourcing Midcentury Educational Films: Digital Repatriation and Local Knowledge

Speakers: Jennifer Jenkins, University of Arizona; Rhiannon Sorrell, Diné College;
Melissa Dollman, University of North Carolina; Crystal Littleben, Navajo Cultural Arts Program

In this NEH-funded digital humanities project, we take midcentury educational films back into Indian Country where they were made in the 1940s through 60s and record new narrations by community members and elders from the insider point of view. This “”tribesourcing”” method allows for identification of local knowledge that might otherwise be lost, as well as providing a rich, community-based metadata record for each film. We will demonstrate the merging of old video and new audio in Mukurtu, and discuss what we have learned in the process of digitally repatriating these midcentury films. We’ll show examples of “before” and “after,” and discuss the collaborative process with tribal partners.

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This session is part of the “Stewardship of Indigenous Materials in AV Archives” program stream at AMIA 2019.  This program stream, in collaboration with the Association of Tribal Archives Libraries and Museums offers collaborative methods, technologies, tools, and workflows to ethically preserve and provide access to indigenous audiovisual heritage materials. The programming is funded by a contract with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), with funds provided by the National Film Preservation Board.

November 16, 2019 | Baltimore, MD