IASA 2019 Annual Conference

The Autry Museum of the American West has received a CLIR Recordings at Risk grant to digitize hundreds of Indigenous songs, field recordings, oral histories, and lectures, and this presentation follows the project over the course of its twelve months. Digitizing a Century of Native Voice and Song at the Autry Museum involves the preservation reformatting of sound and audiovisual recordings on lacquer disc, wire, and magnetic tape. Recordings span from 1898 to 2007 and include songs of the Blackfeet nation, rare LPs from the first Native American-owned record labels, and videotaped performances by Native Voices at the Autry. The digitized collections can benefit tribal language and cultural revitalization efforts, as well as scholars from a wide range of disciplines, so recording metadata, posting finding aids, and enhancing catalog records are also a major part of the project. Since the collection contains recordings of culturally sensitive content, the procedures developed to manage the digital records acknowledge the conditions under which some of the recordings may have been gathered, including possible lack of informed consent by Native individuals or lack of tribal permissions for individuals to share songs or information that are owned collectively. The Autry has constructed a plan to share the digitized recordings with tribal representatives, to consult and collaborate with them to expand documentation of what these materials hold, and to implement the use of Traditional Knowledge Labels in the Autry’s catalog records in consideration of the current wishes of the Indigenous peoples affiliated with the content.